France and New Zealand may be out of the Rugby World Cup, but they have come up with a desperate new attempt to prove they remain a force on the international stage.
In just three weeks, France has doubled the size of its regional network on Facebook, from 141 000 to 284 000. The New Zealand network has grown by more than 40%, from 94 000 to 131 000.
However, South Africa’s growth hasn’t been too shabby either, with a 20% increase over this period, to 365 000, still keeping it firmly in seventh place in Facebook’s global rankings.
Luckily, Facebook is not the Rugby World Cup, or South Africa would have no chance on Sunday. London alone boasts more than 1,4-million members of its regional network, up by 33% in just three weeks. They even lead South Africa in number of Facebook World Cup rugby groups that include the country’s name in the title: 143 versus South Africa’s 87. However, they don’t have Bryan Habana (England fans are invited to a Habana demo here.)
Other major developments in the regional rankings include the huge growth of Australia (and how much did that help them in France?) and Sweden, with the former closing in on the million mark, and the latter passing half a million. At the same time, Norway has continued slowing down, with less than 10% growth over this period, and will probably be overtaken by South Africa by the end of the month.
The only change in the top 10 has been Hong Kong passing both India and the 200 000 mark, almost doubling in the past three weeks. Singapore is making a play for the top 10, while Lebanon’s earlier challenge has faded as the All Blacks of New Zealand plot their return.
The overall rankings are:
1. United States
2. Canada
3. United Kingdom
4. Australia
5. Sweden
6. Norway
7. South Africa
8. France
9. Hong Kong
10. India
11. Egypt
12. Singapore
13. Mexico
14. New Zealand
15. Lebanon
By the way, growth of the Mrs Weasley Appreciation Group (a Harry Potter-related group, for those who are youth-cult challenged) has stalled, and is now barely larger than the Mexico regional network. Thus fall those who live on hype.
I joined a HP group and it got so bug I felt like I was living on FB just to keep up with the comments, some directed straight at me. I left it, gosh it was hectic!
Hi Arthur…SA’s place in the FB rankings is awesome and signals the fact that we are a savvy, early-adopter country. But do you think we will hold our top 10 position, or reach saturation soon and be overtaken by countries with bigger audiences?
Hey Matthew, right now the trend lines suggest SA should remain top 10 for at least the rest of this year. After that, a lot depends on whether we reach Facebook saturation, or when the Next Big Social Thing comes along. Chances are countries like France, India, Hong Kong, Mexico, Germany, Italy and Ireland will overtake us in the next year, through sheer force of connected numbers, but that we will remain top 20 for several years. The likes of China and Japan have their own special networking platforms,so they are unlikely challengers unless Facebook makes serious Oriental play. So it’s not only a matter of numbers, but also of existing context. The question is also whether Facebook has a strategy for addressing pitfalls that lie ahead. The lesson from history for Facebook is a small application called PointCast, which took the world by storm during the 1990s, but was such a bandwidth hog, it was banned from corporate networks,and it died of starvation. I’ll do a blog on it sometime, but the warning signal is the extent to which companies today view Facebook as a hog of mental bandwidth…