Social Media Trends in Europe and Russia

The use of social media is certainly not limited to the United States alone. In fact, for some internet users, social media networks may have been their first experience in connecting to someone outside of their own local, state, or even country.

Russia has a significantly different social media audience in the simple fact that in comparison to the U.S. it is extremely small. The total online population of Russia is just under 60,000 and only 42% of that population is using online capabilities at all.

Russian Demographics

According to eMarketer, 61.9 million people in Russia will use the internet by 2013. This would be a significant jump from 2009 where the number rested at 45.8 million. Although the minor numbers may seemingly indicate otherwise, Russians are actually the most arduous social networkers when it comes the length of time spent on social media sites per user.

Odnoklassniki, Russia’s main social network has a reported user-base of around 30 million. The site helps to connect classmates in Russia and the Ukraine and has over 8 million visitors per day. Nearly 75% of the online population of Russia visited at least one social networking site during the month of the study in August of 2010.

Russians are spending more than double the worldwide average time of 4.5 hours on social networking sites. This makes it rank high at #1 among all countries with reported social networking statistics and open social media option engagement. Following Russia is Israel with an average of just over 9 hours per visitor. Israel is followed by Turkey with 7.6 hours per user spent on social networking websites.

This means that in spite of Facebook’s worldwide powerful command in social networking sites, in an overall majority of this specific internet market, Facebook actually ranks fifth in Russia with just over 4.5 million users. However, recent years have seen increasing growth in Russian internet users who utilize Facebook as a social network option.  This is causing Facebook to quickly outpace the other five top social networking sites. 

European Social Media Statistics

Currently, the top ten countries for social networking are ranked by the time spent per visitor. The current worldwide average time for visitors spent on social networking websites is 4.5 hours. In a 2009 Rapleaf study, it was shown that females are far more active in social media than men. However, this study was focused on the U.S. A newer study from Comscore showed that the same rang true for European countries such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. It should be no great surprise that the younger set of females ages 15 to 24 spend the most time of all age groups on social sites than their male counterparts at a generous 8.4 hours each month. What may be a bit more astonishing  is that the next age group on social media time consumption lists isn’t the 25 to 34 year olds, but the older group in the 45 to 54 year olds. The studies actually showed that the 45 to 54 year olds spent more than double the amount of time on social networking sites than the males of the same age group.

The short top ten list of countries leading in social networking capabilities are:

1. Russia
2. Israel
3. Turkey
4. UK
5. Philippines
6. Canada
7. Indonesia
8. Finland
9. Spain
10. Puerto Rico

Many European countries utilize social media websites that are not commonly used by U.S. internet users.

Friendster is relatively popular in Russia, while Hi 5 is frequented visited by users in Spain and Italy more often. Netlog is also highly popular in Spain and an unfamiliar sight for U.S social media users known as Studvyiz, is Germany’s most popular social media outside of Facebook and Myspace.

Sources:

• Edelman Digital
• Internet World Statistics
• IAB Social Media Measurement Guide
• New Media TrendWatch – Russia
• Russia – The Fourth Largest Social Networking Market in Europe
• Russia’s Social Network – Odnoklassniki
• Slideshare IAB Social Media Research