Wikipedia’s definition of a social media site is “A platform to build social networks or social relations among people who, for example, share interests, activities, backgrounds, or real-life connections.”
Going by this definition, as a significant chunk of the student population in Australia use our site and we connect to them through their profiles, we’d be classed as social media site. We don’t consider ourselves to be, as at this point in time students don’t use the site (outside of the forums) to share information. We see GradConnection as more of an informative site that students use to research employers.
I’ve come across some interesting stats on social media in Australia and I thought that we’d use them to benchmark ourselves against the most used social media in the country.
The stats below are taken from Social Media News.
If we were a social media site, we’d be 15th on this list above Google Plus with 123,000 unique visitors in April 2013. As we have a limited market of about 150,000 final year students and 1,000,000 students total in Australia we’ll struggle to ever make the top 10. However with the uptake of students filling out their student profiles (116,000 in Australia) earlier in their degree we think we’ll be able to move above MySpace in the future. This would sit us nicely under the mainstream platforms that can cater to more than just the Australian student and graduate population.