Global use of social networking sites has been constantly increasing in the past year, the latest report released by comScore shows. The popularity of social networking sites is now spreading beyond the North American borders, where it all started, to other parts of the world as well.

While the North American audience has only grown 9 percent compared to the same period last year, in other parts of the world things look much different. The Middle East – Africa region saw a whopping 66 percent increase in the social networking audience, followed by Europe with 35 percent, Latin America with 33 percent and Asia Pacific with 23 percent.

If we look at the average rate of 25 percent worldwide, it looks like social networking sites have significantly grown in popularity in almost all regions. This could be explained by an increased interest of social networking brands in developing markets, Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president, explained.

“While the social networking trend first took off in North America, it is beginning to reach a point of maturity in the region,” Flanagan said.

Among the brands with most worldwide success were Facebook, which took the global lead in April 2008; Facebook was followed by Hi5, which managed to double its visitors to 56 million thanks to its full-scale localization strategy. Other sites with worldwide growth were Friendster.com, which went up 50 percent; Orkut, which went up 41 percent; and Bibo, up 32 percent.

Facebook has continued its efforts to reach audiences outside U.S. through a very simple and effective strategy: by providing multiple language interfaces, which propelled it 153 percent during the past 12 months.

While the social networking site keeps most of its user base in North America (49 million), where it “only” grew 38 percent, other regions of the world have quadrupled their Facebook audience, adding over 27 million monthly visitors compared to one year ago.

As Flanagan pointed out, “Facebook has done an exceptional job by leveraging its brand internationally during the past year. By increasing the site’s relevance to local markets through local language interface translation, the site is now competing strongly or even capturing the lead in several markets where it had a relatively minor presence just a year ago.”