Facebook Now the Largest, Fastest-Growing Social Network

Call it the Facebook World Tour. Even though Facebook is now the largest social network in the world —with 132 million unique visitors in June—it is also still the fastest growing, at least among the major social networks.

According to figures compiled by comScore, Facebook’s visitor growth is up 153 percent on an annual basis. This compares to anemic 3 percent growth for MySpace (NWS) . Other social networks showing strong global growth include Hi5 (100 percent) and Friendster (50 percent), despite each of those being less than half the size of Facebook. Orkut and Bebo fall in at 41 percent and 32 percent growth, respectively.

If you break down Facebook’s growth into regions, its presence in North America is still growing at a healthy 38 percent rate (with 49 million visitors a month). Europe (with 35 million visitors a month) is growing nearly ten times as fast. And growth in rest of the world is on an even faster tear (403 percent growth in the Middle East and Africa, 458 percent growth in Asia Pacific, 10,555 percent growth in Latin America), albeit from a smaller base.

Much of these huge growth numbers come from the fact that Facebook had hardly no presence in many of these regions until recently when it started its major push to translate the site to other languages. A year ago, it had only one million uniques a month in all of Latin America, three million in the Middle East and Africa, and four million in all of Asia Pacific. When you look at it that way, 10,555 percent growth isn’t as amazing as the raw numbers would suggest. And within these regions, it still has a lot of work to do. For instance, it is floundering in Japan.

The takeaway here is that Facebook’s growth is now coming from abroad, and it still has a long way to go in other countries. Will it get lost in translation, or are we looking at another global superpower here?

 

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Comments

[Mehmet Ates...:]

I resisted for a long time not to join facebook. But it is such a powerful tool, that you can find anybody you want. And its applications created such a market that instead of getting lost in translation, it will adopt and capture every demographic class in this world.

2008 Aug 13 10:06 AM

[Pete_from_BC:]

Wow - I knew that FB was passing MySpace on and off during 1h2008 but now it really seems to be holding the lead. It's interesting because use of applications seems down - maybe people are getting tired of the silly apps and using facebook more for networking and that's in turn getting more people invited as fresh user registrations.

2008 Aug 13 04:44 PM

[robi:]

Facebook is good for Social Network

2008 Aug 14 03:07 PM

[srs:]

Incredible how this is growing. If Myspace were a country it would be the 5th largest in the world. I wonder how myspace compares to facebook in number of users.

2008 Aug 15 01:21 PM

[SEOGuy:]

I had no idea that FaceBook was more popular than MySpace. In theory that should mean that webmasters are getting better results using FaceBook. I wonder if that is true.

While I'm still a beginner with FaceBook, I am ramping up as quickly as I can with Web 2.0 technologies like social networking and social bookmarking. Used in conjunction with SEO and success should be likely as long as people don't give up.

2008 Aug 15 02:37 PM

[Birdlady:]

Yada, yada... Why are people changing from MySpace to FaceBook? How can it be used to our best interest? Let's get some "meat" with those facts and figures.

2008 Aug 15 11:54 PM

[Directoy:]

will Facebook overtake google?
Facebook is dominating the web faster the any boddy ever could think of!

2008 Aug 22 04:51 PM

[FacebookMon...:]

The reason that people are switching from myspace to facebook is because of the simplicity of the network and the professionalism. Plus people are able to make money on facebook that they cannot on myspace.

2008 Oct 30 04:02 PM

[Directoy:]

I think The Social networking age will lest for a long time, and to see that people are geting closer,the social networking space is a great Opportunity to see people from all kind culture ,talking and making friends!

So lets say The Social networking age is here, what is next the Business Social networking??

2008 Nov 06 10:36 AM