Social Media Facts and Stats – Latin America
The number of web users in Latin America continues to grow yearly at an impressive rate. Social media has proved especially popular among latinos with Argentina, Brazil and Mexico joining the global top ten social consumers in under two years. Many of OBAN’s clients have identified the emerging Latin American economies as a great target for online expansion and to do so require international seo services. In this article OBAN provides an overview on how this cornerstone of SEM is consumed in Latin America and what businesses can do to exploit it.
Worldwide, 10.2% of web users are from Latin America – 82% of these actively participate in social networks. Brazil (38%), Mexico (15%) and Argentina (13%) are the social media leaders in the region. Argentina is the 3rd in the world in terms of time spent on social media websites with an average usage of 8.4 hours per month for each user.
While Facebook is the preferred social network in most of Latin America, 8 out of 10 Brazilian web users have Orkut accounts. Facebook, the world’s most popular social network, has been trying to win market share by offering the possibility to update an Orkut account directly into Facebook.
Orkut is currently Google’s most popular social network owing almost entirely to its popularity in Brazil with 51.7 million unique visitors per month. Google+ is set to usurp Orkut in the very near future so it remains to be seen whether Orkuts users will make the switch to Facebook or to Orkuts younger brother Google+. The odds look stacked against Google+ in this respect as market trends suggest that even though use of Orkut is still growing, Facebook is set to become the market leader in Brazil by the Autumn of 2012 if Google does not take action.
Another growing Social Media site in Latin America is Twitter with 93 million users worldwide – 15 million of whom are Latin Americans.
Twitter Factsheet – Latin America:
In December 2010, Brazil and Venezuela were the #2 and #3 Twitter visitors in the world after the Netherlands
Out of every 5 new Twitter users, 2 are connected via a mobile or smartphone. 23% of all tweets are sent from a mobile device
Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela have the higher number of active Twitter users, but Uruguay has the highest Twitter penetration (17%), compared to the total population
The majority of Twitter users in Latin America are University Students (28%) and Professionals (34%)
67% of the users access the site several times a day
33% of Twitter users are between 19 and 25 years old, 30% are between 26 and 35 years old. Gender distribution is quite equal with 49% of the tweets coming from women and 51% from men
36% of tweets are sent on behalf of a company, 42% are sent by self-employed people and 17% of tweets are sent by students
26% of tweets are generated to share the experience had with a certain product or service and 52% of users follow a renowned professional in their working sector