Facebook has 192 million users across Asia, and has added 20 million users in the last six months. No wonder Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is visiting the region. India alone has 46 million users, 7 million of which were added in 2012. India’s Facebook users are now 5% of the total Facebook population.
Everyone might be flummoxed about Zuckerberg’s China visit, as Facebook is blocked in China. Despite the content filtering, there are half-a-million Facebook users in the Mainland. Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau together have 15.5 million Facebook users.
This neat infographic by We Are Social gives us the glimpse of top social networks in each Asian countries.
There is a clear divide between Facebook vs non-Facebook nations. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, The Philippines, Taiwan and Hong Kong are the Facebook nations.
Vietnam, China, South Korea and Japan are the only non-Facebook Asian nations. Japan has a unique distinction of being the Twitter nation. The other three nations prefer their home-grown social networks: QZone in China, CYworld in South Korea and Zing in Vietnam are the preferred social networks in their countries.
China’s QZone is a surprise presence, not because of Facebook’s absence, but because of the uber-popular Weibos (Tencent and Sina). More than China, Facebook should really be concerned with Japan and South Korea. While Twitter has beaten Facebook in Japan, CYWorld rules in South Korea. Japan might probably be one of few countries where it has more users on Facebook than on Twitter.
Maybe it would make things a little bit crowded, but having the top 3 social networks for each country would give a better picture of the whole social network scene in Asia. For India, LinkedIn with more than 12 million users and Twitter would stand as the top three social networks. Similar trends across Asia would show how dominant Facebook is and give us a glimpse of the challengers or potential acquisition targets.
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