The “World Wide” aspect of the “World Wide Web” has always been one of its most important aspects but it doesn’t always get as much attention as it deserves in discussions of social technology. Nielsen’s “Global Faces and Networked Places” report on the global footprint of social networking from last month offers a broad international view of activity on the Web. Some of the findings are a bit surprising and help put the global scope of social technology growth into perspective.

For example, take a look at where the United States falls in terms of the reach of member communities (relative to the total online population):

The same percentage of Internet users in the US that participate in online communities is about the same as the global average. That number is higher in Japan, Italy, Spain, and Brazil (though that number grew a bit more in the US over the last year than it did in any of those countries). But there’s a big practical difference between social networking in, say, Italy as opposed to Japan:

Italy, like the other countries in the first of the two tables, is a “Facebook & MySpace” social networking nation. The US is as well. Japan, on the other hand, joins Germany, China, and Brazil in tending towards other networks, often home-grown ones.

From the perspective of social media engagement strategy, that’s a big difference. Some countries (the US, other English speaking ones, and some western European ones) have online populations that can be reached with the big names of social networking. It might still require multiple aspects of a presence on those networks (Facebook groups in different languages, for example), but it doesn’t require going somewhere new.

For other countries, this isn’t the case. It would be as silly to ignore Orkut in the case of Brazil or Mixi in the case of Japan as it would be to ignore MySpace in the case of the United States. And significantly, the countries that tend to favor their own domestic social networks (or a heavily favored single import like Orkut) are just as likely to have high rates of social network use as countries that use the larger, more transnationally present networks a greater amount.