Social networking growth is beginning to level off in North America, but other regions of the world are just starting to jump on the bandwagon. Led by Facebook, many social networking sites are still seeing healthy growth in 2008.
Facebook saw its membership grow from 52 million in June 2007 to 132 million worldwide in June 2008 — a whopping 153 percent growth. The second highest membership site is MySpace with 117 million, but that site only saw three percent growth over the same period.
When you look at overall growth, the only social networking site that comes close to Facebook is HI5.com with 100 percent growth from 2007 to 2008. However, HI5 only has 56 million members.
Internationally, Facebook’s growth is huge. In Europe the company saw 303% growth; Asia Pacific 458%; Middle East — Africa 403%; and Latin America 1055%.
“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.”