Five Friday Facts #83
News
News
Influencers on Sina Weibo are less active this year: survey
According to TechInAsia, Sina Weibo activity is on the decline compared to its booming performance and growth last year. The findings are based on data from a third-party tool called WeiboReach, that tracked verified and influential users with over 10,000 followers. The findings indicated that Sina Weibo activity started to decline in October of last year.
As the graph above indicates (click to enlarge), Weibo was at the height of its performance during Summer 2012, just as it revealed a massive user base of 500 million users (and 46.3 million daily active users). Aside from expected seasonal spikes (January’s spike is tied to Chinese New Year; the second spike is due to the Ya’an earthquake in late April).
Pinterest has 70M users; over 70% in US
According to a recent Semiocast study, Pinterest has reached 70 million registered users worldwide. The report also indicates that more than 20 million images were pinned, repinned or liked during the month of June alone. The findings also suggest that 71% of the total users are based in the US, as are 79% of of active users on the platform. The concentration in the US market will be mitigated, however, by the fact that international adoption is growing; nearly half of the new accounts from June were for non-US users, while 55% of the new users were based in the US. Semiocast predicts that the international user base may overtake that of the US within the next 18 months. The study also found that English-speaking and North American markets constitute the majority of the worldwide user base; Canada, the UK, Australia and Mexico follow as the largest markets, after the 49 million users in the US.
In another interesting finding, Semiocast found that China had the largest base of business accounts worldwide. While there are only 320,000 Pinterest users in China, over 190,000 of them were registered as business accounts, constituting 35 percent of all business accounts on the platform.
Vietnam users spent 4.8B mins on Facebook in April 2013
According to a recent eMarketer report, a large majority of internet users in Vietnam are youths and young adults. Based on April 2013 data from the US Census Bureau, the estimate has about 52.6% of the internet population under 30 years of age. Data from ComScore also suggested that the 15-24 and 25-34 age brackets make up nearly three-quarters of internet users in Vietnam (72.8%).
Of these internet users, social networking is gaining in popularity. Facebook ranked 5th amongst top 15 web properties for April 2013, with 11.8 million total unique visitors. Meanwhile, Google and Yahoo came in first and second, with 15.5 million and 13.1 million unique visitors respectively. On the other hand, Facebook dominated all 15 web properties when it came to total minutes spent. As the chart below indicates, almost 4.8 billion minutes were spent on Facebook during the month, while Google claimed just over 3.5 billion minutes. Facebook also claimed the highest number of unique visitors amongst social networking sites by a huge margin; its 11.8 million unique visitors are more than double the 5.3 million visits to ZING Me and blogger.
A snapshot of Pakistan’s digital landscape in 2013
TechInAsia recently reported on a summary of the digital landscape in Pakistan this year. The findings indicate that social media is on the rise in the market. For instance, there are now over nine million Facebook users in Pakistan, and the last million was gained in the last 175 days. That’s pretty impressive given the fact that internet penetration stands at a relatively low 15%, or 29.1 million of the total population. This means that Facebook has a penetration of roughly one-third of all netizens in Pakistan. Blogging follows Facebook as the second most popular social media activity in the market. Despite the platform’s ban in 2012, YouTube has remained popular and ranks third amongst social media platforms. LinkedIn has 1.5 million users in Pakistan, making it the 10th largest LinkedIn nation worldwide. Meanwhile, Twitter is estimated to have 1.8 million users in the country, and is noted for being a major source for breaking news.
50% of UK population will use social networks in 2013
A recent article by eMarketer indicated that social networking would reach half of the population of the UK this year. The study further predicts that the growth will continue for the next few years: the penetration rate will reach 55.6 percent of the total population by 2017, or 71 percent of all internet users in the UK. It is predicted that the only age bracket without 50 percent penetration or more will be seniors aged 65 years or over. eMarketer note that the UK is a leader amongst markets for social media, with many areas of opportunity for platforms to expand. Precedent indicates that the social media audience has consisted of younger demographics (12-44 years of age); however, users over 65 years old will drive the largest increases this year, predicted to grow by over 15 percent in 2013, and nearly 11 percent the following year.
