Anne Herngaard who works at social media marketing agency Mindjumpers recently had a simple, yet effective way, of proving that social networking is big.
We all know that social media are very popular worldwide. Facebook, YouTube and all the others.
But we also know that, certainly outside the US, there are many local or regional social networking sites that generate huge traffic in specific countries.
Anne has been looking at a list of the most visited sites globally, according to Alexa.com.
Of course she found that Google is number one and says that this makes sense since many people use it as their primary search engine.
I would like to add ‘for now’ and also that there is more to Google than just search…
Anne found that, besides Google and Yahoo, there are several social networking sites in Alexa’s top.
I guess you knew that yourself. According to Alexa, Facebook and YouTube come in as no 2 and 3 respectively. Twitter comes in as no 12.
Since Anne works with social media, she of course knows their great potential for businesses.
“But for those many social media skeptics out there, who still believe that Facebook is just a flash in the pan”, she says, “I think the numbers speak for itself”.
On a global scale, the most visited sites are:
1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. youtube.com
4. yahoo.com
5. live.com
6. wikipedia.com
7. blogger.com
8. baidu.com
9. msn.com
10. qq.com
Anne: “for businesses and brands, social networking sites are the golden opportunity to meet customers or just connect with people where they are online. Today, people look for brands they can relate to and connect with, and by enabling this, brands can assist in people’s online identity building, whereas the brands get some valuable attention and word-of-mouth in return”.
She continues: “The social web is very much a fact and the large sites such as Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Twitter know how to take advantage of it by building on the social aspects and collaborating across platforms. The rest of us can only try to follow their lead”.
Now, Anne, looked at the global rankings, but she was kind of enough to add a small sentence at the end of her post with a link: “check out the top sites for your country”.
So, I did just that and went looking in several countries.
Two random examples:
- The Netherlands: google.nl, followed by google.com, YouTube and Hyves. Hyves is a Dutch social networking site.
- Portugal: google.pt, followed by Facebook, YouTube, google.com, live.com and hi5.com. Hi5.com is a… (yes, indeed).
Check out the top in your own country here.
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