Facebook rules Danish social networking

Social networking in Denmark comes down to Facebook vs. the rest. Twitter, LinkedIn, Myspace and Danish Arto are hugely surpassed by the gigantic volume of Facebook. From January 2009 onwards, Facebbok has captured some 2,4 million adults out of less than four million total internetusers. Number two, Myspace, reached 315.000 adults in October, Linkedin 270.000, Twitter almost 170.000 and Arto less than 90.000. This is one of the main conclusions from a new analysis I’ve just published, “Danish social networking in numbers: facebook vs the rest”.

Facebook, Mr and Mrs Smith, the young ones and the Eastenders

Facebook is a smashing hit. All the way through 2009 they’ve managed to keep on to an astronomic number of users – and apparently people keep spending more and more time on the site – in October Facebook took out 16 minutes of the average user a day. Not even the youngest seems to be loosing interest (as opposed to the may-be US-situation reported by Adweek).

However the different sites has a take on different types of users. Everybody is on facebook, giving it a rather “mr and mrs Smith”-like profile. LinkedIn users are well-educated professionals. Myspace and – particularly – Arto have a good grib of the young ones, while users from Eastern Denmark are overrepresented on Twitter.

Women’s winning game

I also find a significant difference when it comes to social networking and women. Even though the number of female users only is only slightly larger than the number of male users, women spend up to dobule the number of minutes on their social networking activities on Facebook – on Twitter it’s four times as much! If the ability to navigate in social networking is only slightly as important as the hype goes, this makes social networking a winning game for women. (More on this in this previous post: War of the gender reborn on the internet: Women socialize, men gather information)

Twitter reached saturation

While Facebook is extremly stable, twitter.com seems to have reached saturation in terms of the number of users. Twitter first breaks through the lower threshold of the publicly available audience measurement in April 2009 with 120.000 users. It kept growing up until peaking in June 2009 thereafter stabilizing, reaching 168.000 adults Danes in October. Compared to Facebook, keep in mind Twitter is different, more like a spreading-the-word type of service as opposed to the closer and cosier “Baking with the kids” kind of Facebook-updates. (More on this in this post: Danish facts: Twitter is a small, elitist niche-site)

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Facebook crosses the generation gap, spreads transparency

Just published my new “Digital view: Life on the Danish internet august 17-23 2009″, and this is fascinating I think: Half of the Danish population are using Facebook. More specific: 2,47 mio Danes visited facebook at least once during the month of June (June, 2009 – research carried out by Gemius).

What’s more: Facebook apparently catches all age-groups – even the youngest, who have left their hitherto preferred native and front-running Danish social networking site, arto.com. Even the eldest: Almost half of Danes over the age of 60 who are online uses facebook! (numbers are all there in the report)

This has lots of implications. The perhaps most important is that Danes in this way are building a shared knowledge about the (increasingly digital) world in which we live. Paving way for a more homogeneous Danish society, I’d say! Not being fragmented into diverse sub-cultures, but knitting the diverse subcultures together in an online meta-community.

Don’t get me wrong: off course we’re not all sitting there, talking and updating and networking each other. But: While you may not be online-friends with your teenage-boys, and while you may not know the exact substance of their social activities (what photos they upload, what they write in their status-mentions), you do know what it’s all about, you’ve been there, tagged that, commented this and this gives you a chance to adopt real-world conversations on how they’re doing. It enables you to reach out, it offers you to build bridges between yours and their worlds.

And what’s more: chances are one of their connections is also a connection of yours. Or a connection of a connection of yours. And that you in this way would be informed should they ever show signs of distress, of a character deemed socially important for you. (This has been a worry of a lot of parents: what if my kids are being harassed by their peers – or even worse: are being approached by seemingly innocent characters who turns out to be pedophiles or the like).

These are all perspectives from an individual point of view. In the world of business, perspectives are almost stumbling over each other. Read a few of them in the analysis.