Social networking is not just a US phenomenon. In fact, the United States, is not even the most wired country in the world. Hundreds of millions of people around the world are visiting social networking sites each month and many are doing so on a daily basis. Social networking is no longer a fad but rather an activity similar to checking your email daily.
While attracting global users, specific social networks have a tendency to skew in popularity in different regions. Take MySpace.com and Facebook.com for example, two-thirds of their respective audiences is from North America. But, both are poised and have already started to attract a more globally diverse audience. In fact Facebook has in the works, translated versions of its site.
Bebo.com appears to have a stranglehold on Europe currently, attracting nearly two-thirds of its visitors from that region, while Orkut is the social network of choice in Latin America (49 percent) and Asia-Pacific (43 percent). Friendster also attracts a significant proportion of its visitors (89 percent) from the Asia-Pacific region. Both Hi5.com and Tagged.com exhibit more balance in their respective visitor bases, drawing at least 8 percent from each of the five worldwide regions.
Check out these numbers thanks to comScore World Metrix
With the previous mentioned sites notwithstanding, here are the top 10 popular international networking sites:
XING-named openBC, claims that it is used by people from over 190 countries, albeit the majority of users are Germans.
Badoo-Based in London, Badoo is one of the top social networking sites in Europe
Passado-A European social networking site with strong audiences in France, Spain and Germany.
Studivz-A German version of Facebook with a strong audience in students.
Piczo-A social networking site aimed at teens with a strong following in Canada and the United Kingdom.
Orkut-Originally created by Google to compete with MySpace and Facebook, it has mainly caught hold in Brazil.
Migente-A social networking site targeted at Latin America.
Faceparty-A United Kingdom social networking site founded in 2000, it differs from the norm by charging a fee for features normally found for free in other social networking sites.
Cyworld-A South Korean social networking site similar to MySpace.
Bebo-Based in California, Bebo has gained popularity across the world, especially Ireland and the UK.
We recently published an article about Social Networks situation on Latinamerica in our blog.
You can read it on http://www.analytics20.org/web-analytics/white-paper-ii-social-networks-in-latin-america/
Enjoy it!
Social networks are definitely involving from the “friends” of the originals to networks revolving around interests and slowly around business. Like blogs evolved into an essential business application social networks will too.
http://tomokeefe.com
@ tom I love your biznak site, or maybe I love the name more, almost like your taking it to the hizzy. Or perhaps there is a less “urban” reason why it’s called biznak. Any whoo, thanks for visiting, and I agree that they are evolving, towards niche based apps.