World Cup Fever in Singapore Drives Traffic to Social Networking Sites

World Cup Fever In Singapore Drives Traffic To Social Networking Sites

- Singapore an Internet Users visit YouTube and Facebook most often after World Cup sites
- Official FIFA site most visited by Singapore Internet Users

Singapore, 23 June 2010 — With the World Cup in full swing, Experian Hitwise, a leading online competitive intelligence service, has found that social networking sites are experiencing a significant increase in traffic from Singapore Internet users after they visit dedicated World Cup websites like FIFA.com. This is in line with a shift in popularity of World Cup sites visited by Singaporeans, with the official FIFA website taking share from established soccer sites, including ESPN Soccernet and Goal.com (see Figure 3).

Social networking sites benefit from World Cup buzz
The dominance of social networking sites like YouTube and Facebook, which registered significant changes from the week ending 29 May till the week ending 5 June, showed increasing interest and discussion about the World Cup from Singaporeans via social media channels (see Figure 1). This contributed significantly to the total 40.8% in downstream visits from World Cup sites.

In addition to forums, multimedia and other soccer-related sites, Singapore Pools featured highly in the downstream visits from World Cup websites, showcasing the successful promotion of their PoolzConnect World Cup Accounts, and the variety of betting types available for the World Cup.

"Large-scale events like the World Cup provide marketers with an enormous opportunity to maximize their online activity," said Alan Long, Research Director for Asia Pacific at Experian Hitwise. "As more Singaporeans turn towards the Internet as a primary source of information and platform for open discussion, it is increasingly critical for businesses to understand online user behaviour and execute effective marketing campaigns. Social networking sites continue to be the primary sites that Singaporean Internet users access after visiting key event or company websites. This highlights the need for businesses to closely monitor online traffic trends, and identify points of attack to target and engage their audience during such events."

Official World Cup football site one of winners in Sports-Soccer category
The week ending 5 June also marked the increasing influence of the FIFA World Cup official site, which increased its share of visits within the Sports – Soccer category by 39.4% to the current ranking of 11 (see Figure 2).

In a comparison of the weeks ending 5 June and 29 May, established soccer sites also lost some share to special event sites such as FIFA.com, including ESPN Soccernet (-4.2%) and Goal.com (-7.2%). Despite the loss of share, ESPN Soccernet continued to maintain its popularity among Singapore Internet users looking for soccer news, with a dominant share of 40.9% of all visits, dwarfing the second ranked site Goal.com with 7.2% of all visits in week ending 5 June 2010.

Meanwhile, the largest gains in the top 20 ranked websites from the week ending 29 May and the week ending 5 June were ESPN Soccernet Forums (+54.1%), Castrol Football's World Cup website (+53.9%) and sport news website SPBO1.com (+130.8%)

FIFA.com also benefits in terms of World Cup focused sites
In the week leading to the launch of the FIFA World Cup, the official FIFA site also climbed into the top spot of 10 World Cup focused sites visited by Singapore Internet users (see Figure 3). Meanwhile, Castrol Football ranked second behind FIFA.com based on share of visits by Singaporeans in week ending 5 June 2010.

Castrol, a World Cup sponsor generated 48.9% of its upstream visits from Soccer related websites, most noticeably ESPN Soccernet's Forums, that generated 41.3% of all upstream visits up from 33.8% in the week ending 29 May.

Established local and global online brands such as Sina, Yahoo! also featured strongly alongside Football 365 and SportingLife from the UK (see Figure 3).

"The insights that Internet marketing consultants can gain from these Internet statistics are invaluable, as they can leverage user behaviour to implement more targeted and speedy marketing initiatives," said Alan Long. "With our capabilities to help businesses convert data into insights, Experian Hitwise can play a vital role in helping companies to be marketing forward and anticipate client and program needs and opportunities during large-scale events like the FIFA World Cup and even the upcoming Youth Olympic Games in Singapore. This will allow marketers to successfully engage and influence customers most likely to become loyal and vocal brand evangelists."

Contact:
Margaret Lam
VP of Marketing, Asia Pacific
Tel +852 2839 5276
Email: margaret.lam@hk.experian.com

About Experian
Experian is the leading global information services company, providing data and analytical tools to clients in more than 90 countries. The company helps businesses to manage credit risk, prevent fraud, target marketing offers and automate decision-making. Experian also helps individuals to check their credit report and credit score, and protect against identity theft.

Experian plc is listed on the London Stock Exchange (EXPN) and is a constituent of the FTSE 100 index. Total revenue for the year ended 31 March 2010 was $3.9 billion. Experian employs approximately 15,000 people in 40 countries and has its corporate headquarters in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Nottingham, UK; Costa Mesa, California; and São Paulo, Brazil.

For more information, visit http://www.experianplc.com

For more information on Experian Asia Pacific, visit http://www.experian.com.sg

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About Hitwise
Hitwise, an Experian company, is the leading online competitive intelligence service. Only Hitwise provides its 1,500 clients around the world with daily insights on how their customers interact with a broad range of competitive Web sites and how their competitors use different tactics to attract online customers.

Since 1997, Hitwise has pioneered a unique, network-based approach to Internet measurement. Through relationships with Internet service providers around the world, Hitwise uses its patented methodology to anonymously capture the online usage, search and conversion behavior of 25 million Internet users. This unprecedented volume of Internet usage data is seamlessly integrated into an easy-to-use, Web-based service designed to help marketers better plan, implement and report on a range of online marketing programs.

Hitwise, an Experian company (FTS-EXPN) http://www.experianplc.com, operates in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. More information about Hitwise is available at http://www.hitwise.com/sg.

For up-to-date analysis of online trends, visit the Hitwise Intelligence – Analyst Weblogs at http://weblogs.hitwise.com.