Where Facebook overcomes MySpace: Social networking behaviour in the UK and Canada

October 10th, 2007 by Dr. Taly Weiss

Filed under facebook, internet behavior, myspace, social networking, Trend Spotting Behavior

Well, if Facebook and MySpace can be compared to worldwide conquerors, UK is the first major achievement for Facebook, having reached 6,506,000 unique users since August (MySpace = 6,379,000).

The UK adopts an outstanding social networking behavior:

According to Comscore‘s latest report, UK leads Europe’s social networking in:

1. number of users: UK participation in social networking usage proved to be the highest in Europe, with 24.9 million unique visitors, which is 78 percent of the total UK online population!

2. time spent in social networks: UK users average 5.8 hours per month on social networking sites

3. visits frequency: UK users average 23.3 visits per month.

(see table 1)

Another interesting notion about UK social networking users was revealed in this report by separating Heavy users (defined as the most active 20 percent of the social networking community by time spent social networking) from Lights users (defined as the least active 50 percent of the social networking community). One can see (table 2), that about 80% of all online activity at Social Networking sites in the UK can be attributed to only 20 percent of the visitors (80:20 rule works once again!).

Will Canada be next? According to Ipsos report Facebook is already the most popular online social network among Canadian adults holding a social network profile: two-thirds of adult Internet users in Canada who have placed a personal profile on an online social network have one on Facebook (65%), compared to Classmates.com (20%), MySpace (15%) and Windows Live Space (13%). Facebook users in Canada spend the most time online with an average of 5.9 hours per week.

It seems that Facebook is catching up not only more land (see future plans to launch non-English versions) but also more and more of our time!

table 1: UK leads social networking in Europe

table 2: Heavy versus Light social networking users in UK

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2 Responses

wolf Says:
October 11th, 2007 at 12:21 am
Living in Facebook-crazy Scandinavia I would be interested where countries like Norway (3 weeks after the hype started 25% of the population was online), Sweden (started late but now amongst top ten Facebook nations), Finland (it seems to pick up there now) and Denmark are. My feeling tells me that NO & SE won’t be as high as the UK but could well do better than Germany.
Mikej Says:
October 17th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
I recently did some groups with teenagers in the UK and they have already started to fragment their social network usage. Facebook purely for a close group of friends. Myspace is purely about music and acquaintances they might have met at gigs or online that they arent that close to. Bebo is becoming renowned for its programs like Modern Kate.
Social Networks will be worse than TV stations soon