Worldwide Social Network Users by Geographical Region – 2014 Forecast

Social Networking has seen rapid growth in the past couple of years with 1.2 billion social network users worldwide in 2011 and the users are forecasted to reach, 1.43 billion (2012), 1.66 billion (2013) and 1.85 billion (2014) according to eMarketer. Consumer Social Networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, etc mostly used by consumers as well as businesses have been seeing tremendous growth as evident in the number of users like Facebook (850 million), Twitter (465million), LinkedIn (150 million) in 2012. These social networking sites had significantly influenced the lives of millions of users, how they communicate with friends and family, voice their opinions, collaborate and share knowledge, content and social networking sites too provided the tools and platforms that are easy to use, provided an unique experience, games and applications and kept users hooked to the sites as evident in the comScore report that online users spend 1 minute in ever 5 minutes on social networking sites. According to Radicati Group report, the total number of worldwide Social Networking accounts, including both Consumer and Enterprise accounts, expected to grow from about 2.4 billion in 2011, to about 3.9 billion in 2015. The number of Social Networking users is expected to rise from 798 million users in 2011, to over 1.2 billion in 2015. (Note: users typically have more than 1 account).

Source: eMarketer "Worldwide Social Network Usage: Market Size and Growth Forecast" report.

Asia Pacific is the dominant region due to the number of countries and online population is higher. China dominates the region with close to half of the users of the total Asia Pacific social network users are from China. Other countries from Asia Pacific that figure in the top ten social network users list are India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea and Australia. Latin America is the second dominant region with Brazil dominating followed by Mexico and Argentina. North America is dominated by US and Canada. Eastern Europe is dominated by Russia. Western Europe is dominated by Germany, UK, France, Italy and Spain. Worldwide social network users YoY growth is expected to slow down from 2012 as the market reaches maturity where in the YoY growth for 2012 will come down to 19% from 23% in 2011 and is forecasted to grow by 16% in 2013 and by 11.6% in 2014. Social Networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc will drive the growth along with localized social networking sites in regions like Asia will also contribute to growth. Mobile devices will drive more social network users in the emerging markets as most of mobile handset makers are equipping the mobile handsets with social networking for the customer use.