During a recent presentation at the AMI Government Marketing and Communications Conference, I noted that Government websites received more traffic from Social Networking and Forums than the online News and Media industry for the first time during August 2009 in Australia. While this is partly the result of the rapid growth in visits to Social Networking websites overall, I believe this reflects a much wider engagement by Government agencies in the Social Networking space in the past couple of years. Indeed, there were many local examples of Government initiatives on Facebook and Twitter at the conference, ranging from the Country Fire Authority to the Victorian Police.

Social Nets increasingly becoming an ‘authority’ traffic source

This brought my attention to wider changes we’re seeing in online traffic distribution – with many ‘traditional’ categories, such as Banks & Financial Institutions, Shopping and Travel much more reliant on Social Networking traffic than they were two years ago. Banking websites in particular received an increase of 110.5% in traffic