Fresh Chat

comScore recently released a study showing that the popularity of social networking sites worldwide continues to grow at an extraordinary rate.

Facebook is now the most popular (132m users) and fastest growing (153% year on year growth) social network.

Let’s put this into perspective:

• Hi5 experienced 100% year on year growth, but has less than half the number of users as Facebook
• Myspace grew a measly 3% in the last year.

Facebook is also fourth most trafficked site in the world and, discounting the US, Australia has the 4th highest number of users on Facebook. Let’s not forget that in May, Facebook became Australia’s favourite social network.

North American usage of social networks was fairly flat at nine percent, with worldwide growth at 25 percent. Highest growth was experienced in the Middle East-Africa region (up 66 percent) followed by Europe (up 35 percent) and Latin America (up 33 percent).

Pingdom also recently conducted a survey of social network popularity with the following interesting insights:

• Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Canada
• Friendster and Imeem are most popular in the Philippines
• LinkedIn is most popular in India
• Twitter is most popular in Japan
• MySpace is the only social network which is most popular in the United States.
• LiveJournal is more popular in Russia than it is in the United States
• Orkut is more popular in Iran (10th country popularity-wise) than it is in the United States