Where Facebook’s 250 million users aren’t
Facebook has reached the impressive milestone of 250 million registered users since it was started in 2004. However there are still regions of the world where Facebook can’t seem to make inroads.
When it was founded “the Facebook,” as it was called at the time, was only open to Harvard students. From there it invited students from other Ivy League universities before opening up to the general public.
It’s important to understand this legacy as it describes the population that Facebook was built for. These students were well educated, affluent and generally very American.
This still holds true of Facebook’s users today. Facebook users are more affluent than users of second place MySpace and still highly concentrated within the United States.
The product experience and population of Facebook lends itself fairly well to European and Australian users, but is struggling in terms of adoption in other countries. Even in Europe, Facebook users are primarily Western European, with Eastern Europe lagging far behind.
This whitespace in Eastern Europe extends through Russia with where a Facebook clone called Vkontakte getting a much warmer reception from the locals. Users in these countries seem to prefer local social networks much more highly.
The other region that has yet to catch Facebook fever is all of Asia. China, Japan and Korea all have very different technology usage patterns and social network trends, but none has a high percentage of Facebook users.
All of these trends together seem to dash the hope of one global online community. To gain adoption in these countries, Facebook might have to tailor its interfaces to suit local tastes, but hasn’t shown any signs of moving in that direction.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a video showing the evolution of Facebook’s user base on a map here. However, without tapping into foreign markets, the site may see its growth slow dramatically in the next few years.
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