Five Friday Facts #5
News
News
It’s Friday afternoon, which means it’s time for our weekly roundup of the latest stats in social media across Asia.
This week has been a bit of a bumper for stats for us, with the release of our Social, Digital and Mobile in Asia and the individual country report for Indonesia too, but fear not – we have a wealth of fresh stats for you today as well!
India’s big on mobile
There are currently 50 million mobile Internet users in India, and they are using mobile in a big way. 40% of all Google searches in India are made using mobile phones, whereas only 14% of search queries in the USA, 11% in Russia and 6% in the UK are run from mobile phones. Furthermore, 67% of e-commerce is conducted on mobile devices in India. With smartphone adoption increasing at a rate of 56% year-on-year, we can expect mobile activity, especially social activities conducted on mobile phones, to increase drastically as well.
Hong Kong firms lagging behind in social
A survey by Hong Kong-based accounting firm Grant Thornton Jingdu Tianhua found that only 22% of private businesses in Hong Kong are using social media to connect and interact with consumers, compared to the worldwide average of 43%. Hong Kong firms appear to be sticklers for tradition, unlike their Mainland China counterparts. Two-thirds of Hong Kong businesses surveyed still referred to print newspapers as their main source of news, whereas 65% of those surveyed in China read their news online.
Social gaming on Sina Weibo
China’s popular microblogging service Sina Weibo now has 22 million active social gamers since its gaming portal was launched in July this year. The highest user adoption rate for a Sina Weibo game was 1 million new users in just a single week. Sina is currently taking a 0% cut from its Weibo games revenue, as compared to Facebook’s 20% cut, or Apple’s and Google’s 30% out of their respective app stores.
Average social penetration across Asia
Asia is increasingly social. There are at least 750 million social media users across the region, and 10 out of 24 countries in Asia have social penetration rates higher than that of the global average. Meanwhile, 81% of Asia’s top brands use social media, and with 69% of Asia’s Internet users accessing the web via mobile devices, we expect to see a whole lot more ‘local social’ mobile activity from brands across the region.
Asian languages on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has over 20 million registered users in Asia, and is now available in 3 new Asian languages, namely Korean, Bahasa Indonesia and Bahasa Malaysia. There are currently more than 800,000 LinkedIn users in Indonesia, 700,000 in Malaysia, and 300,000 in Korea. Local language support might prompt further growth for LinkedIn in these Asian regions.