Brazil’s social networking market has a new leader. Earlier this week comScore released results showing that Facebook surpassed Orkut in December, becoming the largest social networking destination in Brazil for the first time.

Facebook’s ascent in Brazil is impressive with the site gaining 23.7 million unique visitors in the past year, tripling its audience and rapidly narrowing its gap with long-time market leader Orkut. Facebook closed out the year reaching 36.1 million Brazilians to secure the #1 spot in the market.

Perhaps even more impressive than Facebook’s audience growth is the rapid increase in engagement among its users. In only 12 months, average time spent on Facebook went from just 37 minutes per visitor to nearly 5 hours, making it the third most engaging web property in the country behind Microsoft Sites and Google Sites.

As discussed in the recent comScore study It’s a Social World, Brazil was one of just a handful of global markets where Facebook did not lead the local social networking category – until now.

A closer look at the top 10 fastest-growing markets for Facebook in terms of site visitors revealed that more than half of these were countries where Facebook either did not lead until very recently or where the site does not currently lead. Vietnam, which in December 2011 was the fastest-growing Facebook market when compared to the previous year, saw Facebook surpass local site Zing Me in November. Brazil, the second-fastest growing market for Facebook and largest in terms of absolute visitor increase, saw the site take the lead in December. In the Netherlands, the sixth-fastest growing market, Facebook surpassed local destination Hyves in July 2011.

In four of the top-gaining markets – Japan, South Korea, Russia and Poland – Facebook does not currently lead the local social networking ranking. But given Facebook’s growth in these markets, and if the example of Brazil is any indication, there is a likely chance that Facebook will capture the lead in at least one of these countries (and perhaps more) during 2012.

Unless you’ve been living in a media-free cave for the past month, you are well aware of the Royal Wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton that took place today. These nuptials mark the first major royal wedding since the dawn of the Internet era, with the last wedding of this magnitude between Prince Charles and Diana captivating the world back in 1981, almost three decades before YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were a part of our everyday lexicon.

In addition to being a primary topic in broadcast, print and online news coverage, the Royal Wedding has taken center stage across social media outlets as well. Using comScore’s Social Analytix™ service (powered by Radian6*), we followed global activity across social media destinations - including social networks, blogs, discussion boards and video/image sharing sites - over the course of the past month.

An analysis of social media mentions around the Royal Wedding revealed that the topic is exploding across different social media venues. Social media mentions around the topic eclipsed 1.5 million citations globally since the beginning of April. On April 27, there were more than 200,000 mentions of ‘Royal Wedding’, up 1,215% from the first of the month, as the approaching event fueled a flurry of discussion. As with most weddings, the bride captured more attention than her groom, with social media mentions of ‘Kate Middleton’ outpacing mentions of ‘Prince William’ by a decent margin. On April 27, there more than 64,000 global social media citations for ‘Kate Middleton’ compared to nearly 47,000 for ‘Prince William’.

When looking at a comparison of the U.S. and U.K. markets by volume of social media activity around the Royal Wedding the United States commanded the lead by a wide margin. Nearly more than 1 million social media mentions on the Royal Wedding occurred in the U.S. from April 1 to April 27 compared to more than 256,000 mentions in the U.K. (It should be noted, of course, that the U.S. has about 5 times the population of the U.K., and only about 4 times the number of social media mentions. That said, the U.S. is surprisingly close to the U.K. on a per person basis.)

With people tuning into the event across the world – whether it’s through live TV broadcast, DVR recording, YouTube video, Twitter feed or one of the many other ways we now consume information – it will truly be an example of the breadth of media consumption options we now have available across the globe.

*Radian6 covers over 150 million sources each day, including the broadest available coverage of: Blogs, Mainstream online news, such CNN.com, Video and Photo sharing sites, like Flickr and YouTube, Micromedia, including the full Twitter firehose and Friendfeed, Forums and Discussion Boards, Blog comments, Facebook public discussion forums. Radian6 uses a combination of RSS and other data feeds in addition to proprietary crawlers in order to index the entire social web. If data is available publicly, we’ll capture it. (That also means that data the community trusts to stay behind a wall, will; we don’t crawl or capture sites like private portions of Facebook, private communities, or anything like that.) We capture over eight million on-topic posts and comments each day, filter out the spam and irrelevant data, and deliver results to you in near real time.

There is much buzz surrounding the announcement that the iPhone will be available to Verizon subscribers as Apple ends its exclusive carrier agreement with AT&T. The deal is expected to shakeup the mobile marketplace as consumers who are either current iPhone subscribers or in the market for one now have the option of choosing a carrier, a choice expected to drive a growing number of mobile users into Verizon’s subscriber base and further increase iPhone device sales.

Verizon currently leads the U.S. mobile market as the carrier for 31% of mobile subscribers, with AT&T accounting for 27% share. But when looking exclusively at the smartphone market, AT&T holds a commanding lead with 38% marketshare, compared to Verizon’s 27%. However, as an increasing number of smartphone options have become available across carriers, AT&T has seen its smartphone share decline 7 percentage points in the past year. Meanwhile, Verizon has climbed 4 percentage points as Android devices using Verizon have penetrated the market at a rapid clip.

Is a Platform Market Share Shakeup on the Horizon?
As Apple ends its exclusive deal with AT&T, it is facing an increasingly competitive smartphone environment as new devices flood the marketplace, highlighted by the rising number of Android devices hitting store shelves. In the past year, Android has risen from minimal penetration to now holding a solid 26% of the smartphone market, putting it slightly ahead of Apple’s 25% share but still behind platform leader RIM, which held 33.5% of the market in comScore’s latest mobile benchmarker. Throughout the year iPhone has seen its penetration remain relatively unchanged, hovering at 25% share throughout the year. (It should be noted that the iPhone’s installed base has certainly grown, but its share of the market has remained more or less stable.) The iPhone Verizon deal will no doubt bring even greater competition to the smartphone arena throughout the coming year as Android, iPhone and RIM jockey for the leadership position.

iPhone Users Represent Attractive Subscribers for Verizon
If iPhone users decide to make the carrier leap and switch from AT&T to Verizon, it is likely that Verizon will gain subscribers that represent attractive brand consumers. iPhone users heavily over index in some of the most attractive age segments – 25-34 year olds (index of 175), 18-24 year olds (index of 141) and 35-44 year olds (index of 129) and are 22 percent more likely than an average mobile subscriber to be male. iPhone users often represent higher income brackets, with 81% of users having a household income of at least $50k and 47% of users reporting a household income of at least $100k.

iPhone users have also displayed loyalty to the Apple brand (and consequently to AT&T) with more than half of users having a subscription for more than three years (54.6%) and 28.2% of subscribers holding their subscription for 1-3 years.

Although it’s too early to tell exactly how consumers will react to the Verizon iPhone announcement, it is fair to say that this deal represents a potentially significant turning point in the ascendance of the smartphone market. Only time will tell which carriers and platforms will emerge as the market leaders, but it’s clear that right now the consumers are winners as they gain yet another option when making their smartphone choice.

Yesterday marked the 150th running of the Melbourne Cup, Australia’s major thoroughbred horse race. Deemed The Race that Stops a Nation, the tradition captures national and worldwide attention as one of the premier horse races of the year.

This year’s race saw a major upset on the track as American-bred, French-trained and Australian-owned Americain won the Melbourne Cup, upsetting the favorite So You Think, which took third in the finish. Maluckyday captured the #2 spot to round out the podium.

Using comScore’s Social Analytix™ service (powered by Radian6), we followed global activity across social media destinations (including social networks, blogs, discussion boards and video/image sharing sites) before and after the race to see how a real-time event such as the Melbourne Cup plays out in the social media landscape.

An analysis of social media mentions for the top three finishers throughout race day revealed that favorite So You Think carried the momentum into the event, comfortably leading the other two horses. Shortly following the 3:00 p.m. race time, mentions of the victorious Americain skyrocketed with smaller gains realized for both #2 finisher Maluckyday and #3 So You Think as social media activity closely reflected the race results.

The Race that Stops a Nation did not stop people from heading to their favorite social media channels to post on this year’s race and contenders.

With more and more people both in Australia and across the globe turning to social media outlets as a way to engage during real-time events, one can surmise that social media itself is becoming a national as well as global pastime in the digital age – odds are in its favor.

World Cup interest continued to intensify around the globe through the end of June. Traffic to FIFA.com reached a global high on Tuesday, June 22 as the end of group play revealed which teams would advance to the next round. More than 8.7 million people visited the official World Cup destination that day, representing 1.3% of the entire global Internet audience.

Interest in the World Cup, using visitation to FIFA.com as a proxy, grew significantly across each global region during the month of June. Latin America posted the strongest regional penetration relative to the rest of the world at 6.5% for the week ending June 27, followed by the Middle East – Africa at 5.6%. Europe reached 3.8% penetration, followed by North America at 2.9% and Asia Pacific at 1.6%.

An analysis of the 40+ individual countries currently reported by comScore showed that countries in South America showed the strongest relative visitation to FIFA.com for the week ending June 27. Chile had the highest market penetration with nearly 11% of online users in the country visiting FIFA.com during the week, followed by Argentina at 9.2%. Even without teams in the tournament, Colombia and Venezuela both posted penetration levels above 9%. World Cup host country South Africa ranked fifth at 8.3%, while Portugal had the highest penetration among European markets at 7.5%. New Zealand topped the list for the Asia-Pacific region at 7.3 percent with their June 24 match against Paraguay driving New Zealanders to the site. The U.S. witnessed a 2.4-percent reach (its highest weekly penetration of the entire World Cup) as it topped Algeria to advance to the next round of play.

For continued coverage of Internet trends throughout the 2010 World Cup, visit the comScore Voices blog or @comscore for additional updates.

With World Cup play well underway, fans across the globe are paying close attention to their national teams and watching highly-anticipated matches between the best squads in the world. On Friday, June 11, the official opening day of the World Cup, global Internet penetration of FIFA.com reached its highest level thus far, with 7.6 million unique visitors, or 1.2% of the global Internet audience, visiting the site as fans checked out the schedules of the early round matches.

Geographical differences in visitation to FIFA.com suggest varying levels of interest in the World Cup depending on one’s corner of the globe. The Middle East-Africa (2.5% penetration) and Latin America (2.3% penetration) exhibited the highest relative visitation to FIFA.com, well outpacing the global average of 1.2%. Europe followed with 1.3% penetration, while North America (1.0% penetration) and Asia Pacific (0.5% penetration) ranked below the global average. In absolute terms, Europe accounted for the greatest number of FIFA.com visitors on opening day at 2.6 million.

One of the highest profile matches of opening weekend was the USA vs. England game, which ended in a draw (to the dismay of many England fans). However, both nations had their heaviest visitation to FIFA.com on the opening day of the tournament, which was a Friday workday, one day prior to their actual game, which was played on Saturday June 12. Although the U.S. had more absolute traffic to the site with 1.3 million visitors on June 11, (0.9% of total Internet audience), the U.K. showed higher site reach at 2.1%, or about 538,000 visitors.

As teams face elimination and matches continue to intensify, we expect to see regional and country-specific visitation to FIFA.com to reflect the success of local teams. For continued coverage of Internet trends throughout the 2010 World Cup, visit the comScore Voices blog or @comscore for additional updates!

Earlier this week Alejandro Fosk, senior vice president of comScore Latin America, presented the State of the Internet in Latin America, which provided a look at recent region and market trends in this dynamic and growing part of the world.

Although the webinar was presented in Spanish, we wanted to offer those of you who don’t speak the language an opportunity to download the presentation in English as well as Spanish.

We also wanted to provide a brief summary of some of the highlights of the data in this blog post.

In April 2010, Latin America accounted for 8 percent of the total global online population. Although this represents a relatively small portion of the world’s online audience, Latin America was the fastest-growing region during the past year – climbing 22 percent from April 2009 – as an increase in broadband penetration helped drive more people online. Latin Americans also displayed strong online engagement, averaging 27 hours online during April, consuming more than 2,000 pages of content and frequenting the Internet an average of 52 times during the month. Latin Americans’ reported the highest search intensity out of the five global regions, with an average searcher performing 141 queries a month.

A look across the individual markets in the region that comScore currently reports revealed that all markets experienced a double-digit online population increase during the past year. Brazil, the region’s largest market, grew 19 percent to reach 35.3 million users, while Mexico experienced a 20-percent increase to 15.7 million users. Colombia witnessed the strongest growth with its audience surging 37 percent to reach 10.8 million people, while Argentina climbed 22 percent to 12.7 million users.

From Mexico to Chile, we expect Internet usage in the region to continue to grow for the foreseeable future, presenting local and global brands with the opportunity to reach and engage these active, online audiences. Stay tuned for more insights into Latin America throughout the coming months as comScore continues to provide insights into digital media consumption across the globe.

Twitter seems to be just about everywhere these days, infiltrating pop culture and challenging traditional communication channels as people answer the simple Twitter question, “What are you doing?” Many people have hopped on the Twitter bandwagon - from businesses to celebrities to professional sports players to President Obama.

Over the past several months, we at comScore have watched how quickly traffic to Twitter has exploded. Worldwide visitors to Twitter approached 10 million in February, up an impressive 700+% vs. year ago. The past two months alone have seen worldwide visitors climb more than 5 million visitors. U.S. traffic growth has been just as dramatic, with Twitter reaching 4 million visitors in February, up more than 1,000% from a year ago.

Reuters reporter Alexei Oreskovic recently authored an interesting blog post about the demographics of Twitter users. What he discovered was that 18-24 year olds, the traditional social media early adopters, are actually 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter (Index of 88). It is the 25-54 year old crowd that is actually driving this trend. More specifically, 45-54 year olds are 36 percent more likely than average to visit Twitter, making them the highest indexing age group, followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.

The skew towards older visitors, although perhaps initially surprising for a social media site, actually makes more sense than you might think at first. With so many businesses using Twitter, along with the first generations of Internet users “growing up” and comfortable with technology, this is a sign that the traditional early adopter model might need to be revisited. Not only teenagers and college students can be counted among the “technologically inclined,” which means that trends are much more prone to take off in older age segments than they used to. And with those age 25 and older representing a much bigger segment of the population than the under 25 crowd, it might help explain why Twitter has expanded its reach so broadly so quickly over the past few months.

Keep an eye out for the March U.S. Twitter data, which should be available later this week. An early peek at the data suggests it’s going to be another HUGE month for the increasingly popular site. Follow comScore on Twitter and be the first to find out how the site did! You can also follow comScore chairman and co-founder Gian Fulgoni on Twitter to hear his thoughts and insights on the digital media industry at large.

Recently, a certain blanket with sleeves - otherwise known as the Snuggie - has become a national phenomenon, infiltrating pop culture with its ubiquitous infomercial, celebrity Snuggie sightings and Facebook groups. It has inspired a massive cult following and even Snuggie-themed social events, including Snuggie Bar Crawls across the nation.

Recently it was reported that more than four million Snuggies were sold during a three month period, with orders continuing to flood in making it difficult to keep the item in stock.

As this national obsession continued to take hold, my curiosity eventually got the best of me. I decided to take a look and see how Americans were turning to the Internet to satisfy their Snuggie craving. Not surprisingly, traffic to Snuggie-related sites peaked during the holiday season in December, with FreeSnuggie.com reaching 1 million visitors that month and GetSnuggie.com reporting about half that number.

Searches for Snuggie also peaked in December, with almost half a million searches performed for the term “Snuggie,” up from 110,000 searches for the term in November. (By comparison, there were 180,000 searches for the term “ShamWow” in December - pretty impressive when you consider that Snuggie lacks the marketing muscle of ShamWow’s spokesman extraordinaire, Vince Offer.)

Obviously I was intrigued by the Snuggie. I mean, how many times have I sat cold on my couch under just a normal blanket cursing the fact that it rendered my hands useless to perform simple tasks such as answering my phone, flipping the TV channel or even holding a baby? I had finally had enough and caved, purchasing my own Snuggie.

I must say, it was worth it.

It’s often been said, you can't know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been. Even in the rapidly-evolving world of digital media, this phrase rings true. The trends of the past shape the future, and understanding these trends can mean the difference between success and failure in the months ahead – especially in the challenging economic climate we face in 2009.

Apparently many other minds in the digital media industry have also been wondering where we’ve been, with our latest report, “The comScore 2008 Digital Year in Review,” having already been downloaded by more than 2,000 people. The report gives an overview of what happened in the digital marketplace over the past year, including a look at Internet usage, e-commerce, search, online video, online advertising and mobile.

One interesting finding was the significant growth in the mobile market due in large part to consumer adoption of smartphones, especially the iPhone. The number of smartphone subscribers more than doubled in 2008, while 3G (wireless broadband) penetration increased 43 percent, allowing for a more robust, user-friendly mobile browsing experience.

This and other findings are included in the free report. If you haven’t downloaded your copy yet, you can do so at www.comscore.com/2008-digital-review. Let’s hope 2009 is a positive one for all of us in the digital marketplace!

Tuesday, April 22 was Earth Day. The celebration that started in 1970 has evolved significantly from its early grassroots beginnings into a day when cities, schools and increasingly more corporations promote environmental consciousness, as well as their own reputations, within communities and among consumers. The going green phenomenon has continued to gain momentum in recent years prompted by increasing media attention on environmental and energy concerns, mainstreaming of green products from food to clothes to cars, and celebrity endorsements to supply the very important trendy factor (think Hybrids at the Oscars and Live Earth).

As buzz continues to grow around the green movement, the Internet has become a place for the growing environmentally-conscious population to congregate as well as a place for newcomers to find information on the barrage of green products, terms and tips infiltrating the market place and daily conversation.

TreeHugger.com, one of the more popular green sites, has seen visitation reach 515,000 people in March 2008, an 81% increase from March 2007. Freecycle.org, a site which connects people in communities to exchange items they no longer need or want for free, gained 15% from the previous year to 322,000 visitors in March 2008.

Beyond just niche environmental sites sprouting up and gaining popularity, search has also been vital to the growing green industry as people seek information about current environmental issues and how they can live greener lives.

I used comScore Marketer, our search intelligence tool, to investigate several green search terms and came up with a number of interesting finding. Terms such as “ecotourism” and “climate change” have experienced large search query increases in the past year, with “ecotourism” growing 574% to 12,864 searches in February 2008 while “climate change” jumped 167% to 9,542 searches. Searches for “hybrid cars” also gained (up 48% to 68,332 searches), while basic environmental word searches have also seen growth, including “recycle” (up 35% to 72,779 searches) and “pollution” (up 58% to 32,788 searches).

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the top environmental search term — “global warming” — has seen its searches decline 54% decline in the past year, to 232,000 in February 2008. However, this decline should not be interpreted as a decrease in overall environmental interest, but rather as a natural decline from the term’s stratospheric popularity over the past couple of years surrounding interest in the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the release of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report. (The first portion of the report was published in early February 2007 making it a particularly strong month for the term). As you can see, searches for the term were actually peaking around this time last year.

So even though we may be less likely to partake in an Earth Day rally today than in the 1970s, it’s clear that environmental activism is alive and well – it’s just that much of it has moved online. The accessibility of green communities and content on the Internet provides granola-lovers and non-recyclers alike with ways to be a little more earth-friendly, as well as a place for green marketers to reach and communicate with this growing niche audience.