The number of social network users in five major Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico) more than doubled from Jan. ’07 to to Jan. ’08 – it was up 103% -?according to an Analytics 2.0 analysis, using comScore?data.
During the same period, the number of US Hispanic and Puerto Rican social-network users increased 48%.
The main social networks of the five-country LatAm region, by number of users:
- Orkut – 12.9 million (up 27% from 10.1 million in ’07)
- Sonico – 7.3 million (Sonico launched during the second half of ’07)
- hi5 – 4.2 million (up 72% from 2.2 million in Jan. ’07)
- MySpace – around 3 million (13 million users in all markets analyzed)
- Facebook – 2.2 million (up 4,152% from the Jan. ’07 count of 52,000)
Social networks in Latin America have a regionalized presence, Analytics 2.0 notes:
- Orkut, for example, is popular in Brazil, but has no significant presence in the other countries.
- MySpace dominates the US Hispanic and Puerto Rican market, increasing 26% in the past year (Facebook grew 251%):
- Bebo and Friendster have minimal presence and?are visited mostly by US Hispanics.
Other findings from the analysis:
- The number of internet users in the five major countries analyzed is approaching 46.3 million, a 16% increase from the 39.8 million in Jan. ’07.
- The number of Puerto Rican and US Hispanic internet users has grown at the same rate, bringing the total to 66 million.
- Six in 10 of total internet users in the five major countries of the region are using one of the above-noted social networks, whereas?77% of internet users in Puerto Rico and the US Hispanic market are doing so.
