Social Network Popularity Around The World

Where are they 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 .

Popularity by country (how we got the data)

Google Insights for Search makes this quite easy for you. For a search term (for example “MySpace”), it will highlight the regions where that search term is the most popular. Google calls this “regional interest”.

This “regional interest” should give a good indication of which regions (in this case countries) a social network is most popular in.

Google also provides a nice heat map of the results. We have included the heapmaps for all the social networks below.

Some interesting observations before we get started

While we were collecting the data we noted several interesting, and often surprising, pieces of information. Here are some of the more interesting tidbits:

• 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.
• 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.
• MySpace is the only social network which is most popular in the United States.
• MySpace, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Xanga, and Twitter are the only social networks in this survey which have the United States in their top five countries, popularity-wise. That is just five out of twelve.

If you needed confirmation that social networks are global affairs, that should do it.

There has been quite a Facebook craze here in Sweden (where Pingdom is based) the last year or so, but Sweden didn’t even break the top 10 when it comes to “regional interest” for Facebook, as Google puts it.

This would indicate that the popularity of Facebook is quite “wide”, geographically speaking, which is something that you can tell when analyzing the data closer. To allow you to easily do this analysis for each social network, we have included a link to Google’s search statistics for each of the social networks.