Social, Digital and Mobile in Asia

Asia’s digital landscape continues to evolve at an astonishing rate, and staying up to date with the latest data and trends can be a challenge.

We have good news, though: today, we’re delighted to launch a new edition of our hugely popular #SDMW reports.

In the SlideShare presentation above you’ll find our Asian Overview report, with more than 100 slides of the latest facts and figures from around the region, including select highlights from each of the 24 countries we cover.

We’ll follow this overview with individual country reports over the coming weeks, each one packed with all the local stats and facts you need to understand the Social, Digital and Mobile landscapes and audience behaviours in the world’s most dynamic markets (get them here first!).

To start with, though, here are some highlights from the overview report:

• There are now well over 1 billion internet users around Asia;
• At least 811 million of these people use social media;
• 50% of the world’s social media users are in Asia;
• More than 10 million new people in Asia join Facebook every month;
• Asia is home to more than 3 billion mobile subscriptions.

All of these numbers are significantly higher than those we reported in the previous edition of the #SDMW series that we released back in November 2011:

• The number of internet users in the region has grown by almost 14%;
• Users of the top social network in each country around Asia have increased by more than 8%;
• Mobile subscriptions have seen growth of more than 12%.

It’s not just the growth in user numbers that are impressive, however; netizens in Asia spend almost 2 million years of combined time on the internet every month, watching almost 45 billion online videos.

That’s more than half a trillion videos every year.

We also noted a continued trend of diversity in behaviour around the region.

Despite becoming Facebook’s biggest region just a few weeks ago*, the world’s favourite social network ranks just 4th in Asia by user figures. However, Buddy Media found that Facebook is still the platform of choice for brands around the region, with almost 9 in 10 Asian companies giving it a ‘Like’. They also report that two thirds of Asian companies on social media have a presence on Twitter.

Most companies focus the majority of their social media efforts on marketing, but figures suggest an increasing number of Asian brands are adopting social media for customer service purposes too.

Meanwhile, the mobile opportunity is becoming increasingly important around Asia too, with 4 in 5 companies in the region stating that mobile social is “an important part” of their overall strategy.

Be sure to check out the full deck for many more insights. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for regular updates on Social, Digital and Mobile news around Asia and beyond, be sure to check our Tuesday Tuneup and 5FF blog posts each week. Even better, you can sign up to have them delivered to your email by clicking this link.

You can download the full PDF by clicking here – if you do, please show your support by sharing this post in a tweet.

And for those of you who are stuck behind a firewall and can’t view SlideShare, just send us an email and we’ll be happy to send you a copy of the report.

You’ll find the source for all the stats above at the bottom of the relevant slides inside the report itself. * Note that the countries included in SocialBakers’s classification of ‘Asia’ differs to the one used in our SDMW reports, so figures may not correlate between these reports.