Five Friday Facts #52

dhanuj.selvaraj

9 in 10 Chinese Internet users are on Weibo
Data Centre for China Internet (DCCI) has reported the latest statistics on Weibo penetration amongst Chinese netizens. An impressive 89% of all Chinese internet users are weibo users. Sina and Tencent have the highest number of weibo users with a percentage of 88% and 85% respectively. This clearly shows that most Chinese netizens have more than a single weibo account, and most actually have both a Sina and Tencent weibo account. Whilst Netease, Sohu and iFeng trail behind, it is noteworthy that 18% of weibo users have accounts on other weibo platforms not listed in the chart. This shows that weibo platforms in China continue to spring up, creating a competitive market for microblogging services. According to another research on weibo user activity, most users access weibo platforms at least once on a daily basis.

China is the most socially engaged country in the world
GlobalWebIndex has recently introduced a new measure called the Social Engagement Benchmark (SEB) to access how socially engaged a particular customer segment is. It uses 12 key social behaviors and aggregates social consumer engagement in participation, content creation and brand engagement. Out of the 31 countries assessed in the report, Asia dominates the league table with China, Indonesia and India claiming the top 3 spots. It is the fast growing online markets that are more socially engaged as compared to the mature markets such as Japan, Sweden or the USA who have reached an optimum level. One of the key findings was that the most socially engaged group were the top 25% high-income earners in China. The report also gives a regional breakdown showing Guangzhou in China taking the top spot, followed by Iba pang in Philippines and Bangalore in India.

Taiwan-based Cubie brings DrawSomething and mobile messaging together
Mobile messaging apps are receiving overwhelming response in Asia. We have regularly shared in our blog the progress of China’s WeChat, Japan’s Line, Korea’s Kakao Talk and India’s Nimbuzz. Whilst WeChat and Line are posing a strong challenge to Whatsapp with their 200 million and 70 million user base respectively, Taiwan-based mobile service Cubie is bringing forth a new challenge by combining drawing features with mobile messaging. The one-off success that DrawSomething witnessed earlier this year appears to be the inspiration behind Cubie. In July of this year, the app passed 2 million users and was witnessing anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 daily downloads. Today, Thailand is Cubie’s largest market having garnered more than 1 million registered users already. In the aim to reach 10 million registered users by Q1 2013 , Cubie is targeting Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong. We are keeping an eye on this space that is bringing mobile and social together!

Social is still a small part of customer service
According to research from SAP and Social Media Today, 71% of companies worldwide are providing customer support on social media, but it is still only a small portion of the customer service picture. 41% of all respondents said that they handled only up to 5% of customer service issues on social channels. Just 18% of surveyed companies handled 25% of all customer service issues on social channels. Majority of the companies that have jumped onto the social media bandwagon have yet to use the various platforms to its fullest potential. Of those who used social channels, Facebook is the most commonly used platform and by far, the most effective as cited by 43% of respondents. Twitter follows closely behind in second place in terms of usage and effectiveness with 28%.

Tumblr reaches 20 billion monthly pageviews
Tumblr is now one of the top 20 most visited websites in US. In an announcement that was made by Tumblr’s CEO and founder David Karp last week, monthly pageviews have increased from 13 billion in September to 20 billion pageviews as of November. This favorable growth in pageviews is partly due to the growing smartphone market, although exact statistics were not revealed. Tumblr, which was founded in February 2007, collects more than 77 million posts daily across 79 million blogs. Of course, Facebook and Twitter are leading in this space with 1 trillion pageviews and 5.9 billion pageviews respectively. However, Tumblr is continuing to see success with the trend towards social curation, and it continues to retain their core appeal and foster an intimate community.