What type of social media site dominates a culture can say a lot about the people who use that site. Or the people. Or both. Without extrapolating any big conclusions from their data, Palo Alto Networks has taken a look at some of their data collected at the end of last year to see who is using which social media site and where.
Palo Alto has already shown us the that growth of people are using social media sites at work is rising astronomically, but what’s intriguing is that despite 54% of businesses saying they don’t allow access to social networking sites at work, the bandwidth at businesses used for web mail and social networking has increased 500% since 2010. Seems that businesses either have flexible definitions of what is considered work-related social networking, or they just don’t want to set the precedent outright that states, “Hey, you can work here but feel free to use Facebook all you want.”
Breaking down the social media traffic for countries around the world, Palo Alto found some telling statistics in their data. One that sticks out for perhaps it’s obviousness is that Asian markets such as Korea and China “have more usage of other social networking apps in the enterprise than Facebook.”
Another fun take-away from Palo Alto’s report: French people use social networking games and plug-ins 50% more heavily than the global average. I guess that preoccupation explains why they couldn’t participate in Wikipedia’s SOPA protest earlier this month.
For a full visualization of the findings from Palo Alto about how social media was used in the workplace this past year, check out the video below:
