The writing on social media's BRIC wall
Following on from yesterday’s post highlighting the growth of social media in one of the worlds most mature markets, the US (Social media usage up 43% in the US), I thought it worth illustrating the potential for growth elsewhere in the world.
As you can see from the graph below, the US is second to China amongst a long list of countries with large internet populations, 8 of which have over 50m internet users:
- The tenth largest country on the Internet is Nigeria. So although Africa as a whole is often considered to be a bit behind the curve on the Internet, it does have a presence among the top countries.
- Seven out of the top 20 countries are Asian.
- Five out of the top 20 countries are European. Six if you count Russia.
- Three of the top 20 are English-speaking countries. Four if you count India.
However, when you overlay each of the countries’ total population size, it becomes clear where there is potential for massive growth:
And when you overlay social media usage on top of these two datasets, a very interesting picture emerges, with the BRIC countries of China, India, Brazil and Russia, along with others like Mexico, already massively ahead of mature markets like the US and the UK in terms of their internet population’s use of social media, with plenty of room for growth:
Which paints a pretty convincing picture, for me at least, that points south and east to the future of social media…