Online Social Networking Growing in Brazil
In September 2009, Hitwise released data on Brazil’s most popular internet sites. Though Google Brasil was in the top spot, with over 11 percent of the country’s total visits during the last week of August, 2009, the country’s top social networking site Orkut was not far behind at nearly 10 percent. English Google was right behind, with 8.6 percent of the visits, followed by YouTube.
Orkut is far more popular in Brazil than Facebook even ranks above Yahoo Geocities, which comes in as second-most popular for social networking. In September of last year, comScore reported that Yahoo Geocities received 20 million unique visitors. Yahoo Geocities received five times fewer hits. Third in line was Sonico, followed by Minglebox and Fotolog. Facebook was actually at the bottom of the pile, as 13th most popuar social networking site in Brazil last year.
The same report also found that social networkers in Brazil averaged 6.3 hours on social networking sites in May 2009. This was nearly double the worldwide average, which is 3.7 hours.
According to a study by Ipsos Public Affairs in September to November of last year, 70 percent of Brazil’s online population used social networks. A massive 82 percent of Brazil’s 16-to-24-year-olds participate in online social networking. This percentage is markedly lower in the US, where an estimated 41 percent of internet users participated in online social networking last year.
Two-thirds of Brazil’s internet users were found to have created an online social network profile in 2008, according to Symantec Corp. The number was even more substantial when analyzed by Universal McCann, who looked at just the 16-to-54-year-olds and found that it was as high at 74 percent. Interestingly, the second study also indicated a slight drop in social networking in Brazil this year.
Brazilians also seem to engage in the web’s social atmosphere more readily than other countries, not only on social networks, but also in chat rooms and on message boards. A study by Deloitte showed that Brazilians also appear more keen to create personal content and participate in online virtual worlds than the respondents surveyed in other countries.
Brazil took the lead in the percentage of its online population who participated in virtual worlds (34 percent), at more than double that of Germany (15 percent), and Japan (10 percent). Over half of all Brazilian internet users created personal content for others to see (55 percent), followed by slightly less in the US (42 percent) and 36 percent in the UK.
EMarketer explains that this data is indicative of a “highly practiced internet population, adept in all aspects of Web 2.0 activities.”
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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