360DigitalInfluence

How many BFFs do you have?

Dunbar’s number is the famed 150 friends with whom humans are supposed to be able to keep close relations. For Asian youths, however, the average number of friends is 107.

Ian Stewart of MTV recently gave these statistics from an MTV and TNS study in a presentation about youth and social networking in Asia.

The friendliest youth of all are in Thailand - often called the land of smiles - where young people have an average of 170 offline, online and close friends. This is more than twice as many as the 80 friends whom youth in neighboring Vietnam have.

As for online friends, Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Australia and India all tend to have about 30 or fewer online friends, while Thai, Malaysian and Chinese youth all have more than 50 online friends.

The online friends number is not entirely related to broadband penetration or level of economic development. Young people in Australia, Korea and Taiwan have fairly low numbers of online friends.

One of the most striking cases, however, is China: The only country in Asia where people have more online friends than offline friends. This is yet another example of China tremendous engagement in Social Media and the Internet.