Two weeks ago I took part in the e-nnovation conference in Poznan, Poland, which was a good opportunity to drink vodka and to know the social networking sites in this country. In fact, it is one of the few places in Europe in which a local network is still above Facebook. It’s called Nasza-Klasa and it has twice as many users as Mark Zuckerberg’s creation.

While according to comScore, Facebook gets 7.6 million unique visitors every month in this 40 million-people country, Nasza-Klasa attracts almost 14 million and is the third site, right after Google (including Youtube) and MIH (also known as Naspers), a South-African company which owns Allegro, the local eBay. This is almost 80% of the Internet population in Poland, which is huge. How come? There are many reasons to explain this Polish specialty. And these are the ones I could experience while in this Eastern European country:

– Local web brands are very important in Poland. Most of the top 20 properties are local.
– Nasza-Klasa has been very successful in becoming attractive to the not so young population. It event changed its name to NK, which does not sound so student-like.
– Polish is a difficult language and the local population does not speak English so well, so Facebook had a big disadvantage at the beginning.
– Poland is a very entrepreneurial and innovative country and its people are very proud of themselves, which always gives an advantage for all local players.
– Naspers is very strong in Eastern European countries. In fact it owns both Allegro and NK, this last one together with Russian group DST, which is also a shareholder of Facebook. Naspers, wich back in the 20th century, was just a newspaper, is also getting strong in Spanish speaking countries, as it bought OLX classifieds company in August.

(Update 28.10.10) Nasza-Klasa is rumoured to be on the blog for €130m