Five Friday Facts #77
LinkedIn passes 20M users in India, is second largest market behind US
TheNextWeb recently reported that LinkedIn users in India had soared to an impressive milestone of 20 million users. This makes India the second largest market on the platform, only behind the US in terms of registered users. What’s more impressive is the fact that user sign-ups on the professional networking platform has gone up by over 500 percent since November 2009, when the company opened its first office in the market. Currently, India represents half of the 40 million users in Asia Pacific, and 9 percent of its 225 million users worldwide. In other markets across the region, the user bases are comparatively small, but growing as well: there are 4 million users in Australia, 2 million in Indonesia, and 1 million in both Malaysia and the Philippines. Singapore also recently passed 1 million users as well.
There are 18M social media users in Thailand; Instagram users up 163%
According to a recent report by TechInAsia, Thailand’s social media landscape has seen rapid growth this year. Citing a new infographic by ZocialInc, the results indicated that Instagram users had increased by a staggering 163 percent in the last year, to over 600,000 users. While this figure still pales in comparison to Facebook’s 18 million, the social network’s growth also declined to a relatively sluggish rate of 28 percent in the same time period. Social media is growing healthily across other platforms as well: Line has 15 million users, while YouTube has over 5 million and Twitter has about 2 million in the market.
Emerging markets drive Facebook user growth
Facebook continues to gain users at a rapid pace, even after passing 1 billion users last year, and 1.1 billion users last month. eMarketer reports that the growth in user base is being strongly driven by emerging markets across the globe; India, Brazil, Russia, the Middle East and Africa are particularly strong markets in the recent gains for Facebook’s user base worldwide. eMarketer predicts that active users will continue to grow as well, to pass 1 billion active users at some point this year. In terms of regions, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America are set to contribute the most across the global user base, by growing at a rate of at least 30% during 2013. eMarketer estimates that Facebook will reach 1.26 billion global users in 2014.
WeChat now has 195M monthly active users
WeChat has continued seeing rapid growth this year. Last week, we reported that the chat app had grown to an impressive 190 million monthly active users. Without skipping a beat, it’s grown again to reach 195 million monthly active users. TechInAsia reports that the chat app has increased by about 23% since last quarter, and over 228% in a year. While WeChat’s 300 million registered accounts are predicted to breach 400 million during this month, the increase in WeChat’s monthly actives suggest that WeChat and Whatsapp are quickly becoming neck and neck for this figure (Whatsapp has 200 million monthly active users).
In the US, 90% of mom internet users are on social media
According to a recent report by eMarketer, over 90% of US moms who used the internet were also active social media users as well. Based on a comScore study from March 2013, the results suggested that moms who used social media in 2013 were up by 20% compared to those who did in 2010. The study also indicated that moms in the 18-34 age bracket were the most likely to use social media, but also the demographic that spent the most time on them. In fact, young mothers spent the most time on Facebook, even compared to the general population. While time spent on Facebook was 24 percent higher on desktop, the combined differece of desktop and mobile Facebook usage suggested that “young moms spent 260 perent more time than the average user.” US moms were also more likely to spend more time on other platforms across social media as well. 77 percent of US moms were on YouTube, compared to 61 percent of the total internet users in the country. 27 percent of US moms were on Instagram, while only 15 percent of the general internet population were using the platform.
