Comscore has published a fascinating chart looking at the top 20 countries worldwide in terms of social media engagement - i.e. the amount of time users on average spend on social networks.
The leaders include some surprises and one name that crops up again and again. Russia comes top with an average of 6.6 hours per visitor per month, followed by Brazil (6.3 hours), Canada (5.6 hours) and Puerto Rico and Spain tied in 5th place with 5.3 hours.
The figures for the UK were 4.6 hours, the US 4.2 hours and Australia 3.4 hours.
Canada usually scores near the top of these surveys, beating the UK into second place in an OFCOM study on the % of the population in social networks, and also coming top when it comes to online video usage (what is it with Canada? More friendly? The weather? Or simply more advanced than the rest of us!).
Russia is an interesting case though as well. Though Comscore says that 616k Russians now use Facebook, up 277% year on year, that's still tiny compared to the numbers attracted by home grown networks Vkontakte.ru (14.3 million) and Odnoklassniki.ru (7.8 million).
In fact, recently Vkontakte announced that it was doing a Facebook in opening its platform up to developers.
Talking head quote:
"Social networking has become a popular online pastime not only in mature internet markets like North America, but also in developing, high-growth internet markets such as Russia." (Mike Read, SVP & managing director, comScore Europe)
"In a country as geographically large as Russia, social networking represents a way of connecting people from one corner of the country to the other."
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