As the second largest economy in the world[1] China has long been the focus for international commerce, specifically for the last thirty years[2]. As the West deals with economic difficulties, China increases its economic appetite, reportedly growing by 7.90% in the fourth quarter of 2012[3].

Over the past three years we’ve sat by and observed while luxury brands tried to gain some online presence and engage in social media, factors they were assured would be priority by hired-in consultants during the latter part of the noughties.  After a mixed bag of successes and failures, it seems that those marketers of luxury goods are finally preparing to get serious and increase their digital marketing spend for 2013.

Twitter has had an electrifying start to 2013 in Japan and Korea, judging by the 33,388 tweets per second that were sent after the ball dropped at midnight, UTC+9 time. This statistic shows the enormous popularity that the site enjoys in East Asia, and the microblogging site was buzzing in time zones across the globe as shown in this infographic:

It is no secret to anyone that emerging markets lead world in social networking growth. After last week’s estimation presented by emarketer.com – the number of social network users in the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific, will grow from 1.18 billion (in 2011) to 1.4 billion (in 2012). According to the same source this year Facebook users grow fastest in Asia-Pacific, where adoption rates in India, Indonesia and Japan far exceed the worldwide average growth of 26% this year.

After creating a lot of Buzz in US and Europe, with the growth rate for visitors that has been in the double, triple and quadruple digits, the social network is working its magic in Latin America. According to a comScore report, Pinterest’s local audience grew eightfold since the beginning of the year, with 1.3 million Latin Americans users in April.

Social Networking has been on the rise in Western Europe in the last few years, where today more than 100 million Internet users visit social networks on at least a monthly basis. Last year, Elisa Tavilla, eMarketer analyst, noted that the increase in social networking in France, Germany, Italy and Spain stems from two main factors: “greater broadband access and increased usage among people ages 50 and older”.  Let’s have a close look at the social networking environment in France, in terms of numbers and the most popular platforms in 2012.