International Social Media: A 2011 round up

We have only few weeks left until the end of 2011, we thought we’d take the chance to round up some of the most exciting and significant developments in the sphere of international social media in 2011.

Over the last six months, Libya became the Facebook’s fastest growing country in terms of percentage increase in national users. The North African country has gone up 588.86% with Facebook users rising to 316,000 in only six months. According to The Guardian, the political events in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt brought about “Twitter revolutions”. Twitter and Facebook were used as a medium avoid the strict censorship of traditional media in the Arab world and to allow the people’s voices to be heard by the rest of the world.

“Where social media had a major impact was conveying the news to the outside world, bloggers and Twitter users were able to transmit news bites that would otherwise never make it to mainstream news media”, said Sultan Al Qassemi, a Guardian columnist based in the United Arab Emirates.

In countries such as Tunisia, Libya and Egypt where the broadband and freedom of access are allowed, it is expected that the social networks usage to continue to grow ito 2012 and beyond.

In 2011, Indonesia, the Philippines and Brazil have lead the world in Facebook user growth. Facebook statistics service Socialbakers reported that Brazil registered an 11.37% growth in May, Indonesia and the Philippines noted increases of 4.15 and 5.75 percent respectively. Until this year, Brazilians were spending their time using Orkut, which owns 43% of the social networking market in Brazil. In 2011, Orkut fell by 18% since last year, while Facebook grew 16% - galvansing the prediction we made in August that Facebook would beome the dominant social force in Brazil in 2012.

Socialbaker’s list of top growing countries also mentioned India, Malaysia, Thailand and Japan. Even if the vast majority of the Indian population is still not connected to the internet, it seems when they do get connection, they immeditely join a social network, as around 40%of internet users are on Facebook.  Predictions indicate that within three years, India will be the number one Facebook user worldwide.

Despite Facebook’s global expanision, we can not ignore the huge social networks which continue to be important local players. In China,  where Facebook has been banned since 2009, the most famous  social network is RenRen. Today, the social platform has around 30 million active monthly users and around 100 million registered users in total. This year, RenRen has purchased China-based video and photo sharing site 56.com, similar to Youtube.

In August, MSN China and RenRen signed a wide-ranging strategic cooperation pact that enhances the Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) portal’s profile in the Far East but leaves Facebook’s position uncertain. The cooperation includes unified account log-in, content synchronisation, finding and communicating with friends and more. Some have commented that the MSN’s choice of RenRen as a partner might suggest that Facebook is unlikely to make any impact in China anytime soon, as critics may draw parallels to Bing’s merger with top Chinese search engine Baidu earlier this year.

Overall, the international social landscape looks set to be an exciting battle ground in 2012. Will the launch Google+ help the search giant rival the more established network? Will Facebook succeed in it’s quest for world domination? Join us next month when we look at predictions for the victors and losers

Dan Bloomfield is an International SEO Expert at OBAN Multilingual