Social Media on the Rise Worldwide

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Juana Ponce de Leon. Juana runs the New York Community Media Alliance. The Alliance is a consortium of ethnic newspapers in the New York area. It provides assistance to individual newspapers as well as translates articles for its website from dozens of native languages into English. It is a one-of-a-kind organization dedicated to supporting the 1.7 million New York City residents who are non-native English speakers or readers.

During our discussion, Juana introduced me to a report from Universal McCann, an arm of the ad agency McCann Erickson, on the growth of social media worldwide. You can find the report as a slideshow on Slideshare where there are also really cool presentations on social media, digital identity, the future of social networks, etc.

The report, Wave.3, chronicles the growth of various social media worldwide. My favorite tidbits:

• 83% of people are watching online video, an increase from 62% at the time of the last study in June 2007.

• 78% of people are reading blogs, an increase from 66% in the previous study.

• 57% of internet users are members of social networks.

• RSS consumption has increased to 39% from 15%.

• 48% of the people surveyed listen to podcasts.

There are also some interesting differences about social media adoption across geographies:

• Blogging – China leads the way with 70% of internet users writing a blog (that’s 42 million bloggers versus 26 million people in the US), followed closely by the Philippines at 66% and Mexico at 60%.

• Social networking – the Philippines leads the way with 83% of the people surveyed being a member of a social network, followed by 76% in Hungary and Poland alike.