Twice a year (in June and in December), Vincenzo Cosenza creates a “world map of social networks”, showing the dominant social networks by country, based on traffic data gathered from Alexa and Google Trends for Websites.
In June 2009, Facebook was already quite big, and at the end of that year its accelerating growth became even more apparent. By December 2010, the map colored bluer than ever.
The trend shows no signs of stopping this year. How long until it turns all blue?
You can see an animated version of the different maps here. Pay close attention to how many social networks made it to the map in June 2009 compared to June 2011. From 17 to 9.
Facebook is now the ‘leader’ in 119 out of 134 countries Cosenza has analyzed (he added Ethiopia and Tanzania this time around). Since the last update of the world map, Facebook has conquered countries like Syria and Iran, despite struggles against government censorship.
According to data from Facebook’s Ads Platform, Europe is now the largest continent on the network with more than 205 million users (out of roughly 700 million in total).
Cosenza posits that The Netherlands and Brazil will be the next countries to “surrender” to Facebook’s steamroll (it’s already happening, in fact).
Meanwhile in Russia, Odnoklassniki seems to be putting on a good fight against VKontakte.
Also worth noting: Twitter and LinkedIn appear to be on the rise in the United States, Canada Australia and big parts of Europe (UK, France and Germany in particular).
Interestingly, Inside Facebook just reported on apparent big traffic drops for Facebook in North America. On a global level, however, Facebook is drawing more visitors than ever.
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
With over 100 million users representing over 200 countries around the world, LinkedIn is a fast-growing professional networking site that allows members to create business contacts, search for jobs, and find potential clients. Individuals have the ability to create their own professional profile that can be viewed by others in their network, and also view the profiles of their own contacts. Competitors to LinkedIn include sites such as XING, Doostang and Ecademy. Of note, LinkedIn won...
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