Franziska Kroeger's Blogs

The so-called Web 2.0 inevitably brings about changes, impacting every day communication with friends and colleagues. Let’s have a quick glance at Europeans and their Social Networking habits.

According to KMF Werbung GmbH, a German advertising agency, there are currently over 402 million internet users in Europe of which 60% are using Social Media.
In 2009 only, the number of members in social media networks grew by 40%.
With about 92 million European users Facebook is the strongest networking site whereas, in addition to that, each one of the 16 countries has their own leading network: in Germany StudiVZ.de, in Spain Tuenti.com, France with Copainsdavant.linternaute.com, Sweden with LunarStorm.se and lots more.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that the average European user uses 2-3 networks and spends 5 hours and 46 minutes per month online in a social network.
The leaders in Social Media are the UK, Germany and France.


Loic Le Meur (see loiclemeur.com) stated that Social Media wasn’t affecting the EU, but helping to cross national borders.
Catalyst for this phenomenon, like Le Meur says, was Twitter. Users figured it made sense to twitter in merely one language: English. So they had to learn to twitter in their second language, whereas the majority of European blogs is still in the blogger’s mother language. “For most of us <Europeans> blogging in English is an effort”, says Loic Le Meur.

Regardless of language barriers, there is evidence of a similar development concerning the importance of Web 2.0 – just like in the rest of the world.

For businesses this means: Marketing is changing.
In the past months, expenses for ads in social media have doubled and marketing executives predict that social media will be (or already is) prioritized over, for example, TV ads.

“We’re getting closer”, so says Loic Le Meur, “and more competitive in the global scene”.
Emailing is a dated technology, instant messaging gains in importance.

And that’s why Europe is not lagging behind any more – as it used to.


By Franzi Kroeger.


For reference see
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxWahcXfwCg
Loic Le Meur's blog: http://loiclemeur.com/english/2007/07/how-importan...