Five Friday Facts #60
40.8% of Japanese smartphone users on free voice call, chat apps in 2012
A recent survey by MMD Laboratory, a Japanese research house that specialises in mobile marketing, indicated that there were changes in how smartphone users in Japan used their mobile devices in 2012. In particular, there has been a noticeable uptake in the use of free voice call and chat applications in Japanese users. As TechinAsia notes, the survey highlights this increase as it occurred between July 2012 and December 2012. The result indicates a 12.4% increase in chat app users during that time period, from 28.4% in July 2012 to 40.8% by the end of the year. Interestingly, this significant increase in Japanese chat app users marks the highest increase as a genre in smartphone application usage.
200 million LinkedIn users in Jan 2013
LinkedIn announced that it has reached an impressive 200 million users on Wednesday. As Mashable reports, this number indicates that the professional social networking site has doubled its user base in a little over a year, which claimed about 100 million users in 2011. Since then, the site has seen significant increases of 10 to 15 million new users per quarter in the past year. Although LinkedIn’s numbers are small in comparison to Facebook’s 1 billion users and Twitter’s 500 million accounts, LinkedIn has surely established itself as a serious contender in social networking, as it currently adds an average of 2 new users per second.
LinkedIn sees strongest levels of growth in Indonesia
As LinkedIn announced its recent milestone of reaching 200 million users, it also reported significant trends in its growth in Asian markets. As TechInAsia reports, Indonesia has the third highest number of users in the Asia region, with about 1.7 million active users on the social networking site. This number is compared to China’s 2.8 million users and India’s whopping 18 million, the highest number of users in the region. It is interesting to note, however, that Indonesia has the highest level of growth in the Asia region. Indonesia also ranks third on a global scale, in terms of the country’s growth rate of active users on LinkedIn.
How big is Facebook on mobile?
Multi-screens has become a rapidly growing trend in the past year, and many have predicted that it will continue to gain traction in the future. Facebook has taken significant steps towards catering to this trend by revamping its mobile interface and developing significant accommodations for mobile use. It is important to note, however, that many Facebook users are still accessing the site exclusively from non-mobile devices. As eMarketer notes via a survey by AYTM Market Research, 39.7% of Facebook users in the US claimed that they never logged on to Facebook through their mobile phones.
Globally, however, the number of users who access Facebook via mobile has been increasing at a compelling rate. Out of the 1.04 billion monthly active users on Facebook in 2012, over 639 million users were accessing the site through their mobile phones.
Thailand’s Exteen produces 30 million page views per month
A recent report by TechInAsia indicated that Exteen, Thailand’s most popular content management service, has been generating a staggering 30 million page views on a monthly basis. As TechInAsia notes, the “WordPress of Thailand” currently claims over 600,000 blogger accounts in total , with 100,000 of these users actively posting to their accounts. When the Thai CMS was launched in 2004, the number of accounts stood at roughly 1,000 users by the end of that year. Since then, the blogging site has seen astonishing levels of growth and continues to see increases in its user base with no noticeable signs of slowing down.