I Belong to the Nation with the World’s Most Engaged Social Networking Audience. So How Does It Feel?
by
on July 03, 2009,
Yesterday the web measuring company comScore decided to publish the results of their study of the social networking field in Russia. Their research shows that Russia has the most engaged social networking audience in the world and I could not resist the temptation to share some thoughts as someone who lives and blogs on the technology from Russia.
The engagement is measured by comScore in terms of how much time people spend on social networking websites and how many pages people view on such sites and in Russia the numbers are highest with people spending 6.6 hours on social networks and viewing 1,307 pages per user per month. For comparison, in the US it’s only 4.2 hours and 477 pages.
And it’s not only that: 59% of all the internet users access social networks here. What’s more, I myself know people who are not even internet users yet they do have accounts on social networks. For example, my friend once created an account for her mother on Odnoklassniki because her mother wanted to find her former classmates but her lack of computer knowledge resulted in my friend doing all the communications on the network with her friends for her.
But while all these figures from comScore are no doubt very impressive, no outsider will be able to describe how different social networking is if you compare it to what you have come to know as social networking in the US as people use the tools available in a very different manner. What’s more, some of the tools that are the popular darlings of the international English-speaking community are virtually obscure in Russia with the vast majority of the population not even aware of them.
The first obvious example is Facebook. The top social network in Russia is Vkontakte with its 14 million visitors (and 37 million of registered users - many of them are bots created for spamming only but their number is impossible to evaluate and the network owners do not disclose the information) and it was initially developed as a total clone of Facebool itself repeating everything down to the last interface element. Since Facebook has been changing their interface significantly over the last couple of years, only those who remember how Facebook looked like years ago will recognize the familiar interface but it is still here.
Yet this fact did not prevent Vkontakte from winning many users in Russia (or possibly even helped it) and holding the top position in the social networking field here. So when last year Facebook finally decided Russia (along with its huge advertising rates and numerous users) deserved their attention, it was definitely too late to win users back from the existing market leaders so based on comScore stats Facebook now holds the 7th position in the market (though to its credit I’d have to say that it is still the most popular international social network here. And the irony is that when some users decide to take a look at what Facebook is, they tend to think that Facebook is a western clone of their beloved Vkontakte.
Another example is Twitter. The thing is that lately Twitter has been gaining popularity a lot among the Russian geeky crowd so everyone in the tech community is already in the microblogging service exchanging messages and playing cool kids overall.
There are now rumors and some evidence (in the form of Twitter emailing some local web companies to ask for support in promotion of the service) that Twitter is seriously considering an expansion to Russia and will soon be localized for the market. There are even plans to talk to the local carriers to arrange for SMS updates as they are in the US and elsewhere where they are available. I have no idea who may be working on the translation itself but I know that many Twitter users here have already begun complaining that the translation will be as bad as what we usually get from web companies for Russia and the words like “follow” and “followers” will be a total disaster when translated to Russian as there is hardly any equivalent in the language at all. If someone from Twitter reads this, I hope they will pay special attention to this issue because making the users unhappy is certainly not something worth doing at all in this peculiar market.
But the most significant difference between Twitter in the US and Twitter in Russia is that the service is nowhere near mainstream here even though Twitter has many fans among geeks. The traditional media here has not even begun sharing the Twitter story with the population of Russia so the vast majority of people here have no idea what Twitter is and what they may need it for. And without the media support I’m afraid nothing will work here because whenever I try to explain Twitter to my connected friends, I invariably fail to properly answer the usual question “Why do I need it at all?”
So we use very different tools for social networking here and we also use them in a different manner but what makes this country the most engaged in social networking? I’d say it is huge media support and clever PR campaigns of the top social networks. The mainstream social networking here began with Odnoklassniki, our own equivalent of Classmates.com and with their impressive PR campaigns. While they did not run TV ads (or at least I am not aware of such actions), they arranged for coverage and mentions of the social network in numerous regular TV shows so everyone suddenly realized they wanted to meet their old school friends - and rushed looking for them on Odnoklassniki.
As my friend’s mother, many people (especially mid-aged) only ventured online for the social networking experience as they all wanted to demonstrate their successes to their friends from school. I remember a very funny situation when I went to a photographer to quickly make a photo for a visa and while this process normally takes some 5 minutes from entrance to leaving with the printed photos, I spent there almost an hour waiting. The reason for this enormous waiting time was a woman in her forties who wanted the photographer to make a very good photo that she could use on Odnoklassniki and the photo was not supposed to demonstrate her age as she wanted to look young for her school friends to be impressed.
So social networking quickly became the favorite pastime for many housewives and office workers who spend endless hours on social networks chatting to their school and college friends. I have no idea what portion of the 6.6 hours per user per month on social networks comes from the office computers, but I have a feeling that the portion is impressive so it is no wonder that many companies now ban Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki and the likes in their offices.
So yes, social networking is a very interesting phenomenon in Russia and is definitely an interesting one to witness but it is very different from the international social networking scene so all the comparisons are pretty difficult to make and the fact that we spend endless hours on our local social networks does not mean that we understand social networking and various social media tools better than people in the US. What’s more, “social media” still does not have any descent translation in Russian and is beyond understanding or knowledge of the vast majority of the population. And people who use Odnoklassniki and Vkontakte in the vast majority of cases have no idea that their activities are named social networking at all.
