Facebook has failed miserably in Japan, but succeeded tremendously in Chile and Colombia.

Japan

Facebook has been unable to gain any significant traction in Japan because they have fallen into the trap of thinking that what works in the U.S. can also work in Japan. Mixi, the locally grown social network ranks at #6 in traffic while Facebook does not make it to the Top 100. Serkan Toto, a contributor for Techcrunch, notes that the reason why facebook has not fared too well include:

• Failure to adopt to cultural differences: Different from American social media consumers, japanese culture places more emphasis on community than on individual self-promotion. And that what Zuckerberg heralded as a value proposition of showing real names and pictures, is actually something that Japanese users try to avoid.
• Lost in translation (Without Mobile, You’re Dead): Facebook is not optimized to work with Japan’s handsets, a big flaw, considering that people use the handsets to access the internet more than they do a PC.

Eventhough myspace and facebook are failing in Japan, they are doing great in Latin America, and we will take Chile and Colombia as examples.

Colombia:

Facebook has had tremendous growth in Colombia

• 2,691,760 Users on Facebook
• Number 1 in number of facebook users in Latin America
• 5th in number of facebook users globally (excluding the U.S.)
• Approximately 25% of all Colombian internet users are in Facebook

Why such vast and exponential growth? My theory is that its growth can be attributed to the Colombian expatriates in the U.S.

Between 1998 and 2000 it is estimated that more than 1 million people left Colombia and moved to the U.S. for economic and political reasons, many of those people had children that would eventually enter college around the time that facebook was getting it start and opening up to all colleges and high schools.  Thus, by the time facebook opened up to anybody with an e-mail address in 2006, there was already a large population of Colombians living in the U.S. that were members of Facebook, and they invited their friends and family in Colombia to join facebook.

Another significant event that helped the growth of facebook was the utilization of facebook as a tool for organizing a social movement. A group was created in facebook called 1 Million Voices against FARC (FARC is a marxist-guerrilla movement considered to be a terrorist group, one of the factors that forced so many people to Colombia in 1998-2000) and it grew very fast gathering coverage from the national press, media and radio, it eventually culminated in a protest February 4th 2008 in which 4.8 million people showed up to the streets in Colombia and 10 million people worldwide.

Chile

Facebook has grown 2,197% in Chile

• Between February and August grew in Chile from 106,960 to 2,456,480 a staggering growth of 2,197%
• Approximately 33% of internet users in Chile have facebook

One of the reasons why facebook was able to grow so fast was because they made a spanish version in February, which coincides with the start Chile’s growth in facebook.

Although Facebook has had more success in Latin America than In Japan, it is by no means a declared victory because local rival sonico.com is gaining ground in places like Argentina and Brazil.

Sonico gains significant market share in Argentina

Sonico beats facebook and myspace in Brazil

In future posts we will explore what local competition means for American social media sites and how social networks like Friendster have a new hope in emerging markets rather than in the U.S.

Links:

• Chile es el pais de mayor crecimiento en Facebook a nivel mundial (FayerWayer)
• Taking social networks abroad (Techcrunch)
• Tracking Facebook’s 2008 international growth by country (InsideFacebook)
• Rise of the 5th power Facebook and the Colombian Social Movement (Pulsepolitics)