• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, July 6, 2009

No wonder Mark Zuckerberg turned to Russia for Facebook's latest investment round. When it comes to connecting via social networks, Russians lead the way with a monthly average of 6.6 hours and 1,307 pages per visitor.

That's well above the global average of 3.7 hours and 525 pages and just ahead of runner-up Brazil, at 6.3 hours and 1,220 pages, according to a new comScore World Metrix report. Rounding out the top five in time spent were Canada (5.6 hours), and Puerto Rico and Spain both, at 5.3 hours.

Of a total of forty countries tracked by comScore, the U.S. was ninth, with an average of 4.2 hours on social networks. Overall, 65% of the 1.1 billion people ages 15 and over who were online in May went to at least one social network during the month.

So why are Russians devoting so much time to social networks? Something to do with those long Russian winter nights?

Mike Read, senior vice president and managing director, comScore Europe, said in a statement that social networking had become a popular pastime in developing, high-growth Internet markets such as Russia. And in a country as vast as Russia, it provides a convenient way for people nationwide to connect with each other.

The most popular social networking services for the 32 million Russians online are locally based, including Vkontakte.ru, with 14.3 million visitors, followed by Odnoklassniki.ru (7.8 million), Mail.ru-My World (6.3 million) and Fotostrana.ru (1.6 million visitors). Facebook trailed with 616,000 users, but has grown nearly 300% from a year ago.

The company in May landed a $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies, which has stakes in some of the largest Internet companies in Russia, including Vkontakte.ru (a Facebook clone) and Mail.ru. Zuckerberg has said Facebook raised funding from DST in part because it hopes to benefit from the success DST has had building social networks in Russia and Eastern Europe.

And comScore notes that "the highly engaged behavior of social networkers in Russia offers significant opportunity for marketers and advertisers seeking to reach these audiences." Social networks in Russia so far, however, have relied more heavily on e-commerce models that their U.S. counterparts.