In my previous post, I gave an overview of some of the top social media sites based on their Alexa ranking. However, when it comes to Social Networking sites, understanding their key geographies of dominance becomes very important, both for users and marketers. Let’s take a closer look at this…

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A    Few highlights:·

• Facebook emerges as a strong network internationally closely followed by MySpace ·
• Orkut is pretty strong in Brazil and the Indian subcontinent. In fact, did you know that more than 2/3^rd of the Brazilian net users use Orkut. ·
• hi5 has strong presence in certain pockets across the globe. This is mainly in Peru, Columbia, Mongolia, Thailand etc. An interesting discussion is how it has established such dominant presence in select pockets. But I’ll leave that for some other time.·
• Friendster, one of the foremost social networks is mainly dominant in south-east Asia. In fact, it is estimated that nearly 90 percent of internet users in the Philippines have Friendster accounts!

While networks are trying to grow their presence across various countries, this is now simple even for the number Uno network. The underlying key to social networking is a user’s group of friends should be on
that network. Once a user establishes a circle of friends on a particular network, it is pretty difficult to  migrate the users to other networks, no matter how good the services provided!

For example, currently 61% of Facebook users come from only 3 countries – US, UK and Canada.  For the #1 social networking site to displace the regional market leaders like Friendster in South-east Asia, Bebo in part of Europe and Orkut in South Asia and Latin America is not going to be any easy task. But, knowing the speed at which Facebook has traveled from Harvard to Ivy League schools, further  to high schools and corporate networks and finally, to the entire internet community…millions of eyes are glued to track its progresses now!

This is a list of some of the most used Social Media websites. I have sorted them based on their Alexa rank to get an idea of their popularity. The category and overview gives you an idea about each of them.

If you haven’t tried out some of them…now is the time! Because its certain – many of them are here to stay!