Social Network Users in Asia, May 2012

Our latest research shows that the number of social network users is still growing rapidly across Asia, with platforms in South and Southeast Asian nations seeing the largest gains since our most recent SMDA report just a few months ago:

China’s Qzone still dominates the Asian landscape with 531 million registered users, but its compatriot, Sina Weibo, has been attracting the most attention in recent months.

With 27 million (9%) of the platform’s 300 million users checking in every day, and more than 100 million posts every 24 hours, it’s clear that Sina Weibo is one of the most active platforms in Asia.

Similarly, Tencent’s Weibo offering also claims around 300 million users, and is definitely up there in the world’s most important social networks.

Meanwhile, Facebook has added more than 20 million users across Asia in the past 6 months, and now claims more than 192 million users across the 24 SDMA markets.

Although it has now been nudged back into 3rd place on the global Facebook user rankings by Brazil, India has still added more than 7 million Facebook users in 2012, and its 46 million users account for more than 5% of the worldwide total.

Interestingly, despite being blocked in most of China, Facebook now counts more than half a million users on the mainland, in addition to the 15.5 million users across Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

Twitter also continues to be hugely popular across the region: it’s now the number one platform in Japan, with Japanese the second most used language on Twitter worldwide.

Twitter has maintained its popularity in Indonesia too, although Facebook is still the Southeast Asian country’s most popular platform.