Czechs most active users of social platform Facebook

A Czech language version of Facebook only became available a year ago. The social platform allows users to design a profile, add friends, or share personal news. In the Czech Republic, the site is very popular and user numbers have been growing exponentially.

Across the world, the number of people who use the social platform Facebook is growing at a mind-boggling speed. The site counts 350 million active users; 1.7 million pictures are uploaded to the platform 1.8 billion messages are sent over facebook per second. If Facebook was a country, it would be the world’s fourth largest.

In the Czech Republic, the social site is fast growing in popularity. At a “Facebook now” event on Thursday, Blake Chandlee, the company’s Vice President and director for Emerging Markets, explained how users here have been responding to the Czech language version.

“We went through the translation process last year. We’re now translated into Czech and we’ve seen the user numbers grow from around 300,000 users in January 2009 to just over 2 million users now.”

With a population of 10 million, that makes the Czech Republic a nation where every fifth person has a Facebook account, and counting.

“The growth continues month by month: Last month our user number here grew by eight percent. While we’re really pleased with just the overall increase in users, what’s more important to us is how people are engaging. Are they coming back on a regular basis? Are they sharing things with each other? And in just about every case, the Czech population is above most of the rest of the world.”

Why is it that Czech users have so quickly surpassed other nations in terms of actively embracing the social platform, despite the fact that an English-language version of Facebook has been around since 2004, while the Czech language version only arrived a year ago?

Blake Chandlee

“We’ve looked at a lot of different factor: The kinds of things that people are sharing, the daily activity rates and weekly activity rates, how many friends people have. The average user in the Czech Republic has 93 friends, and that’s increasing. The average user around the world has 120 friends. So in the Czech Republic, people have fewer friends, but the connections are probably a bit more meaningful. There are different cultures in Europe. The Italians, for example, love their friends. Italians have friends all over and are very expressive. The Czech culture might be a bit more conservative, along the lines of: I don’t want to have lots of friends, I’d rather have quality friends, and that drives more activity, more engagement.”

The social platform has also propelled user specific advertising and its executives are actively seeking to blur the lines between social interaction and advertising. Doesn’t this cheapen the social interaction and allow users to become prey of advertisers without realizing it?

“If I choose to share a Nike video of some football with my friends, through news feeds and other channels, I don’t look at that as Nike trying to take advantage of me to try and reach my friends. If Nike were trying to leverage that and to access my data, I would find that offensive and dangerous. Part of our job as a company is to make sure that companies can never have access to user data, that they can never really violate the relationship with users. So it’s in the tools that we build, which allow advertisers to do things that are actually consistent with users’ expectations.”