Turkey has grown from 10,2 million users in 2006 to 35 million in 2010 achieving a 45% of penetration rate. Turkey, according to InternetWorldStats.com, is the forth in top10 european countries for the total amount of Internet Users, even if the penetration rate is under european average estimated in 58% (2010), ranking Turkey at 43rd position on 52 countries included in the list.

Collecting data and informations from different source, I’ve prepared a document aiming to build a snapshot of Internet’s state of art in Turkey. The “Turkey and fast growing Internet” is available on SlideShare under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).

According to ComScore, Turkish people are the most engaged visitors as number of pageviews per user (more tha 3.000) and it is ranked 3rd in time spending with an average of 37 hours. The Digital Agenda for Europe shows that Turkish people (40% and above) use internet in order to gain information about news, good and services, health and downloading entertainment contents. The content producing and the usage in daily life management is limited to a maximum of 30% internet users. Furthermore looking at the top20 visited websites list,  we can guess that just below to the international website such as Facebook and Google, the most visited websites includes turkish portals and newspaper’s websites.

COMPANIES ARE ORGANIZING THEIR INTERNAL PROCESS AND DEVELOPING E-COMMERCE

Companies are organizing theirself to speed up and to improve processes. According to Digital Agenda for Europe 21% of Turkish companies adopt CRM software, against the 17% european average. Furthermore 65% of Large Enterprises and 34% of SMEs integrate internal processes sharing electronic documents. The external business communication instead is at an early development, seeing less the 20% of enterprises exchanging electorinic document, e-invoices and adopting supply chain management technology.

E-commerce is in a early stage. According to Digital Agenda for Europe, 5.2%Turkish population and the 13% of Internet users purchase on-line are. Companies selling on-line are the 8.1% in the Large Enterprises and the 7.8% in Small and Medium entersprises. B2B eCommerce seems to be more widespread seeing 11.2% and 11% of Large and SMEs purchasing on-line respectively.

SOCIAL NETWORKS NOT FOR PROFESSIONAL PURPOSES

Facebook is the main social network used in Turkey. With a total amount of 24,5 million users, Facebook is used by 89% of internet users and the 34% of population (InternetWorldStats.com), ranking the country at the first position in Top6 internet users european countries, followed by UK.

Twitter is used by 16% of Turkish Internet Users and the Turkey has been ranked as 8th in the ComScore “Top 10 Countries in Internet Penetration for LinkedIN.com and Twitter.com” report. Friendfeed is the other micro-blog widespread, obating 10% of his traffic from Turkey, ranked by Alexa.co, as the 3rd country for relevant traffic.

LinkedIN, instead, is uncommon network for turkish people. Indeed the business network registered in October 2011 less more than 830.000 turkish users (2% of Internet Users), growed of +9% against September. The typical LinkedIN user is a male professional 25-34 years old, working in a large Enterprise (>10.000 employees) in Manufactoring or High-tech industry. The female/male ratio is less than 1 to 3.

About groups, the most popular is Turkish Business Network. The Networking Group opened in 2008 counts more than 53.000 subscription (about 6% of Turkish LinkedIN Users).

CONCLUSIONS

For the early internet development and the progress by companies in organizing processes, Turkey is a next-frontier for internet based services. Because the early stage, It suffers a unstructured and underevaluated usage of the internet potentials, limiting to a “passive” approach. However the news about start-ups and the adoption of technology for process optimization –  required by the fast growing economy – let us to say that Internet will play a key role al least in the economic system.

 

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

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