Odd that BlackPlanet.com is not mentioned in the study. Are minority SNs being discounted in this study?

i am surprised, gosh !!! Indians use LinkedIn, i was expecting Orkut to steal the top party. hush Indians are far behind others in using facebook, twitter etc…
i am getting more and more Facebook requests each day so i must say we are catching fast of course pretty less number of tweets from India i agree.

You are omitting PLURK, one of the fastest growing social networking sites around today. It is an interesting and very nicely put together survey here, but without PLURK, it is not close to being a complete list.

Interesting study, but misleading in that it leaves out local social networks. For example, the most-used social network in Japan is Mixi, which isn’t covered by this survey.

I am not surprised by LinkedIn’s popularity in India. There are so many hi-tech companies there with ties to the USA, that I’m sure this is indicative of the networking going on between IT folks in both countries.

Awsome study BTW.

Le Monde published an interesting map of each region’s favourite social networking site a while ago, it’s good to see you continuing the search but you might find the list of sites you chose is quite US-centric.

Using Google Insights with the networks mentioned on the map we see that the Japanese love Mixi, South Koreans love Cyworld, so there is some difference of opinion between the two sources.

Here’s the Le Monde map:
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/infog/0,47-0@2-651865,54-999097@51-999297,0.html

Umm, what about QQ?

300 million active accounts with 700 million registered accounts.

http://cnreviews.com/video/plus_8_star_benjamin_joffe_interview_social_networks_in_us_asia_20080806.html

I find something missing here… the study is fine.. but haven’t we forgot the fact that Google Inights for Search is only to predict the search usage geographically and not the site usage?

Lets take the first link as example – http://www.google.com/insights/search/#cat=&q=myspace&geo=&date=&clp=&cmpt=q … the link only shows the usage of search term “myspace” by geographically and not the site’s popularity! So does with others… every query you have witnessed only shows you how well a search query is popular among people from various country but not the sites popularity.

Google Trends for Website would have provided more detailed analysis to the point you are trying to explain here. I really doubt the outcome of survey provides usage of Social Networking around the world..I would rather call the “search query” on Social Networing platform around the world.

To help you more.. look at the page below.. where you are show “alternative searches” & “rising searches” which is pretty evident to the fact we aren’t viewing a popularity of a website but the popularity of a keywordor search term typedin.

Is it only me or anyone else who got the point of what I am talking here?

Cheers,
Vinay

How about some stats on overall global popularity . . . . what are the 10 most popular social network sites?

This will get the point I am talking on..

1) http://trends.google.com/websites?q=linkedin.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 – Shows LinkedIn is popular in US!

2) http://trends.google.com/trends?q=linkedin&geo=all&date=all – Shows “linkedin” search query is popular in India!

Verdict: Google Insights for Search shows your popularity of a “keyword” geographically and not the website itself. When you are looking at a result of “linkedin” on Insights for Search.. the result you are about to see is search volume of a keyword classifed “country” wise. At the end.. when a company is ranked No.1 doesn’t mean the site is popular there..but the “keyword” is..!

Cheers.

I do agree with Vinay. What’s you’re providing is about search and not popularity nor distribution of social networks. Google Trends and Alexa would have been better tools for popularity (since catching with hits).

good points, but not relevant for a serious analysis of international markets, imho.

stats about people searching for a keyword might provide a sense of popularity, but not of active users, which is what really matters. What is the reach of each network in each market?

this is the data that we need. And because it is valuable, it is not available for free (we would need a comscore, nielsen account in order to check reach, active users, time spent, et cetera).

talking about this, comscore just released a press release about their latest research on social networks around the globe:
Social Networking Explodes Worldwide as Sites Increase their Focus on Cultural Relevance:
http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2396

google insights for search is, again, interesting, but it must be taken with a grain of salt, and i would definitely not take it into consideration for a thorough analysis, and even less as a relevant source of information when making business decisions.

Do you think Japanese people search Facebook by its (original) English notation instead of Japanese letters? How about Chinese? Russian? If you count by roman alphabets keywords only, it will put English using countries’ stats higher.

This is interesting data, even if it just shows search volume for each social network by country. I would love to see a more comprehensive study of the actual popularity of the top networks (Facebook, MySpace, etc) in each country, and also, if those networks aren’t popular in a country, which ones are? The data is limited because the survey was restricted to these 12 options.

I don’t think search or traffic volume is key. Maybe we should be looking at the number of active users?

@Akky AKIMOTO – You should ask Google on this.. I can only explain what I learnt from Insights for Search explains/expresses!

@Pingdom .. thanks for detailed response..does have the answer I wanted on this post! Cheers for your effort!

great overview, many thanks!
since your study includes LinkedIn, also looking at XING, LinkedIn’s competitor based in Europe, would be great, imho.

Great study. Thanks for doing this work and sharing the results with all of us.

Statistical reliability aside, I found it interesting that despite the “geography-less” nature of the internet, there were still strong geographical trends, like the popularity of Orkut in South America, and Friendster in Southeast Asia. I wonder if that’s because of demographic targeting/marketing, or just coincidence. Definitely curious to see followups on this kind of study, particularly if someone can estimate normalized traffic to social networks and combine that with search data and other forms of data. Nice job, anyway.

great research you had! seems like Malaysians like to do social networking

Interesting study and results.

I agree with Vinay, though – the searches shown in the post clearly only show the region-wise interest for the keywords associated with the sites, not usage and traffic for the actual sites.

As you mention, in the absence of hard data (number of users and web traffic for each site), the results you got could be indicative – but the results could even be misleading – here’s an example of how:

Assume that a particular SN site, say Facebook, wanted to check on the competition – then they could conceivably run searches very often, say daily or even more often, for the names of their competitors (e.g. MySpace, LinkedIn), to see relative number of hits (search results). That itself could potentially skew the data. And in fact, I think that’s probably a likely scenario – that all those sites might be regularly checking on the competition – it’s business, after all …

Anyway, the results are interesting in themselves.

looks like Facebook is more popular in countries w/ slower Internet connections

The top 5 countries listed don’t exactly sum up the popularity of each site since it doesn’t take into account the number of users on each site from each country and these differ a great deal from the popularity

From alexa we can see that US users dominate myspace but the lower placed countries all disagree
Myspace.com users come from these countries:
United States 68.8%
United Kingdom 3.7%
Germany 3.5%
Mexico 2.3%
Italy 2.3%

But look at imeem’s top 5 despite not having the US in it’s top 5 we see that US users of imeem still vastly outnumber all the other countries.
Imeem.com users come from these countries:
United States 37.4%
Thailand 8.1%
Philippines 6.5%
Indonesia 4.0%
China 3.3%

I just have one question for most of you debating the research/comparison in this article…

When do you “search” something in Google?

When you want to learn more about something. I see the data as showing where interest is growing the most internationally on one of these social networks. If I want to connect to my LinkIn or FaceBook or MySpace account I am usually doing so directly, not via Google. Heck, the only time I even remember I have an account with Friendster is in a random email.

The study doesn’t claim to show what is being used, but what is being queried. And I think where you’re being queried shows where interest and growth for your company lies. I would use Google Insights as a valid option when considering growth or expansion options. In the data present I see a whole new generation of Americans learning more about MySpace, my children and step-children included. And I see industry growth in India leading the inquery of LinkIn, a business social network that I learned about through an invite not a Google search.

How would you use Google Insights?

Anyone here knows which is the most popular social network in Spain? or in Spanish language? joseph_remesar@yahoo.com

Nice work!

In regards to Myspace being the most popular in the US – do you think it holds any real commercial value for people outside of the entertainment industry when it comes to meeting people?

Yes, Nice work.

Guess this one shows how popular a social network is in a particular country (takes as 100) and how it fairs relatively in other countries.

For eg: Linkedin does well in India (taken as a base at 100) than in other regions. So the chart really shows how the other regions stand w.r.t. india for the keyword search “linkedin”.

It noway compares the popularity of social networks in a particular region or various regions.In the above example, though linkedin seems to be a popular keyword in India, it does not mean that it is the most popular social network there.Obviously orkut is much much more popular in India anong net users.

The title is obviously misleading.Guess you guys realised what the charts and data mean really after you made this post.

finding the popularity of keyword searches (social network names) in aparticular region is easy using Google insights.

But the charts here are not the right ones.

It is important to mention that the data retrieved was based on English Language Search Engine type-in. Japanese people rarely tend to use English keywords in search engines (for example). Therefore, the research does not quantify the real use of each SN around the world. But can give you an interesting insight….

Why is Hong Kong broken out as a separate country? It’s a city in China. Period.

See Orkut as the top social network in Brazil was expected. It’s almost a synonym for Internet here (along with MSN Messenger).

Great research I think facebook will become (if not already) the number 1 social network.

Being from Canada, I can confirm that Facebook is very popular here. LinkedIn seems to be generating some good leads too.

Regarding Linked In being more popular in India than anywhere else:

If you search for “Linked In” rather than “linkedin” you will see a a different picture.

As expected it shows USA first followed by UK. India is still on place 4.

Hong Kong is not a separated country of course. It’s a city in China.

香港是中国的一部分!

Countries with highest interest in Facebook:

1. Turkey

Our people like that. They have so many time for facebook!

Dears,

I think your research method is wrong and these results are misleading.

People who already regularly visit their social network sites simply don’t Google them. They have them bookmarked, widgeted, turned into a custom button in their browser and whatnot.

I haven’t checked but I wouldn’t be surprised if a site’s perceived “popularity” based on Google search only meant that users from top-ranking countries are just in the process of discovering the site in question.

The more people for whom eg. Facebook is the latest buzz, the more computer newbies there are, frantically typing facebook into their Google toolbar because all their friend told them was to “erm, just type facebook!”

Another good example of local/social could surely be http://www.myopencity.it , an example of social network made in Italy, that is really different from the Facebook attitude.

That’s an awesome article.
I’ll ask my readers and try to discover why Orkut is so popular here in Brazil.

In Canada, Facebook is a popular social network — that is true — but there are also others such as MySpace and Orkut very, very popular among Canadians (teenagers, mostly).

MySpace is probably popular in Canada because its blue looks similar to Facebook blue

The most amazing trend is twitter popularity in Japan. I think Indian user base is in second position for Orkut.

Twitter is catching like wild fire across the globe, and soon we may see some other country snatching the top spot from Japan

Amazing work. Now, with the broad strokes illustrated in the data, I would be interested to know the social implications of this trend.

All of the countries leading above would certainly have a high IT literacy base, likewise, a healthy dose of infrastructure to support IT. It will only be a matter of time before other countries with less developed infrastructure follow suit. With this data, it would be interesting to extrapolate the trends from which this survey could lead to. Leaning to the extreme, would it be possible for the web community to develop a unified language of it’s own?

Already, words from mother languages have been abbreviated to convey an idea over SNs by the younger generation as with text messaging. Would a universal web language unify the globe? Is world peace over the horizon? It’s funny to think about, but, hey, so was walking on the moon.

This is fascinating and challenging. There are now huge community with millions of members and spanning many countries and at the other extreme millions of thinny community counting a handful of users. This is a classical longtail (as per Chris Anderson’s book “The Longtail”). This highlights once again the need for niche segments if one wants to succeed.

i hope the future is towards business networking rather than fun networks. a`good example is growing popularity of linkedin.com or livebiznet.com which is a network for serious business people.

Facebook is far more popular than Orkut in Pakistan.

Regards
Samreen Ali
(http://www.apnaportal.com)

Seeing this is not complete article.

and what about Viadeo.com??

In Canada, I can just confirm that Facebook is the most popular social network. Even the employers check the new employees life on Facebook

Countries leading above would certainly have a high IT literacy base, likewise, a healthy dose of infrastructure to support IT. It will only be a matter of time before other countries with less developed infrastructure follow suit. With this data, it would be interesting to extrapolate the trends from which this survey could lead to.

It will be interesting to see how those numbers will change in a few years with the growing number of custom social networking platforms that are out there.

Only just found this article.
Very interesting!

I wonder how these stats have changed over the last 12 months.

Would we see any big changes?
Facebook has gone from 150 million users to over 400 million……