Brits addicted to social networks

From Guardian's pda: the digital content blog:

It seems that Britons are more addicted to poking and tweeting and writing on each other's walls than anyone else in Europe.

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace reached 9.6 million users in the UK in 2007, according to a new report from Datamonitor. This puts it ahead of bigger countries, including France with 8.9 million and Germany with 8.6 million. Spain is in fourth place with just 2.9 million.

The UK user base is forecast to almost triple to 27.1 million by 2012. For Europe overall, the user base is forecast to rise from 41.7 million now to 107.4 million over the next four years.

Datamonitor explains the UK's dominance on the fact that British consumers are quick to adopt new technology and many of the networks were initially only available in English.

Is it plausible that 27.1 million Britons - half the population - will be using social networking sites by 2012? This represents a 23% compound annual growth rate over the five years from 2007.

By 2012 social networking is likely to be far more integrated into everything we do online. But given that not everyone in the country is online and the current high growth rates are likely to slow, it does seem extraordinarily high.

The report also notes that so far, using social networking sites for marketing campaigns has yielded mixed results, partly because advertisers are uncertain about how to do it.

The personal information available on the sites is a rich vein for advertisers to mine in creating targeted campaigns - but they also need to be careful not to overstep the bounds and invade users' privacy. However, I'm sure they'll figure this out eventually.

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