Facebook (along with a few other social media sites) exerts a strong pull in many countries all over the world, and new stats from comScore confirm that one of them is Australia.  comScore’s found that Australians dedicated almost 22 percent of their time online in December 2010 to social networks, versus 16.6 percent a year earlier.

A quick note with regards to the timing of this report: don’t blame us.  comScore released it today (or actually tomorrow, since it came out of Sydney), so we haven’t been sitting on it since early January or anything like that.

Anyway, you can see comScore’s table for yourself below, and the company added in a statement, "In December 2010, Microsoft Sites led as the most-visited Internet property in Australia, followed by Google Sites and Facebook.com.  When looking at the top sites by total minutes spent, Facebook.com assumed the #1 spot followed by Microsoft Sites and Google Sites."

Those are some impressive gains for social networking.  Nothing else came close to pulling off the same sort of increases, with the next-nearest categories actually suffering major losses.

Google is doing fine, though, if anybody was wondering.  comScore said, "Nearly 12 million Australians conducted an online search query in December, with an average searcher performing 115 queries.  Google Sites accounted for 80 percent of searches in December."