If you are of the opinion that social networking and social media ‘happens’ more frequently in a common business language such as  English or with an anglo cultural bent, think again.  Our blogging, microblogging, memberships in communities, and content sharing growth rates are soaring in every language and have become critical components of professional etiquette worldwide. 

Let’s take, as an example, the Spanish / Portuguese speaking regions of the world.

Sonico, http://www.sonico.com, may very well contain the highest number of members for a Spanish language social network.  Sonico began in Argentina and is growing very nicely – 37 million members, 1 million of whom reside in the United States.  (The US is home to more than 45 million Hispanics, making it the world's second-largest Spanish-speaking community, only after Mexico and ahead of Columbia, Spain and Argentina.  Roughly 35 million Americans speak Spanish.)

Hi5 is the third most popular social network (Facebook and MySpace are #1 and #2, respectively) in terms of unique visitors per month (60 Million).  Although created and headquartered in the USA, Hi5 has a huge Hispanic membership (nearly half of its users) thanks to its natural language interfaces and its cultural relevance outside the US.  

Both Ning and Orkut have caught fire in the regions: In Brazil, for some reason Orkut (Google) is very strong – perhaps due to the tremendous outreach and momentum of Google as a first mover in that country.

Facebook is gaining ground in the region; Columbia has the highest Facebook presence in Latin America, followed by Chile, Argentina, and Brazil.   Brazil has the highest growth rate in Latin America presently.

Nine percent of all Facebook users are from Latin America – which is the third largest percentage of Facebook members. Europe is second at 33% and the US is first with 39%. Spain’s membership on Facebook is up 66% since 3 months ago.

Speaking of Spain, a fast-rising social network in Spain is Tuenti.  Tuenti is invitation only, and still in beta, but appears to have twitter and facebook- like capabilities, plus Spanish cultural sensitivities.

Professionals using twitter accounts in Spanish range from: moms raising bilingual kids, to radio and news wires, to professors, the owner of a Spanish t-shirt company, job postings, green business, CRM in Latin America, etc.

LinkedIn is fully multilingual; which means it has qualifying text in Spanish and a natural language interface.   At last count I found 4,639 LinkedIn groups in Spanish (as opposed to the 268,375 in English…).  This is significant, considering that LinkedIn only launched its Spanish language site second half of 2008.

So, whether we “twittear” in Spanish, or we connect in English, we’ll be interacting where it makes sense culturally and professionally.  It’s going to be exciting to track the language and geographic nuances of global social networking communities throughout the next few posts.