Germany and Austria have far smaller populations of Facebook users than many other European countries, but that is starting to change, and fast — both countries made our list of the top ten fastest-growing in the region yesterday. Here’s a closer look at what’s happening.Germany, a country with 82.1 million people, grew by 541,000 Facebook users over the course of last month to reach 4.36 million monthly actives. Austria is ten times smaller, with a population of 8.34 million — but it also grew by 14 percent, gaining 129,000 users to reach 1.03 million.
This means that even though Germany is much larger numerically, Facebook has only penetrated 5.3% of the population. Meanwhile, 12.3% of Austrians are now using the site every month.
It is especially meaningful that Facebook is getting this growth in the German-speaking part of the region, because it faces an entrenched incumbent: A clone of Facebook called studiVZ. Facebook sued the company last year for copying it to the degree that it merely replaced “Facebook’s blue colour scheme with a red one.” Facebook was “seeking to end StudiVZ’s illegal activity to ensure that users are not confused and that Facebook’s reputation remains unharmed.” The suit was settled out of court a month ago. At the time, we noted Facebook was growing fast in Germany; while we don’t have fresh data on studiVZ’s traffic, last we heard in April, it was around 5.5. million. In other words, studiVZ does not appear to have a dominant share of its home market, and Facebook is now growing in the middle of it.
Time will tell if studiVZ has differentiated itself well enough as a German-language social network to be able to hold its own versus what we expect to be Facebook’s continued growth among the 105 million native German speakers in the world. For a visual aid, check out the map of German speakers in Europe, below.
[Photo of a German town taken from Austria by Luiz Felipe Castro on Flickr; German language map via Wikimedia.]
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