360DigitalInfluence

A recent report by Inside Facebook highlights the interesting development of Facebook in Southeast Asia. Despite being blocked in China, East Asia’s largest and fastest-growing market, Facebook has grown phenomenally in the rest of Southeast Asia during the last few quarters.

How has this happened?

• In Taiwan, Facebook has exploded from 400,000 to nearly 7 million users in only 12 months
• Significant growth in Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia
• Indonesia is now the world’s #3 country in terms of total Facebook audience size (behind US and UK)
• Facebook has overtaken hi5 in Thailand and Friendster in the Philippines (formerly the top social networks)
• …But Facebook has seen little growth in Japan and S. Korea

Taiwan’s rapid adoption of Facebook is a particulary interesting example, as it is now one of the few non-English speaking countries with over 30% penetration, joining Hong Kong and Singapore as one of Facebook’s Asian sucess stories.

Why Taiwan?

• A key driver for this growth has been social gaming apps, like Happy Harvest, Pet Society and Restaurant City
• These apps pull users away from other social sites without games, like Taiwan’s other social network Wretch.cc
• More games are being developed in or translated into Traditional Chinese, such as Mahjong by Godgames

Though perhaps Taiwan doesn’t represent a gateway to the rest of Southeast Asia,  it does show that Facebook can be successful in the region. Perhaps social gaming will also open doors for Facebook in tougher markets like Japan and South Korea…

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.