Anecdotally, Facebook has been taking off in Japan over the last 6 months.  However, as Serkan Toto pointed out in his blog on April 10th, there is something fishy going on.  It seems a lot of this hype is based on what facebook Japan told the Nikkei newspaper.  The 'Nikkei Trendy' publication was claiming growth of half a million subscribers a month, which would see facebook challenging Japan's number one social network Mixi (with approximately 22 million members) by sometime towards the end of next year.

In the 4 weeks since Serkan's article, the growth in facebook user in Japan has been only 146,060 to reach a grand total of 3,205,060 (according to facebook's advertising tool).  This is slightly higher than the level on Socialbakers of 3,059,000 users.  Also, doing a very rough trend analysis of the Socialbakers figures (see the roughly drawn red line in the chart) the growth is not exponential - in fact it would appear that the growth is either fairly constant or actually decreasing slightly.  Assuming a  constant rate of growth for facebook and none for Mixi, facebook will be on parity with Mixi in about 10 years.

The problem with all this analysis of registered members, is that it's kind of meaningless.  To anyone who has been on Mixi, you will notice the majority of communities have had hardly any activity for a number of years.  Most users would also appear to be inactive or only very occasional users.  The active users - those sharing their blogs with their close friends - would at least anecdotally appear to be a tiny percentage of the total members.  This isn't to say that all Facebook users in Japan are more active than their Mixi counterparts - there are a lot of accounts with only 1 or 2 friends and no updates.  This could be because Japanese users come in knowing the blog paradigm and then don't know what to do.

Although Nikkei Trendy is guilty of spreading the misinformation about growth in numbers, they did have an interesting take on the differences between Mixi and Facebook - at least in the eyes of Japanese users - Facebook is a party and Mixi is Karaoke.  The idea being you meet and greet lots of people at a party, but you go with your real friends to Karaoke where you let your hair down.  This might seem a bit strange to western users as facebook is considered a more private place to share thoughts and photos of your lunch.

So the uses of Facebook and Mixi are quite different.  Whether Mixi users are less engaged than Facebook users is difficult to say, but Alexa (I know this can be quite inaccurate) has some interesting things to say.

Top ranked sites in Japan (social networking sites only - first number is rank)

6. Ameba Blog (ameblo.jp)
10. Facebook
13. Twitter
14. Mixi

So which is the top social network in Japan?  Best bet is to watch the advertising numbers - and it feels (I could be swallowing the hype too) that there is a lot of interest in Facebook from Japanese advertisers at the moment.

This article was originally posted on Greg Lane's Blog as "Facebook to be #1 Social Network In Japan in 10 Years".