Italian Digital strategist, Vincenzo Cosenza, has tracked social media popularity over the past few years releasing maps that track changing social media landscapes. The maps show the most popular social networking websites in each country based on Alexa and Google trends for websites.
His latest release of the "World map of social networks" for December 2011 reveals that Facebook successfully continues its global climb to the top. Out of the 136 countries Cosenza tracks, Facebook is number one in 127 countries as of December 2011. This is no surprise as the social networking heavyweight has nearly 1bn users.
Europe leads the pack in Facebook users with 223m using the site. North America doesn’t trail far behind with 219m users and Asia has 202m. The maps featured below show just how dominant Facebook is globally.
Over the last two years the number of leading social networking sites has dropped from 17 to 6, as Facebook forces out other social networking sites left and right.
As of December 2011 LinkedIn and Twitter battle it out for second, but in Europe Badoo and Twitter are in competition with Badoo slightly ahead in country numbers. Yet, after Twitter’s announcement of country specific censoring the microblogging site could see some negative backlash.
In just the 6 months between June and December of 2011 Facebook conquered the whole of Europe, the Netherlands, and Brazil. Facebook was finally able to knock Orkut out of the top spot in Brazil, which toook the site years to accomplish. 
Facebook has been unable to reach the top in Russia as the local social networking sites V Kontakte and Odnoklassniki are still preferred by Russians with V Kontakte being number one according to Google Trends for websites.
QZone is number one in China but since sites like Facebook and Twitter are blocked from the country it looks like Facebook’s global takeover isn’t getting over the Great Firewall of China anytime soon.
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