Facebook Leads the Social Networking Game in Europe

Facebook has been the social network of the year with its rapid growth everywhere. And while for Facebook (and for many other ad-supported web services) the US market is what rules the world in terms of where they make money, Europe now looks like it has been the place where Facebook enjoyed totally incredible growth over the last year.

The report published today by comScore covers 17 countries that the web analytics company tracks and measures and for Facebook the results in the social networking category have been amazing almost everywhere as it now holds the top positions in 11 out of the 17 countries.

In addition to simply being the most popular social network for the large part of European internet population, Facebook has also become something of a favorite hobby to many that deserves significant investment of time: where people only spent 1.1% of all their online time on Facebook only a year ago, today they give the whole 4.1% of their time to the social network. And when it comes to time people spend on various social networking sites, things are even better for Facebook as it increased its share from 12.3% last year to 30.4% this year.

Given how people seem to enjoy spending their online time on Facebook, it is no wonder that the social networking giant is enjoying enormous growth rates of unique visitors at 314% over the year in the entire Europe with Spain demonstrating almost ten-fold growth (999%) and Italy featuring amazing increase of 2721%.

And while the growth rate in the United Kingdom (75%) can be considered to be quite moderate (given the large figures for other countries), it is not really a bad thing as when the audience is already huge it is kind of difficult to expect enormous growth rates - and UK actually offered the largest European audience for Facebook - 22.7 million visitors out of total 99.8 million.

In fact, Facebook does pretty well in terms of popularity almost everywhere: there are only 3 countries in Europe where Facebook does not hold the top 1 or 2 position - Germany (No. 4), Russia (No. 7), and Portugal (No. 3). For Russia the irony is that the top 1 position is held by a local social networking site that is nothing but a clone of Facebook with the owners copying everything down to the smallest interface details (but they currently differ pretty much as the clone does not introduce all the design changes Facebook does).

So Europe proves that given the right attitudes to local population, it is absolutely possible to ensure growth that will leave all the local competitors behind. Of course such successes must mean presence of local representatives that know how to ensure such growth by working with the press and the community but the mere fact that such amazing results are possible for US companies across the ocean makes me wonder once again how it happens that so few US companies bother to pay proper attention to international markets and prefer to watch local clones getting the market share that could otherwise be owned by the original products.