Not Sure Where To Expand Your Social Network To? Try Europe, Social Networking Is A Hit Here

Today comScore has shared results of a new survey with the world, this time about social networking trends in Europe with a particular focus on France. The figures from the survey are rather interesting as the web measurement company discovers that three quarters (74.6%) of all European internet users are exposed to social networks.

Out of the 16 countries studied the penetration is quite predictably the highest in the United Kingdom (79.8%) while in Austria it is at the lowest end of 49.7%. Here is the chart demonstrating the levels of social networking penetration among internet users of the European countries covered by comScore survey:

While the penetration of social networking is relatively low in France (at 63.9%), the socially networked population in the country has grown at an amazing rate – by 45% compared to the previous year. And the most popular social networking site here is not some local player, it’s the good old Facebook. Reason? Facebook has bothered to introduce French-language interface to the users in the country.

To me the most amazing fact is that Facebook easily reached the top position in the social networking space in France by doing one simple thing – translating the user interface into French. After launching a French version of its user interface a year ago in February of 2008 Facebook has grown among French users by amazing 443%. The irony is that the entire localization process did not cost the officially largest social network in the world anything (beyond the programming efforts required) as the interface has been translated into the new languages only by volunteer translators who are native speakers of the target languages.

Actually I’ve been watching Facebook trying to achieve the same results here in Russia by launching a Russian-language version and it is certainly impossible to be impressed by their results as they are barely noticeable: the international giant still has an image of a foreign invader compared to the local clone Vkontakte that is amazingly popular here even despite of some usability problems already fixed in Facebook but still present in Vkontakte and also despite of the fact that the site was completely copied from Facebook (which the vast majority of users here don’t realize simply because they have never heard of Facebook at all).

But the situation is very different in France where the French language helped Facebook easily reach the top position. So this is quite surprising to me as the French are known not to be particularly friendly and welcoming when it comes to everything foreign and Facebook is certainly a foreign player for them. But Facebook seems to be a lucky exception here and the French users seem to be pretty happy about getting their localized version of the most popular social network in the world – without caring if such localization involved any efforts on behalf of Facebook.

Still the results of this survey clearly show that translation of a service into other languages is still one of the ways to significantly increase your user-base – especially if your site does not have strong local competitors. And while the immensely popular social networks and services like Facebook or Meebo can ask their communities to help translate their favorite service into other languages, the vast majority of sites will need to outsource it to professional translators and come up with user interfaces that will be more appealing to international users than those that big companies like to get without paying to translators – and still making us turn back to English because products are not usable in our native languages (Dear Google, can you please remember I don’t want to have my Google Reader in English?). Now can anyone explain why companies dislike to pay for professional translation services when they can expect the results as amazing as what Facebook achieved in France so easily?