All it takes, conventional wisdom goes, for the big US social networks to overcome the European upstarts is to start offering themselves in languages other than English. So what exactly does a localisation do for the bottom line? Nearly one million more users a month, if you’re Facebook and the country is France. Traffic jumped 26 percent there from 3.16 million monthly users in April to 3.98 million in May, comScore says, after the network commandeered volunteers for the translation effort - one of the biggest gainers in that month. But that’s still a fraction of the 11.9 million uniques claimed by leading blog network Skyrock.com, proving that there ain’t nothing like local content for local people.

• French Social Net Skyrock.com Seeking Sale To Telco, Talks Ongoing