There are many things come to mind when you think of Israel, but “social media addiction” is definitely not one of them… at least not until recently.
Much to everyone’s surprise, including mine, a new report released by comScore revealed that Internet users in the Middle Eastern country are the world’s biggest users of social media.
The report, released yesterday, takes a look at social networking during the month of October of this year, and finds that the United States doesn’t even crack the top ten in terms of social media addiction. That isn’t to say that the U.S. doesn’t have more people using a social network than other markets, but it does account for amount of time spent social networking.
One of the many findings from the report shows that Israelis spent on average 11.1 hours using social networks during said period. That’s more than double the global average of 5.7 hours, and some way ahead of major markets like the United Kingdom (7 hours) and the United States (6.9 hours).
Slightly behind Israel comes Argentina (10.7 hours), Russia (10.4 hours) and Turkey (10.2 hours). A number of countries within developing markets – particularly Latin America – dominate the top ten ranking, as the chart below shows:
A theory as to why the U.S. isn’t sitting atop these rankings (and something that they probably should be proud they’re not) is because they’ve had social networks roughly forever, and the U.S. social networking honeymoon period is over. Yes, this is the part when Americans could go all hipster and tell the world that they used social media before it went mainstream.
For other regions in the world, it remains to be seen if this is a honeymoon period effect which might wear off and see usage decrease over time.
