comScore, Inc., one of the top ‘web measurement’ companies, has found that the Netherlands led the world in penetration of mass messaging service twitter and the professional networking service LinkedIn.
“The Netherlands is in many ways a nexus of global social networking behavior,” pointed out Mike Read, svp and managing director of comScore Europe.
The social networking category grew 18% to 11.5 million visitors in March 2011 — representing 96 percent of the online population.
Hyves, a local firm, held the top spot unlike most countries where the segment is led by Facebook.
Facebook, however, is quickly gaining ground, surging 76 percent in the past year to nearly 6.6 million visitors. Twitter.com and Linkedin.com rank third and fourth, respectively, with more than 3 million visitors and each growing approximately 70 percent in the past year, it said.
More than one in four Dutch Internet users visits these sites during the course of the month.
While the top ten countries in Linkedin penetration are either English-speaking or in Western Europe, the top countries for Twitter touch virtually every corner of the globe, comScore pointed out.