The Social Internet: findings on how countries and regions engage differently with the web

One of the topics that interests me the most is the variety with how different countries and cultures engage with social media, so I was very please to see in the current issue of Harvard Business Review a great spread on Mapping the Social Internet. Click on the image below to see the central visualization of how countries engage differently on the web.

Source: Harvard Business Review

The axes of the chart are the portion of internet users who manage a social-network profile, and the portion of internet users who write a blog, a choice of dimensions which yields a few very interesting perspectives:

* Asia is the most social region of the world. Up to 45% of internet users blog in some form, often for close friends, and micro-blogging is highly prominent in China and India (as well as Brazil and Russia).

* South Korea is highly engaged in social networks (predominantly Cyworld) but few people manage their profiles.

* English-speaking countries and continental Europe are fairly homogeneous in their use of social networks, and focus their activities on managing their social network profiles.

* Japan has small focused social networks, with the average number of users on Mixi being 25. Broadcast is less common (though it doesn’t note in the graph that Japan used to have a very high use of blogging).

We will be releasing some views on comparative use of social media in coming months.