Social Networks Around the World
Italian PR professional and former Microsoft Italy marketer Vincenzo Cosenza sent us an interesting visualization today. Below is a map of the world, showing the most popular social networks by country. The map was built using Alexa and Google Trends for Website traffic data in June 2009 and we think it shows some interesting trends. After all, our world is becoming smaller and it's good to know what services our friends on the other side of the globe are using to connect with each other.
Australia: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter
Canada: Facebook, MySpace, Flickr
India: Facebook, Orkut, Hi5 (Twitter is a close fourth)
France: Facebook, Skyrock, MySpace,
China: QQ, Xiaonei, 51
Germany: Facebook, StudiVZ, MySpace
Italy: Facebook, Netlog, Badoo
Russia: V Kontakte, Odnoklassniki, LiveJournal
Spain: Facebook, Tuenti, Fotolog
United Kingdom: Facebook, Bebo, MySpace
United States: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter
Cosenza also noticed some visible patterns that are worth sharing. I've added my own notes in parenthesis:
- Facebook has almost colonized Europe and it's extending its domination with more than 200 millions users
- QQ, leader in China, is the largest social network of the world (300 million active accounts)
- MySpace lost its leadership everywhere (except in Guam)
- V Kontakte is the most popular in Russian territories (looks a lot like Facebook)
- Orkut is strong in India and Brazil (this one was a little scary because it already knew my name)
- Hi5 is still leading in Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and other scattered countries such as Portugal, Mongolia, Romania (Hi5 is a San Francisco based Company)
- Odnoklassniki is strong in some former territories of the Soviet Union
- Maktoob is the most important Arab community/portal
Finally, let's see what services our friends in these other countries are using to network with each other. Check out this list of social networking services that you may not be aware of:
- Iwiw in Hungary
- Nasza-klasa in Poland
- Cyworld in South Korea
- Friendster in Philippines
- Hives in Netherlands
- Lidé in Czech Republic
- Mixi in Japan
- One in Latvia and Lithuania
- Wretch in Taiwan
- Zing in Vietnam
Be sure to check out Vincos Blog and while you're at it, listen to his Last.fm playlist and read his thoughts about Facebook.
Share
Facebook
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
i dont see India there in the country lists...
the social networkings used in India are:
* FaceBook
* Orkut
* Hi5
* Twitter
plz add this to the list...!
Doug, that's a very interesting post. Do you have any thoughts on why MySpace is losing ground and Facebook is climbing so quickly?
My opinion is that MySpace has a different demographics and Facebook does. MySpace seems to attract a younger audience while Facebook is being used a more business orientated group of individuals. What's your opinion?
Thanks Megesh. Of course, how dumb of me to not include India. I'm adding that now.
Zumba,
I'm not sure how Facebook and MySpace are marketed in other countries (if they are at all), but I think you are right, it's probably a demographics thing. It's hard to figure out why a service is more popular in certain countries. It could be how well each service works in those countries, it could be that those companies market better in those countries or a number of other factors. I also wonder what sociological factors are at play here? Could culture play a role? You raise an interesting question, I'm sure I'll have a chance to look into it further.
I'd say in Latvia the largest social network is draugiem.lv (English equivalent is frype.com). 2.5 million members accounts to total number of population in the country.
I think Facebook is more classic and neutral in interface than myspace, so that potential auditory is more wider.
As for culture - russian and ex-soviets users are non-english speakers and have less expirience in internet at all. That is why they choose local products.
Another proof of the basic rule of 3 (the rule of branding). The networks that dominate dominate by an enormous margin relative to the 4th and downwards placers. And it seems China's isolation is a self imposed thing? It's not like Facebook can't do chinese, right? Why do these users automatically prefer something homegrown? Hmm...
You've linked the wrong URL to Cyworld. Technically, http://us.cyworld.com/ is a website for Cyworld US, which is targeted on people in US. It should be http://www.cyworld.com/
please, don't talk about italian Badoo and NetLog, they're worse than Vista running on a Game Boy.
Thanks for the heads-up jef.
Message from Vietnam
Zing is mp3 download site not a social networking site. In Vietnam Y360 is dominate, but for some reason Yahoo is closing it. FaceBook is growing supper fast here, I expect FB to dominate Vietnam to the end of this year.
Found the map's data on Africa interesting & did some extra research, which you can read here, http://bit.ly/akyiR.
Wow, facebook is #1 in pretty much every english speaking language. I wonder if the government has the ability to spy on people through facebook.
How does Oktur lead both in Brazil and in India?
Two countries are too far to have any geographical or demographic common factors. Any Idea?
Oh that's strange, Orkut know my name too ... =S! How does it do that?
I sometimes speak to education institutions, and often to international recruiters. I put together my own map based on ad hoc research (as opposed to Alexa et al):
http://bit.ly/eJlwv
Great post, thanks for sharing. By this one can know which social community is popular in which area and trends can be known.
@Vincenzo Cosenza: never heard of 35mio people on Netlog?
http://www.netlog.com
Or even in Italian: http://it.netlog.com/
You miss 35mio people in your analysis, thus your analysis is wrong.
what about Xing in Germany / German speaking countries?
This is a great list.
I live in Japan and I have to say that the vast majority of people here use Mixi. Mostly because it is perceived to be 'safe' even though it isn't so much. To be a member of Mixi you have to be invited by someone in Mixi AND have a Japanese cell phone address. Despite all this I found it to have more pseudo-spam in it than Facebook. Also, most Japanese that I have talked to that are on Facebook and Mixi say that Facebook is more convenient and easier to use, but Mixi still has the most users.
As for Twitter, hardly anyone knows about it except expats and programmers.
Yes, it seems social networking is just getting bigger and bigger, with no slow down in sight
Nice Article. It's Great to see how the world is connected with every day ordinary people doing the connecting.
Tony Searight
"A Father Teaching Kids To Invest And Give Back!"
www.tonysearight.zoomshare.com
nice info. great to see how pple is connected
its cool slide. not a critique but the info could be more "Self illuminating".
How about some data info over time. So we could see how myspace has ebbed and flowed.
Or how about some sort of tie in with the social site as focus. So once again I am thinking motion. Perhaps starting with a global country view and your country map begins to dissolve into matrix like social networking bits and the data reconstitutes itself as Social Countries which echo the influence of their users countries...
The idea when be to allow the data to express itself and tap directly into the immense bandwidth of the eye.
Xou forgot XING.com from Germany. The business network with 7+ millions professionals and users.
Here in Brazil, I think that Orkut is a phenomenal social network most because Google influence. GMail has dominated the scenery of new mail accounts and its fastest translation to Portuguese leverages a lot its dissemination. The others are in foreign language (MySpace has been translated very recently...) and English language it's not common to be understood to Brazilian in general.
Orkut knows your name probably because its a Google service.
If yu have Google account/use some Google service (Gmail, Docs, Picasaweb etc.)with your name, then every other Google service knows you already...
Orkut is closely related with Google, so it knows a lot of you:)
It's really strange about countries mostly using orkut - Brazil, India and Estonia - three countries with absolutely different culture and geographical location
The reason Orkut knows your name is because it is a google service - if you are logged into your gmail, you are already 'technically' signed-up. The wonderful weird and scary world of Google Open Social. Great post! Interesting to see how the rest of the social world works
damn,
My Country (Bangladesh)is not there. :(
This is very interesting thread and chart. Social Networking / communications are cultural phenomena. My 3 questions:
1.) Are any of these top sites monetizing besides online ads
2.) What is the dormancy rate of users that have an account or multiple accounts but do not use them? (example I have a Friendster account I have not logged into in a very long time
3.) In 5 years will any of these social networks even exist or will they be out of biz or replaced by the nex new thing...
Dormancy? I've joined everything pretty much. But I only use the ones other people use. You know, well you don't, in the UK young people usually have pay as you go (=US 'prepay') mobiles (=US 'cell phones'), you get discounts on phoning/texting your own network, so everyone buys what their friend has to save money; leads to market domination by one brand, but it never lasts longer than 2 years.. Well I have to use QQ, facebook, and who am I going to contact on lokalisten, even though it's ace, if no one I know's on there? The only social networks you can use on your own, unless you're a stalker, are flickr/livemocha/last.fm, not first and foremost social.
Hi to everyone!
I know that many indian people live in Finland and Estonia maybe because Orkut so popular in Estonia and India ;-P
There are not many indians in Estonia. It is a very small country and orkut was the first thing which spread very quickly in Estonia among estonians. Now facebook is spreading very quickly here. By the way, it is quite funny that orkut means in finnish orgasms :-)
How trustworthy is this map? It lists Facebook as number one for Germany, but StudiVZ, Xing and Werkenntwen are all ahead. Facebook is only number 4 in Germany. So much can I trust the other data?
What a fascinating snapshot of the worldwide ascendance and dominance of Facebook in a relatively short time. I agree with another commenter that Facebook's neutral, uncomplicated interface has solid appeal for people of disparate cultures. The entire social networking phenomenon and its incredible growth is historic. It's only been five years since Facebook was "launched" in Cambridge. What will the next five years bring?
Great post, thanks for sharing! :)
In Hungary:
Iwiw.hu, MyVip.hu are popular social portals
(i dont see MyVip, therefore i wrote this post)
Br,
Szabolcs
Really great post! wow I never knew that there were so many Social Networks though I would agree with the geo targetting of the ones I am aware of, If you exclude the giants it seems there are a lot of other social networking sites that are popular locally. I will give some of them a try.
Soccer one : mysoccerplace.net
great list. i didn’t know most of them before.
Where is South Africa in this survey? We have a local IM platform called MXiT that now haS 13 million subscribers. This is not web based but mobile based, as there is a much higher penetration of mobile devices in SA than internet PCs.
Julie
what about http://www.studyin.org ?
Excellent,
Nice collection of top bookmarking site. Good thought and great idea. Thanks for the information.
Thanks for the article on Social Bookmarking! Very informative… and timely! Keep them coming.
thanks for article very
Turkey also wanted to Social Networks
thanks admin good post
In the Czech Republic has Facebook 1mil. accounts. It's no. 2 after lide.cz but I think that Facebook has more active accounts than lide.cz now.
Thank you for this good list! I started bookmarking my site and asking my friends to do so if they would and it’s definitely helping.
thanks, for good article!
Thank you for this good list! I started bookmarking my site and asking my friends to do so if they would and it’s definitely helping.
1 2 Next