A survey of social networks conducted recently by comScore has shown that Facebook is now the largest social network in the world, after having overtaken rival network MySpace.
Facebook also continues to hold the honour of being the fastest growing social network in the world. As of June this year, they had 132 million unique visitors, having grown by 153% in the last year.
Hi5 has also done very well with 100% growth, and Friendster has shown 50% growth in the same period of time. Orkut and Bebo are next in line, with a 41% and 32% growth rate respectively. MySpace, which has shown only 3% growth, seems to pale in comparison.
comScore also provided details of the growth of social networking by geographic distribution. The 131 million North American users of social networks signalled a growth of just 9%, compared to the 35% growth rate, which pushed the user base to 165 million visitors across Europe.
Asia continues to be the largest social network user base, combined with the Pacific Islands. There are 200 million social network users in the region, and this number continues to grow, having already grown 23% year-on-year.
In most places outside of North America and the UK, Facebook was an almost unknown entity a year ago. However, now that they have launched versions in a number of other languages, they have started doing well, especially in Europe, where the network grew over 300%, which is surely one of the major factors contributing their growth.
Even now, there is still a lot of scope for further improvement. As mentioned last week, Facebook and MySpace are not doing too well in Japan, in spite of the former’s 458% growth in the Asia Pacific region.
