Digital Life Project Analyzes Global Online Behavior

Digital Life – the largest ever global research project analyzing people’s online behavior – announced its results and observations today by TNS. The piece covers nearly 90% of the world’s online population through 50,000 interviews across 46 countries. A thorough and visually beautiful showcase of the results can be experienced at the Discover Digital Life site, where you can also narrow down results by online behavior, drivers, and compare across countries.

While the entire report/results are worth a more involved look – particularly as pertaining to your brand and region of focus – we’ve gathered some of the key highlights below. While we found that these confirmed what we have already been discussing (i.e., the growth of mobile and prominence of social), what may be surprising is how these differ across countries – particularly how those less developed markets are overtaking the mature along particular behaviors. We noted some of the implications we noted, or questions we raised below, for further exploration;

• Globally, if you’re on-line, you cite digital sources as your number one media channel: 61% of online users use the Internet daily, vs. 54% for TV, 36% for Radio and 32% for Newspapers.

• Rapid growth markets have overtaken mature markets in digital activity engagement: Markets such as Egypt (56%) and China (54%) have much higher levels of digital engagement than mature markets such as Japan (20%), Denmark (25%) or Finland (26%) – despite mature markets’ possessing a more advanced Internet infrastructure. Might this denote culture differences in preference for online vs. offline interaction?
• Activities like blogging and social networking are likewise rapidly gaining momentum in rapid growth markets: Four out of five online users in China (88%) and over half of those in Brazil (51%) have written their own blog or forum entry, compared to only 32% in the US.  The Internet has also become the default option for photo sharing among online users in rapid growth markets, particularly in Asia. While the prevalence of online users uploading photos to social networks or photo sharing sites is at 92% in Thailand, 88% in Malaysia and 87% in Vietnam, less than a third of those in Japan (28%) and under half of those in Germany (48%) have done the same. What does this mean for content creation – will less developed nations lead the way in the future? Are more developed nations relying more on brands, or entities to create content?
• Growth in social networking fueled by mobile: Mobile users spend on average 3.1 hours per week on social networking sites, vs. 2.2 hours on email. Furthermore, consumers expect their use of social networking on mobiles to increase more than through PC.
• Social networking vs. e-mail: Facebook and LinkedIn are being used to communicate moreso than e-mail in rapid growth markets such as Latin America, the Middle East and China, where the average time spent per week on social networking is 5.2 hours, vs. 4 hours on email.  Online consumers in mature markets remain more reliant on email, spending 5.1 hours with e-mail, vs. 3.8 hours on social networking. The heaviest users of social networking are in Malaysia (9 hours per week), Russia (8.1 hours per week) and Turkey (7.7 hours per week).
• ‘Friends’ in social networks: Consumers in Malaysia top the list with an average of 233 friends, followed by Brazilians with 231. The least social are the Japanese with just 29 friends. Surprisingly, Chinese consumers only have an average of 68 friends, despite being heavy users of social networking sites. The average number of ‘friends’ in one’s social network, across countries, could indicate cultural preference for close (but fewer) relationships, vs. the more ‘American’ broad network of acquaintances. It would be interesting to see how these change over time, as well, as a result of social media permeation – and any changes in how its use evolves for personal vs. professional networking.

Discover Digital Life

[via PR Newswire]