Social networks: understand your market

Some facts to take into account before designing widgets for linking your application into social networking sites – particularly if you’re working internationally. This is one area where Europe is not unified at all:

• Which is the most popular social network site in your country? | Mindspill
  

  SNS Sites - December 2007

  Social Networking Sites are popular all over the world.
  • In 90 (79%) countries a major social networking site features in the top 10 sites of that country.
  • In 19 of these countries, the social networking site is the highest ranking site in the country – ranking higher than any search engine.
  • From a sample of 116 countries only 2 (Taiwan and Vietnam) didn’t include a popular social networking site in the list of the top 100 websites.
  The popularity of social networking sites is no surprise but there are few reports on the use of these sites by geographic region.This site contains interactive Java visualisations showing the relative popularity of sites by country

  (tags: software social networking project:europetition 2007 world visualization)
• The world map of social networks | Valleywag
   

  

  Pupular SNS Sites - June 2007

  A map of the world, showing the dominant social networks by country, according to Alexa. There are way more players than anybody, from a vantage point in Silicon Valley, would expect. In the US, the story of social networks is this: there was Friendster, which had no purpose but dating and didn’t scale; then Myspace, which gave people freedom to make ugly personal websites; and then came along Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, which was classier.But other services, such as hi5.com, Bebo, Orkut and Friendster itself, have established, and maintained, footholds outside the US. Unsurprisingly, social networks, which let people share news, photographs and other content with their friends, benefit from network effects. A dominant local site, such as Orkut in Brazil, can hold off the competition because it’s the default, and nobody wants to migrate to another site, however much more advanced, if their friends won’t follow.
  (tags: software social networking project:europetition 2008 blog world visualization)

• Royal Pingdom » Social network popularity around the world
  

  Facebook

  

  LinkedIn

  Using Google search data to identify where 12 of the top social networks are the most popular? The social networks we included in this survey were MySpace, Facebook, Hi5, Friendster, LinkedIn, Orkut, Last.fm, LiveJournal, Xanga, Bebo, Imeem and Twitter.Something to be aware of when looking at localising social network enabled applications – eg use Bebo if you want the Irish on board.

  (tags: software social networking project:europetition 2008 blog)

First point: the inconsistency and variability of the figures means that you may have to be considering reaching the top two or three SNS applications in each country.

Second point: as dana boyd showed a while ago, different SNS sites will be used by different communities within a country. In the UK, Blogroll is the biggie amongst political bloggers. Not sure who uses WordPress…

On a related theme, web users also behave differently in different countries:

• What’s The Social Technographics Profile Of Your Customers? | Groundswell
  Companies often approach Social Computing as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a podcast there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for. This sites gives a profile of expected customer behaviour by age, gender and country
  No point hoping that Europeans will behave like South Koreans, or even Americans.
  (tags: project:europetition 2007 blog visualization marketing community)

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