Five Friday Facts #72
News
News
There are 40 million overseas users on WeChat
Social giant Tencent’s chat app WeChat currently has over 300 million users around the world–making the China-based chat app the largest app in its category. As is the case with most Asian chat apps, a vast majority of WeChat’s user base has also been locally-based in China. This tendency may be on the decline for WeChat, however, as overseas users recently hit the 40 million mark. According to TechInAsia, Tencent’s president Martin Lau suggested that the increasing adoption of mobile web has played a crucial role in extending the reach of Asian tech companies abroad. To this end, WeChat has continued to develop strong roots in foreign markets; these efforts have led to particularly promising results across Southeast Asia, as WeChat has topped the charts in app stores across Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
In US, Vine claims top spot amongst free apps for iOS
Despite being one of the youngest social platforms available, Vine has made quick strides in the social appmosphere. Since the app’s launch six months ago, the video sharing platform has overtaken similar apps like Cinemagram to become the most popular app in its category. Vine also reported increasing its monthly active users by 50% during March. As TheNextWeb reports, these achievements have been followed up by another success, as Vine claimed the top spot amongst all free apps on the App store for Apple this week.
The video-sharing app consistently remained a top contender amongst apps in the social networking category; however, its ranking had fluctuated considerably before it eventually reached the top spot across all app categories. While this impressive rank doesn’t extend to app store rankings beyond the US, it is interesting to note that the platform does claim the top spot amongst social apps abroad, in Sweden as well as in Canada.
Korean chat app KakaoTalk tops app stores in Indonesia
Earlier this year, KakaoTalk launched a TV ad promoting the chat app in Indonesia. The resulting influx of KakaoTalk users suggests that this campaign has paid off, as the chat app currently sits at the top spot across app stores in Indonesia. As TechInAsia reports, the TV ad was followed by a rapid uptake that consisted of a staggering rate of 100,000 downloads per day, or at least 1 million users who have tried the app in the Indonesian market. KakaoTalk’s overseas expansion is seeing success in other markets across Southeast Asia as well; in Vietnam, KakaoTalk currently ranks 4th on the iOS app store and 13th on Google Play.
In US, 60% of internet users are on YouTube at least once a week
eMarketer recently reported that 60% of all internet users in the United States visited YouTube one a week during March 2013. Based on a study by AYTM Market Research, the results further illustrated that nearly 30% of these weekly visitors were on YouTube multiple times during the week. 22% of the participants in the survey reported being daily visitors on the video sharing site.
Only 13.7% of the respondents indicated that they rarely visited YouTube, whilst 8.5% had never been on the site.
These two answers are striking, especially given the fact that the popularity of online video platforms declines rapidly outside of YouTube: the highest percentage of survey participants said that they rarely watched videos on other platforms (37%), while 11% of them never watched online video on another site.
66% of user-generated tweets about brands come from mobile
The increasing adoption of mobile web has taken another step in shaping the interactions between brands and their audiences on social media. According a study by SocialBakers, 2 out of 3 user-generated tweets about brands are posted through a mobile device. The social listening company took a sample of over 500,000 tweets posted during March 2013 to calculate these results. The findings further indicate that highest percentage of these tweets come from one app, with 44% of them from Twitter for iPhone. The Android app followed with 20% of mobile users, whilst Twitter users on the Blackberry app constituted 11%.