Social Media usage worldwide: Australia / Brazil lead the way

The latest global survey from research house Nielsen shows Australia and Brazil are the top Social Media users in the world.

Australia leads the table of most time spent, with each user spending on average 7:19:13 hours per month on Social Networks/ Blogs (SN/B).

Brazil leads the countries with the greatest reach, with 86% of their Internet population active users of SN/B.

While Brazil and Australia share some of the best weather and lifestyle in the world (which might at first seem at odds with time spent on SN/B) the two countries got to the top on the back of different Social Networks – Facebook in Australia and Orkut in Brazil.

Below are the results from other countries included in the study:

It’s a bit odd that Nielsen only includes Japan, Switzerland, France, Germany, Brazil, Spain, United Kingdom, Italy, United States and Australia in their “global” report, but you’d think that they’ve picked a good sample of countries to demonstrate the difference across territories.

Other interesting data from the study shows that

• Almost ¼ of all time spent on the Internet is spent on Social Networks/Blogs
• ¾ of global consumers who go online access Social Networks /Blogs
• A 66% increase in time spent on Social Networks/Blogs compared to last year