23Musings

Many people assume that social networking is a strictly western past time, with the vast majority of users coming from the U.S. and western Europe.

Not true at all! The latest figures from comScore show that it’s a truely international phenomenon and is actually being lead by the Asia Pacific region at the moment.
This leads me to deduce that it’s not all about Facebook and MySpace. Neither have the presence in these other areas of the world. Orkut, Google’s social network offering, is massive in Latin America and making waves in Asia, but something else must be contributing to these Asia Pacific totals.

Engagement wise, it’s Latin America leading the way. The average social network user in Latin America spends much more time engaged in social networks than users in North America or Europe. Could it be that Orkut is more engaging than Facebook?
The figures above would seem to suggest that although Asia Pacific are heavy users of social networks they are not as engaged and are using them for different purposes to the Americas (perhaps).

Lastly comScore have a breakdown of the regions with what social networks they prefer.

This is where it suddenly jumps out that Friendster is doing really well in Asia, and that a network called CyWorld accounts for a lot of the numbers in that area but doesn’t figure at all in EU or U.S. Also obvious from these figures is that Facebook just doesn’t feature in Asia or Latin America, they have a massive opportunity to break into these regions and gain a lot more eyeballs!