Orkut continues to lead Brazil's social networking market

Twitter.com also witnessed strong growth, nearly doubling its audience to 8.6 million visitors, with Brazil leading the world in terms of Twitter's Internet user penetration at 23%.

"Social media accounts for nearly 20% of Brazilians' time spent online, making it one of the top online activities in the country," said Alex Banks, comScore managing director for Brazil and vice president for Latin America. "As the ninth largest Internet market in the world and one of the fastest growing, Brazil offers global marketers large and growing opportunities to reach consumers, with the social networking market representing one of the most efficient ways of doing that."

Orkut reigns as social networking leader in Brazil

In August 2010, more than 36 million Internet users age 15 and older visited a social networking destination from a home or work location in Brazil, with an average visitor spending more than 4 hours a month on social networking sites and viewing 585 pages of content. Orkut ranked as the most-visited social networking destination, reaching 29.4 million visitors, followed by Windows Live Profile with 12.5 million visitors. Facebook.com secured the #3 spot with nearly 9 million visitors while Twitter.com reached 8.6 million visitors.

Orkut displayed by far the strongest audience engagement with visitors averaging 4.6 hours on the site during the month, viewing 657 pages of content on average and visiting the site on 35 different occasions.

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

Additional social media insights in Brazil include:

• Traffic to Social Networking sites grew 51% in the past year, with sites in the category currently reaching more than 36 million visitors age 15 and older.
  
• Facebook experienced triple-digital growth, increasing its audience 479% in the past year.
  
• Traffic to Orkut grew 30% in the past year, while Twitter.com climbed 86%.
  
• Twitter.com reached 23% of the entire Brazilian online population, the highest penetration in the world.
  
• Visitation to the Blogs category grew 48% to 29 million visitors. Blogger ranked as the top blog destination with more than 21 million visitors.

Demographic profile of visitors to Facebook, Orkut and Twitter

A look at the demographic profile of visitors to Facebook.com, Orkut and Twitter.com across Brazil revealed varying levels of engagement by gender, age and geographic region. Females exhibited stronger engagement across the Social Networking category, as well as with the three individual brands. Women were 16% more likely to consume content on Social Networking sites than an average visitor. Facebook.com showed the strongest disparity with females consuming 31% more content on the site.

Looking at differences among age segments, younger users were more likely to view content on Orkut and Twitter.com than Facebook.com. Persons age 15-24 were 32% more likely to view content on Orkut than an average visitor and 36% more likely to do so on Twitter.com, while on Facebook.com this age group was 35% less likely than average. On the other hand, older age segments exhibited stronger engagement with content at Facebook.com with persons age 45-54 indexing at 141 and persons age 55 and older indexing at 135.

Across geographic regions in Brazil, visitors from the Southeast region which includes both Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo were 16% more likely to view content on Facebook.com, with all other regions under indexing significantly. Orkut and Twitter.com displayed more balanced consumption patterns among visitors from various regions.

* Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.
**Composition Index Page Views = % of Category or Site Page Views / % of Total Internet Page Views x 100; Index of 100 indicates average representation.

comScore announces Social Media Monitoring

With social media usage continuing to grow across the globe, comScore recently announced the introduction of comScore Social Analytix, a social media intelligence service for comScore clients, powered by the Radian6 social media monitoring and engagement platform. The service will provide clients with detailed, real-time insights based on what consumers are saying about their brands and products on the web across more than 150 million social media sources worldwide including blogs, discussion boards, video and image sharing sites and popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn Answers.

For more information, go to www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/9/comScore_Introduces_Social_Analytix_for_Social_Media_Monitoring.