The market research agency InSites Consulting has posted a terrific report about the global use of social networks. InSites surveyed 2,884 internet users in 14 countries and the report is a gold mine of interesting statistics. I have chosen to post two of the slides that I think are especially noteworthy.
The first is a slide that shows professional vs personal use of different social networks. It is a clear difference in use of sites like Xing and LinkedIn on the one hand, and Facebook and MySpace on the other.
It seems that internet users have more trust in professional social networks than in ones used for personal purposes, with the exception of the Dutch site Hyves.nl, in which users also have a lot of trust. That might possibly be due to the fact that it is a local social network, but that is a guess on my part.
Here is the entire presentation and I encourage you to check it out.