An interesting ‘technological’ item of Brazilian news today. The social network site Facebook has for the first time pulled ahead of its nearest rival to become the most popular in the country. This has recently been announced by ‘comScore’, a respected statistics firm.
It seems that the former favourite, Orkut (provided by Google) has now slipped slightly below Mark Zuckerberg’s site. The most recent figures, for December, indicate that Orkut attracted the still hugely impressive total of 34.4 million unique visitors while being overtaken by Facebook’s 36.1 M in the same month.
Of course, many in the online community are keeping their Orkut accounts while also signing-up for Facebook ; it’s certainly not a question of ‘either/or’. Nonetheless, the surge towards the latter site has been particularly remarkable over the last year, when Facebook’s numbers of visitors have nearly tripled. Orkut has increased only very slightly, by about five per cent.
Compared with other countries, Facebook usage in Brazil has apparently moved the country into the top four. It’s now the case that the South American giant is in this respect only exceeded by (in order) the United States, India and Indonesia.
Commenting on the recent Facebook boom in Brazil, Alex Banks, comScore’s MD in Brazil remarked that the nation has always been oriented towards such sites but previously usage favoured those provided by other organizations. All that is now changing, however.
It’s also interesting to note the position of other ‘players’ in the market. The number three position seems now to be held by Windows Live Profile (up by one-eighth over the last year) now on 13.3 M visitors, with ‘flavour of the month’ Twitter now scoring 12.5 million, a surge of over forty percent in the last twelve months.
The growth of these popular communications systems have immense implications for business in the country as well as personal contacts.
For those interested in domestic or international investment their potential is enormous.
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