Five Friday Facts #13

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India is no. 2 Facebook nation behind US
India has finally surpassed Indonesia as the nation with the second most number of Facebook users in the world with 43,497,980 users compared to Indonesia’s 43,060,360. India saw a growth rate of 144% in new users in 2011 alone. The US still reigns supreme, accounting for roughly 19% of total Facebook users worldwide.

Facebook users increasingly ‘Liking’ a page from mobile devices
There is no doubt that people are increasingly engaging with their social networks through their mobile devices. In fact, the number of Facebook ‘Likes’ for brand pages from mobile devices account for 33% of total ‘Likes’ as of 1st January 2011, and this volume has grown by more than 54% in 4 months.

LinkedIn in Asia Pacific
Earlier today at Singapore tech event Startup Asia, Arvind Rajan, VP of LinkedIn for APAC and Japan, commented that 40% of professionals on LinkedIn are from Asia, while nearly 50% of Singapore’s professional population is on LinkedIn. This is an extremely strong signal for employers to update their hiring practices.

Number of active Twitter users
According to a study by Semiocast, the US has the most number of Twitter users, with their 107.7 million users accounting for 28.1% of all users. Brazil is second with 33.3 million accounts, while Japan follows with 29.9 million. The country with the most active Twitter users is however Netherlands, with 33% of active users. Surprisingly, Japan has the second most number of active users at 30%.  Globally, only 27% of all accounts posted a tweet in a 3-month period, which suggests that many Twitter users are spectators rather than creators – they are not actively tweeting, but might instead be using their Twitter accounts as an aggregator of news from people they’re following.

Companies boosting digital marketing budgets
Econsultancy’s Marketing Budgets 2012 report shows how brands are acknowledging the importance of investing in digital. 68% of companies surveyed are increasing their digital budgets for 2012, while 74% of companies intend to invest more in digital marketing technology this year, up from 67% the year before. Companies also recognise the importance of recruiting talent, with 56% claiming that they will recruit more people into their digital teams this year, up from 52% a year ago.