Social network websites enjoy, worldwide, a well-defined and engaged audience. Japan makes no exception to the rule, as over 56 million users were reported to have accessed their personal social network webpage at least once in June. While Mixi, a Japan-based network, recorded the largest audience, of almost 13 million single visitors, its year over year growth only reached 3%, according to a comScore study of the Japanese market.

MySpace, Orkut, Facebook and Gree are the other social networks that strike the fancy of Japanese users. The most surprising evolution comes from Facebook, which reported a 213% year over year growth. From 172,000 users that Facebook had last year, June 2008 stats show that a number of approximately 538,000 people currently use the features brought by the U.S.-based company.

"The competition between social networks in Japan is beginning to heat up with the recent introduction of the Japanese language version of Facebook," says Maru Sato, managing director of comScore Japan, explaining the remarkable rise in popularity of Facebook. "The popular social networking site's launch of Spanish, French and German language sites earlier this year resulted in strong traffic growth in these markets. If this is a reliable indication, we can expect to see Facebook's growth in Japan follow a similar trend."

Although placed only on the third place in a ranking that took into account the number of users, Orkut is indicated by comScore as the most engaging social network for Japanese users. The average user spent a monthly 454 minutes logged on their Orkut account and visited 1,557 friends pages. Over a third of June's 30 days were considered by Japanese users perfect for checking their Orkut page, which brings the number of days this social network was accessed to 11.5.

"As these newer sites attract larger audiences and become more familiar in the Japanese market, engagement among their users will inevitably grow." Sato adds.