Facebook’s rise in dominance

Italian PR and marketing talent Vincenzo Cosenza who has worked at Microsoft Italy and has a degree in Economics has put together a series of maps over time revealing the dominant social network in every country showing a rapid progression in recent years of Facebook’s dominance. Cosenza uses language that makes the rise in Facebook sound like a war or at least an intense chess game.

Using traffic data from Alexa and Google Trends for Websites to show the most popular social networks by country showing which networks are falling in popularity compared to other social networks, primarily hi5 which used to dominate parts of Asia and Latin America. It is suspected that people in countries where Facebook originally dominated invited friends and families across immediate borders so Americans invited friends and family from Mexico and so on and so forth. Granted Facebook is not the exclusive expansion, it is the top accelerating social network in the world.

---

---

Fast Co columnist Cliff Kuang said of the expansion, “There are lots of reasons this might be. But the only one that really explains Facebook’s success in so many countries and settings is the product and its design. Facebook managed to take over the American market despite how entrenched MySpace was (and to a much lesser degree, Friendster). And it did so because of its reliability, and its simple and intuitive design. More than any of its competitors, it’s a stable franchise: No matter who you are, you know exactly what to expect from every single Facebook page. Or, to put it another way: Facebook is winning because it’s the McDonald’s of social networking.”

Facebook and business

The infographics are a generalization, but it is good to know that if you’re investing time and money in Facebook, it is a place people are still flocking to with analysts suggesting the expansion will continue, but we remind you to not put all of your eggs in one basket. Once upon a time, some agents spent all spare waking hours “marketing” on MySpace which has flopped and it could potentially happen with Facebook despite it being the “McDonald’s of social networking.”

Click here to see Cosenza’s full work.

• Permalink