Five Friday Facts #8

News
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It’s just two days more before Christmas, and we are wrapping up (pun intended) with our last 5 Friday Facts post of 2011. Enjoy the long Christmas and Boxing Day weekend everyone!

Massive growth of e-commerce on Livejournal Singapore
In Singapore, Livejournal is not used just for blogging, but as a platform for online retailers as well. In particular, e-commerce in Singapore is booming on Livejournal, with 1.2 million Singaporean users and over 50,000 ‘blogshops’ that generated more than US$72 million worth of transactions in Singapore in 2011 alone. Altogether, Livejournal blogshop transactions represented around 6% of Singapore’s forecasted e-commerce volume of US$1.2 billion in 2011.

Online shopping increases by 18% in India
Almost 60% of Indians with Internet access from home or work visited an online store last month, an increase of 18% in unique visitors from the previous year. Deals and coupon sites have contributed to this increase in online shopping, with 16% having visited a coupon site. Traffic on coupon sites increased by a massive 629% from the previous year. comScore estimates suggests that all of India’s coupon sites attracted 7.6 million visitors in total in the month of November.

Increased use of smartphones for capturing images
Photo-sharing mobile applications such as Instagram, which saw its user base increase from 1 million to over 15 million users in 2011 alone, have gained immense popularity and contributed to the shift from traditional cameras to smartphones in capturing images. A study by NPD Group found that smartphones took 27% of photos in 2011, an increase of 10% from the previous year. Conversely, traditional cameras took 44%, down from 52%.

Myspace will exit Japan
Myspace plans to exit from Japan from February 1 next year, although its service will continue to be available for those that use it there. It recorded just 1.09 million users as of August 2011, compared to Facebook’s 6 million odd Japanese users, or Mixi’s 25 million registered users.

Increased use of social media by B2B marketers
B2B companies are increasingly using social media as part of their marketing mix. According to web survey company iTracks, 89% of US B2B companies were using social media marketing as of May 2011. Sagefrog Marketing Group reports that LinkedIn is the top social media platform of choice, with 58% of US B2B marketers who used social media utilising LinkedIn, compared to 50% for Facebook and 43% for Twitter.