Digital Marketing and Technological Insight

Every month the Oxyweb Blog puts out a “world map of social networks around the world”. The map is a visual representation of the most popular social networking services on a country by country basis - rankings are based on Alexa data.

I love looking at this map for many reasons, the biggest being people in the United States tend to look at the social networking / media world from a MySpace vs Facebook standpoint. However, as you can see from the multitude of colors on the map that just isn’t true. It is a big and growing world out there and each country operates differently - this is the challenge and excitement of doing International Digital Marketing. Marketers in the U.S. do not even mention Google’s Orkut, however they dominate India and Brazil - two of the fastest growing economies in the world. Obviously Social Networking conversations should start with the big players, however sometimes you have to look outside your window and see who else is coming up the driveway.

Here are the map changes from September 2008:

Facebook gains Bahamas from Hi5
Facebook gains Belgium from Skyrock
Facebook gains Cuba from Hi5
Hi5 gains Cyprus from Facebook
Hi5 gains Luxembourg from Facebook

Here are the changes from august 2008:

Facebook gains Albania from Hi-5
Facebook gains Austria from MySpace
Facebook gains Bahamas from Hi-5
Facebook gains Italy from MySpace
Facebook gains Libya from MySpace*
Facebook gains Libya from MySpace*
Facebook gains Madagascar from Skyrock
Facebook gains New Zealand from Bebo
Facebook gains Qatar from Orkut
Facebook gains Uruguay from Orkut
Hi5 gains Syria from MySpace*

Check out the full-sized Social Networking Map Here…

• How To Take Social Networking Global
• The Power of Social Networking and the Battle for Page Views
• Is Social Networking growth heading in the wrong direction?
• MySpace Outperforms All Other Social Networking Sites
• Helio Announces New MySpace Mobile Social Networking Application