Five Friday Facts #51

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dhanuj.selvaraj

More than 50,000 government accounts on Sina Weibo
According to a recent report released by Sina, there are 50,947 government entities with weibo accounts as of September. In the last year, government bodies have established their presence on weibo upon understanding the new sphere where public discussions take place. This figure represents 33,132 government accounts and 17,815 government officials, and the numbers have doubled since December of last year. Police departments were the first adopters and we’ve seen them in action during this year’s Beijing floods when Sina Weibo came to the rescue. Today, departments and officials from every province are represented, from public security to public health. Tech in Asia noted that most of these accounts come out of the more developed areas like Beijing, Jiangsu and Guangzhou. Therefore, there is still room for growth when it comes to the public sector in disseminating information. In terms of disseminating news of crises in the West, we have noted that Hurricane Sandy has poured in plenty of updates on all the social media platforms. Apart from the obvious platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, photo sharing network Instagram has emerged as the destination for breaking news on the hurricane in pictures. There were 10 hurricane photos shared every second on the first day of the disaster. As of today there are more than 700,000 photos tagged #sandy and 420,000 photos tagged #hurricanesandy.

Japan’s Line grows past 70 million users
Japan’s mobile messaging app Line’s growth has been in the limelight for awhile now. Upon passing 70 million users, the service is attracting marketers from various brands in Asia. Only last month, Line reached a milestone of 60 million registered users. It claims to add 5 million new users every three weeks since February of this year when it had some 21 million users. The company is aiming to hit its 100 million target by end of this year by launching Line in China and the US. A number of brands in the region have already taken it to the service. In Thailand, food brand CPF and Thai Airways are seeing success on Line, with the latter racking up more than 1.2 million followers in less than one month of its presence.

Microblogs reach Chinese netizens more than other social media platforms
Nielsen’s recent report on China has revealed that microblogging sites such as Weibo reaches 97% of all Chinese social media users while social networking sites such as Renren penetrates about 70% of the social media users. Location-based check-in platforms are still emerging services with only a 10% usage rate.

Facebook’s future is on mobile
Earlier last week, Facebook announced its Q3 earnings in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed his optimism about the company’s chances on mobile. As of Q3, there were 604 million monthly active users on mobile . Zuckerberg shared the possibilities of monetising on mobile, crediting that each product group inside Facebook now owns the mobile monetisation experience, which enables Facebook to leverage the ad revenue opportunities on mobile.

He also revealed,

Someone who uses mobile has a 70% likelihood of using Facebook on any given day, compared to 40% on desktops.

He went on to say that most people underestimate the opportunities with the trend towards mobile as Facebook starts to reach more people on mobile than on desktops. This seems to be making a larger difference with emerging markets and in their respective rural areas where ownership of mobile phones are more common than personal computers.

Here are all the numbers you need to know on Facebook’s Q3 report.

Twitter goes female
Research from Beevolve has revealed data on Twitter demographics and usage. The microblog that attracted men as early adopters is now seeing a shift towards women with a 47% to 53% gender distribution between male and female.  Women also tweeted more than men. This trend of women communicating more than men on Twitter is also consistent with their usage on other social media platforms.

Interestingly, with this emerging shift there appear to be more conversations on the topic of family on Twitter. This definitely presents marketers in the industry of home products and services an opportunity to engage in conversations with this interest group.