A whopping 10 million people accessed a social networking site in the Netherlands last month – according to internet data mine comScore.
Research found that during May 2013 this ‘social’ category reached 85.3% of the total Dutch internet audience.
US-founded social giant Facebook was the clear leader with 8.7 million unique visitors – more than double that of LinkedIn, which came in second place with an audience of 3.8 million unique visitors. Twitter ranked in third position with 3.5 million unique visitors that month.
After looking into the demographic profile of these social networks in more detail, comScore found that Dutch social network, Hyves, attracted a large share of the older population with two thirds of its users over the age of 35 (69.4%), while nearly half (49%) of Tumblr’s users are under 35.
The number of visitors aged 45-54 accounted for the largest segments of the Dutch audience for both Twitter and LinkedIn, whereas people aged 55 and up made up the biggest proportion of Facebook users in May 2013.
Trends Confirmed Locally
Amsterdam-based business development manager, Lorenzo Pireddu, from 77Agency – a new media marketing agency which specialises in SEM, SEO, social media, affiliate marketing and more, said the latest comScore research confirms trends the company has seen when working in the social media sphere with advertisers. He said it pinpoints very clearly the balance between the different social networks.
“Hyves used to be by far the dominant social networking site before Facebook started to gain momentum internationally, especially after it got translated in Dutch in 2010,” Pireddu said.
He said from then, Dutch users started to switch from Hyves to Facebook due to its fast-moving approach and international scope.
Pireddu said Hyves kept a share of users from older demographics mainly because they are less prone to switch. “However, looking in more detail to Facebook growth in the Netherlands, today we see that the 35+ age group is the fastest growing,” Pireddu added.
Fast Adapting Dutch Users
Pireddu said Twitter and LinkedIn penetration in the Netherlands is ‘really impressive’, and is likely attributed to the extremely fast adaptation of the Dutch online users to new offerings.
“This led both companies to start looking very closely at the Dutch market as a very strategic one, and thus structure dedicated teams to help advertisers make the most of these large and very engaged audiences, Pireddu said.
