Vincenzo Cosenza, an Italian digital strategist, who has shared his social media research with us in the past has just published a new edition of his World Map of Social Networks.
The map gives us a closer look at the global popularity of various social networks, and unsurprisingly, Facebook comes out at the top of the list. The social network has secured the number one spot in 127 countries out of the total 136 countries in the list.
The map offers a great visualization of Facebook’s dominance, throughout North and South America, most of Africa, Europe, Australia and part of Asia.
With over 800 million active users, a number that continues to grow, Facebook is continuing to make its away across the world map, taking the place of local offerings or other international competitors. In June 2011, Facebook surpassed Hyves, to become Holland’s most popular social network, while just this month, it edged Orkut out of its dominant position in Brazil. Facebook has also found itself outpacing Japan’s popular mobile social networks, Gree, Mobage and Mixi.
Europe is dominating the Facebook numbers, and has the most users out of any continent, with the number currently standing at 223 million, followed by North America at 219 million, and Asia and 202 million users.
Russia has shown a little bit more resistance than other countries to Facebook, with two local networks, V Kontakte and Odnoklassniki battling for social media users’ attention.
The number two and three spots in the social networking world vary from country to country. In Australia, Canada, Finland, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the US, Twitter and LinkedIn are playing catch up with Facebook, while Badoo is a popular choice in several European countries including Italy, Austria, Belgium and Spain. Orkut is now the number two choice in both Brazil and India.
Comparing this year’s figures with previous years, the number of dominant social networks has gone down from 16 in 2009, to 11 in 2010, leaving us with just 6 at the end of 2011.
Killing concurents is also killing innovation. That's why social media ould have been nice as with a decentralised model. A protocol wich allows various platforms to exchange.
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LikeThibaut DEVERAUX Dont worry, its on the way - Peer to peer Social Networks. FB is like MS before linux. P2PSON has a great advantage over conventional model. Privacy is one of the top. Google had to perceive that strategy instead G+ (maybe) and making its business model only around their storage services. It means if a peer want to be 24/7 in the cloud with gigs of content segmented to his different peering identities, he would need to use some premium cloud storage. And storing content is different than posting it, with regards to FB privacy policy that they own everything that a user posts. Nonsence!
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LikeThe only major country where Facebook is still not a major contender remains China as the social networking major is banned there and this is the only reason why it hasn't passed 1 Billion mark till yet.
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LikeWhat measure/source indicates that Facebook is #3 in Russia? Moi Mir has far more registered users and greater reach: http://www.dreamgrow.com/social-media-in-russia/
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LikeI can see Path, the "on and off" mobile version of Facebook to be killed this year by the new timeline feature Facebook has brought to the table.
Foursquare will also face a challenge this year as it doesn't integrate with any social networks very well in my opinion, compared to Facebook places which needs to update its index of worldwide locations. However, Facebook places is very restricted when sharing as you can't share it with your Twitter followers.
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LikeConversation from Facebook
And even in small country of Latvia they are holding strong with Draugiem. In Belgium I think Netlog is also still very active.
Can't Play with the big boys n bet small..Go big or go Go Home!!!
Don't forget South Korea's big social network called Cyworld.
russia also
except in China.
Path will be next and Foursquare will face a challenge this year