Social Networking Sites Experiencing Significant Growth

comScore’s latest study of Internet data, is focused on tracking the usage of Social Networking sites, which as the study shows are experiencing significant growth. Facebook and Hi5 notes comScore (SCOR), more than doubled their global visitor bases during last year.

When analyzing social networking — aspects of mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, computers, web sites, and other information-knowledge processing entities are taken under consideration. This must be quite an undertaking task for comScore, not only from a data-gathering perspective, but also from an evaluating aspect as well.

During the past year, analysis comScore — the total North American audience of social networkers grew at 9% compared to a much larger 25% growth for the world at large. The Middle East-Africa region (up 66%), Europe (up 35%), and Latin America (up 33%) have each grown at well-above average rates.

Many of the top social networking sites continue to demonstrate rapid growth. Facebook.com has taken over the global lead among social networking sites experiencing an 153% growth during the past year. Facebook’s recent rise to become the top global social networking site has been fueled, notes comScore – by its substantial growth across worldwide regions. Though its largest visitor base is still in North America with 49 million users.

Facebook has done an exceptional job of leveraging its brand internationally during the past year, said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president. By increasing the site’s relevance to local markets through local language interface translation, the site is now competing strongly or even capturing the lead in several markets where it had a relatively minor presence just a year ago.

Another site posting solid progress is Hi5.com which by putting on its full-scale localization strategy, helped the site double its visitor base to more than 56 million.

Other social networking sites, including Friendster.com (up 50%), Orkut (up 41%), and Bebo.com (up 32%) have demonstrated particularly strong growth on a global basis.

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