Italian-based social media strategist Vincenzo Cosenza (blog Vincos.it) has looked at the most popular social networks used worldwide, according to traffic monitoring sites such as Alexa and Google Trends, and put together a map to highlight the leading platforms.

Facebook with more than 845 million active users has established its leadership position in 126 out of 137 countries analyzed (in this edition I’ve added Uganda). Europe is the largest continent on Facebook with 232 million users, North America has 222 million, Asia 219 million users (Facebook Ads Platform).

Countries where Facebook is not the leader:
- Russian territories where there is an ongoing battle between the two main local players: V Kontakte and Odnoklassniki.
- China where QZone claims 560 million users, followed by Tencent Weibo (337 million) e Sina Weibo (334 million).
- Iran where it’s hard to access Facebook due to state censorship
- Vietnam and Latvia still likely to use local social networks: Zing and Draugiem respectively