Flavio about Business 2.0

Valleywag came up with an interesting map, showing which Social Networks have the highest penetration in each countries:

Interesting to see how Social Networks are distributed throughout the world. Lately, I have come under the impression that everyone is looking at facebook and that other players are loosing game.

But the bloggers, including Techcrunch, Mashable and my humbleness, might not see the entire picture.

In many regions of our world, facebook is very insignificant. In fact, if you look at the world map above, facebook dominates only very few countries. (Note: The map only shows the leading social network in a country.)

Now there acts the principle of the self-fulfilling prophecy: When bloggers talk about facebook and about how it’s platform is revolutionizing the internet, they are aggressively accelerating facebook growth themselves, by evangelizing it (absolutely for free, by the way).

Facebook indeed is a winner here, because they were the first to implement a platform for developers. They are thus gaining importance by the huge amount of attention they receive from the blogosphere. Linkedin’s or MySpace have just barely announced they’re planning the implementation of platforms, and have received only minuscule coverage.

The map also reveals that facebook might not have the impact everyone thinks it has. As pointed out by Andi, Facebook’s market share in Asia is close to zero, as well as in Latin America. Basically, everything except the anglosaxon part of the world.

Now obviously the arising question is: Will one player step up to plate and gain everything? Or maybe there is only one professional network and one student / fun network?

Interesting is also this article, showing how facebook and myspace mirror a class division in the USA.

No matter how strong facebook grows, they’re still very far away from myspace and will not overcome them anytime soon. Xing and Linkedin both hold very strong positions in their home markets and there is no signs of a consolidation in either one of them.

Maybe with the development of meta tools, which quickly allow to import/export profile and contact data, more appealing social networks might grow even quicker than now and actual take market share away from weaker players until they can’t carry on with their non-profitability.

As already mentioned before, Facebook is gaining internet platform status. No wonder there are already dedicated blogs about facebook but now there is also a new tool to monitor facebook application success: Appaholic. The name refers to well known Alexaholic that had to change its name to Statshaholic because of trademark issues with Alexa (an Amazon Company).

Comparing the new Where I’ve been App against HOT or NOT

Watch out when building facebook apps: They changed the from being able to invite 10 users at a time to 10 users a day per user, severally limiting the viral distribution of facebook apps:

Inside Facebook’s take

Facebook is hype:

Now Facebook certainly has the biggest market share with students in the anglo-saxon world, while in the germanophone parts of the world, Studivz is still much stronger.

This is how they are growing internationally:

While it was always clear that studivz would never be able to beat facebook worldwide, the question arises on how long the studivz can sustain itsself when facebook grows in users and in features.

It is not that simple to compare user numbers in specific countries. The facebook network Switzerland has 16′000 users now, while Studivz claim they have 52′000 users in Switzerland. But a lot of people on facebook don’t necessarily join their regional Network. In fact, of my 136 total friends on facebook, only 71 of them are in the Switzerland network. I guess I have about 100 people that actually live in Switzerland as friends, which makes my guess at the penetration 70%. According to this, There would be 16k / 0.7 ~= 23k users from Switzerland. That’s already close to half of the Studivz users. How long until we surpass Studivz?

Let’s take a look at University penetration. ETH Zurich Network on Facebook has 8 people called Philipp. Studivz shows us 90 results for ETH. That would be a penetration of less than 10 percent, if we generalize over all students.

St. Gallen University has a better penetration in facebook: 23 Philipps while Studivz shows
72 results, this is roughly a third.

While it is hard to really compare how much penetration those networks have, two things are clear:

1. Studivz still has much more users in Switzerland and Germany
2. Facebook is growing fast internationally, also in those two regions.

The question we haven’t answered yet is, who grows faster?

Nevertheless, I would suggest that facebook will win sooner or later just because of their wider international reach ( you need facebook for your exchange student friends in the US/England. ) and their massive expansion strategy with facebook apps. They understand what’s important and what’s viral, execute fast and deliver results.

While researching on the facebook platform, I stumbled upon this blog: http://www.insidefacebook.com/

With the rising hype around the facebook platform and Mark Zuckerberg showing no modesty by saying they want to build a platform to the internet as was the Microsoft Windows OS to computing, Applications on Facebook gain an increasing momentum.

The most used application Top friends has - at time of this writing - 6,908,623 users growing a few hundred users every minute.

The increasing traction that facebook applications receive, has already let to two acquisitions.

If Facebook becomes the next Microsoft, then inside facebook has a pole position for being the next Techcrunch

While reading Seth Godin’s book Small is the new Big, I just realized how effectively and smart Facebook is applying Seth’s Theory of Flipping the Funnel is (in fact right now I am being Seth’s salesperson as his customer. Well done, Seth!)

When you upload pictures to facebook, you can tag people on the photo, providing additional information to facebook. Facebook will intelligently propose the friends that are most likely on the photo, according to people you tagged in previous photo of the same album.

If a friend is not on facebook, facebook proposes you to add their email address so your friend can sign in to facebook and check out the picture.

You nearly can’t give a bigger incentive to someone than receiving a message:

“Melissa tagged a photo of you on facebook. Click here to view it.”

The person will most likely click on the link. Everyone is obsessed with photos (and everything else) about themselves.  To see the picture, there is no registration necessary, but in most cases people want to see the rest of the album, with pictures of them and their friends, so they will likely sign up for facebook.

Literally everyone who tries to build a network or platform uses viral marketing. But Facebook does it in a very smart and effective way.