In US and Europe, more tweets come from mobile than PC
The increasing adoption of mobile web has continued to have a significant impact on the online behaviour of internet users. Using a study conducted by Strategy Analytics, TheNextWeb proves that this has clearly remained a trend amongst Twitter users as well. The survey compared how 6,500 Twitter users in the US and Europe used the platform between March and October of 2012. The findings showed that mobile users increased from 56% to 71% during the period. Of these users, mobile phone users increased from 53% to 64%, while tablet users doubled from 9% to 18% of the respondents. Meanwhile, users who tweeted through desktop or laptop computers declined considerably, from 77% down to 64%. TheNextWeb notes that this trend may continue to unfold given the sharp drop in PC sales in the last year.

Urban netizens in China have a vast appetite for digital content
A recent report by eMarketer suggests that a vast majority of netizens in metro China are keen on digital content consumption. Based on a survey by KPMG, the findings indicate that social networking and streamed music constitute the highest share of digital activities, each claiming a response rate of  72%. These activities are followed by downloaded music (68%), streamed online films (67%) and accessed news (61%).

In fact, internet users in metro China surpassed those in other metropolitan areas across the globe when it came to music and international news. The highest number of respondents indicated they had accessed music content in urban China (77%), followed close behind by metro Brazil (75%). While 69% of internet users in urban China accessed international news through digital media, Singapore came second–this time at a considerable margin of 58%.

Spotify launches in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong
According to TechInAsia, Spotify has launched in three markets across Asia: Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. As these are the first steps into the region for the music streaming giant, many questions were abound regarding the decision to come into these Asian markets.  After all, the platform already claims 24 million active users across 23 different markets, with a whopping total of one billion playlists created. Spotify’s Sriram Krishnan indicated that Asia had actually been in sight all along–it only took a while to launch in the region because they had to tune it correctly “for this part of the world.” Although Spotify will face a local competitor called KKBOX, TechInAsia notes that Chinese-language music constitute the majority amongst the songs offered by the Taiwanese platform.

Smartphones help drive users to Facebook in US
A recent study conducted by International Data Corporation (IDC) has illustrated how smartphones are encouraging Facebook users to visit the platform more often than before. As noted by eMarketer, the findings suggest that 74% of the respondents in the 18-24 age bracket used their smartphones immediately upon waking up in the morning. A whopping 89% of the participants claimed to use their smartphones within the first 15 minutes of their day. The overall results amongst all of the respondents show that the numbers did decrease but only slightly.  Even amongst the 18-44 age bracket, 62% of the participants reported using their smartphones immediately, with 79% of smartphone users taking to their devices within 15 minutes of waking.

IDC also found that amongst these smartphone users, Facebook usage through mobile constitutes an average daily engagement time of 32.5 minutes overall. Over half of these minutes are spent checking their newsfeeds (16.4), while 9.5 minutes are spent messaging and 6.6 minutes are spent on photos or photo statuses every day. The total number of sessions averaged 13.8, with Newsfeed claiming the top spot again with an average of 7 sessions. Messaging similarly came in second with 4.1 sessions, while photo/photo status averaged 2.7 sessions per day.

Sina Weibo enters Thailand, aims to reach 1.6M users by year end
TechInAsia recently reported that Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo has made strides toward entering the Thai market. To this end, Sina Weibo has partnered up with Jiaranai Entertainment, a local company, and set some lofty goals for their expansion into Thailand. In particular, Sina Weibo aims to earn $1 million in revenue, and acquire 1.6 million active users by the end of their first year in the market. On one hand, Thailand is a popular destination amongst Chinese tourists; as TechInAsia notes, however, this hardly supports the venture on its own, not to mention the ambitious goals set forth within the short span of a year. Given Twitter’s presence in Thailand, as well as the increasing reach of (and possible displacement by) chat apps, Sina Weibo may be facing an uphill battle–one that is much steeper than they had anticipated.

Continuing the series on the top Facebook pages for the month of March, here are the reports from the remaining Asian countries.

Despite being home to the world’s third largest Facebook nation, India struggles with maintaining a strong response rate on its brand pages. The Socially Devoted brands section on the following infographic reflects the poor performance of brands when it comes to answering fan questions and posts with an average response rate of only 25%.

The report on Nepal is first of its kind. We’re excited to welcome Nepal to the bigger Asia region with a sizeable 1.9 Million fans! With only 7.13% penetration over its population, Nepal is definitely an emerging Facebook market. Noticeably, many of the top pages are local pages, with Kit Kat being the only exemption. BBC’s localised page BBC Nepali is also well received by fans.

Samsung is unsurprisingly the best performing page in its home country, South Korea.

Hong Kong continues to maintain its top pages from last month:

Did anything stand out to you in this month’s Socialbakers report? Share your insights with us!

Continuing the series on the top Facebook pages for the month of February, here are the reports from the remaining Asian countries.

Similar to Indonesia, India saw a drop in Facebook user numbers as well. This continuing trend from January seems to be due to Facebook’s measures to delete fake profiles. Also in February, Vodafone’s valentines season content garnered all the top 3 positions on the most interacted posts of the month.

OLX Pakistan, an online classifieds page, is not only Pakistan’s top Facebook page but it also has the top content for the month of February.

Japan has the highest post engagement rate amongst Asian countries. However, its average response rate stands at a low 21% reflecting that a large portion of its fan posts and questions remain unanswered.

Similar to Japan, South Korea has an audience who prefer local pages to global Facebook pages. Again, reflecting that a social media strategy on global versus local Facebook pages for brands depends heavily on the type of community it is engaging.

Hong Kong has the highest post engagement rate in Asia after Japan. Even though Sina Weibo is a popular platform, Facebook continues to keep its audience engaged.

Sina Weibo launches promoted feed ads
Still trying to find ways to monetize its popular Twitter-esque microblogging site, Sina Weibo has rolled out promoted feed advertisements to its 400 million users. Known as Weibo Tuiguang, the ads will appear in user feeds and be differentiated from user posts by a grey line and a notice indicating that it’s a sponsored post. Yet to be implemented on the mobile platform, the decision to roll out on the web platform first  is an interesting deviation from the company’s declared intention to focus on its mobile platform as it seeks to monetize.  In addition to promoted feed ads, the company is exploring a diverse range of options such as e-payments and fan headline advertising to start the revenue stream flowing. It better move quickly as its rival, Tencent’s killer chat app, WeChat is fast gaining ground having registered its 300 millionth user less than a week ago and drawing Weibo users’ attention away from the microblogging service.

WeChat’s new features to include song recognition & voice chatrooms
Speaking of WeChat, the app has unleashed a beta version 4.5 update that features multi-user voice chatrooms, Siri-like voice reminders and even a song database search feature along the lines of Shazam or SoundHound. The update will allow users to set verbal reminders for themselves and to search for an unknown piece of music by shaking the smartphone. The app will stream the song along with its lyrics but  is expected to be made available only to Chinese users due to copyright issues. Word has it that the update will be made available to iPhone users first before Android users. It will be interesting to see how many users the group chatroom can host.

Japanese chat app, Line, reaches 100 million users
Fast becoming a worthy rival to WeChat, Line has just passed the 100 million users milestone. The photo below shows the user counter that was set up at Line HQ in anticipation of breaching the 100 million users mark. Though a much smaller player than 300 million strong WeChat, Line is ahead of Korean Kakao Talk’s 72 million users, in the battle for dominance in the Asian mobile messaging market. Industry watchers expect these Asian players to expand into English speaking markets this year. This would be interesting as they face off with old players such as WhatsApp and new entrants such as Facebook Messenger in the international arena.

Snoop Dogg pimps Line on Twitter
Line has tied up with popular US rapper, Snoop Dogg to help its expansion into the North American market. Boasting a range of Snoop Dogg virtual stickers that are available for free downloads, Line has been getting lots of attention through the rapper’s shout-outs on Twitter.

Line’s aggressive foray into overseas markets such as Southeast Asia and the US has been credited with helping it to hit the 100 million user mark. Interestingly, the app’s maker, NHN Japan revealed some months back that half of its then 70 million users were not from Japan. The app is expected to gain more traction in English speaking markets in 2013 while simultaneously looking to expand in China with a Chinese version, called ‘Lianwo‘.

China’s MiTalk to give WeChat a run for its money
China-born Android-based smartphone maker, Xiaomi, has struck a partnership with Taiwanese startup, Mface, to market it’s messaging app known as Miliao in Chinese (aka MiTalk in English) across Southeast Asia. The collaboration is expected to help MiTalk expand its reach to Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan. MiTalk aims to register 5 million overseas users by year end. The chat app currently has 23 million registered users, a large proportion of which are presumably from mainland China. The company will be marketing its smartphones in Hong Kong and Taiwan soon and may expand into North America in the next few years.

Worldwide smartphone penetration on the up
An article by eMarketer has examined the growing smartphone market around the world. It predicts that by 2016, roughly 75% of certain markets including the US and UK, will own one of the devices. The mobile phone market is incredibly saturated, with 130% combined market penetration of smartphones and non-smartphones. As such, they argue that the coming years will see an increase in the former and a decrease in the latter, resulting in the following figures:

Facebook release Graph Search
Facebook have announced Graph Search, a new social search engine that will allow users to search for results based on what their friends like. For example, instead of just looking for a dentist, you can look for “dentists in my area that my friends like”, or even the likes of “singles in my area who like Star Wars”. We have produced a comprehensive post detailing everything you need to know about the feature here.

Facebook bring free voice calls to the US
As we’ve previously discussed, Facebook operated a trial in Canada for free voice calling over the Internet with its iOS Messenger app. Now, they’ve extended this to the US with the latest version of Messenger for iOS. Provided that both users have downloaded the app, they are able to call one another for free, either over WiFi or by using up some of their data allowance.

Instagram releases monthly active user data
After the speculation about Instagram losing users, which we mentioned in last week’s mashup, the network has decided to release data about its monthly active users for the first time. They have stated that, contrary to the rumour, they have actually seen 10% growth in the period from December to January and that the last count showed over 90 million people using Instagram monthly.

EyeEm overtakes Instagram in app downloads
Whilst this was going on, Instagram was actually overtaken by a rival photo-sharing app called EyeEm in terms of downloads, which was at one point the second most downloaded photo/video app behind YouTube. Instagram has since regained its position ahead of EyeEm, but this shows the potentially precarious position Instagram holds in the photo-sharing market.

Favouriting becoming more popular on Twitter
Over the past year, the option to ‘favourite’ a tweet has become much more popular, as the following graph shows:

This comes as a result of changes made to favouriting by Twitter in December 2011, placing the option in a much more noticeable position and making it easier to access favourited tweets. Interestingly, users are more likely to favourite an @-reply than a regular tweet, potentially showing how users are employing the function as a way of exhibiting a positive response, similar to a Facebook ‘like’.

Twitter and television
Twitter have released some intriguing statistics into the way in which people interact with television on the network. They claim that 60% of Twitter users access the site while watching TV and around 40% of prime time Twitter activity is about television. Using specific programmes as case studies, they showed how big TV events can attract an impressively high amount of online activity, such as an episode of Made In Chelsea that procured 215,220 tweets from 110,162 users, reaching a potential 124.2m users.

Twitter headers make it possible to fake verified accounts
The introduction of Twitter header images has led to an unwanted side effect for Twitter, as it is now possible for someone to fake a verified account. As you can see from the image below, it seems as though there is a verified account for a fictional creation, the children’s book character Percy Jackson. However, the blue tick that announces verification has simply been added to the background. Fortunately, there is still a way to tell the difference between verified and unverified accounts, as the word “verified” will appear when you hover the cursor over a true account.

New Myspace now publicly available
The new version of Myspace, which launched in July, is now open to the public after a period of invitation-only signups. The emphasis remains strongly on music and in particular discovering new usic, with an audio deck on each page and a variety of music-related trending stories. The main page also promotes investor Justin Timberlake’s new single. There is yet to be a formal announcement for the new launch.

Foursquare’s maps show the growth of the network
Foursquare have released a detailed map that shows the various places where people have checked in over the last three months.

As can be seen above, this shows various world hubs, but can also be used to show in more detail the areas where people like to check in within a city, such as a clear layout of the runways in Atlanta Airport. In an interview with TechCrunch, Foursquare’s data scientist, Blake Shaw discussed how having access to all this information is important for the future of the company. He stated how they are experiencing a stage of growth similar to Twitter in 2008, from a place to share information to a location for consumption of that information; that is, Foursquare intends to grow further towards being a tool for discovering new places.

Twitter tracking the Oscars
Twitter have released a tool for tracking the positive conversation around Oscar nominees in the six largest categories: Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress and Director. They have produced a real time graph that displays positive sentiment around any of the nominees, measured as a percentage score against the average sentiment level of all tweets on the network. This is similar to a project pitting Romney against Obama during the US Presidential Election and is of interest for examining how particular events or news stories have an effect on public opinion.

Smoothie King helping with New Year’s Resolutions
It’s a sad fact that most New Year’s Resolutions don’t last a very long time. So drinks company Smoothie King have released a Facebook app called Lean Into Life, aimed at salvaging the spirit of New Year in mid-January, by encouraging users to take photographs of themselves whilst completing certain resolution-related challenges for the chance to win $100 gift cards, free smoothies or a bicycle. Fans are asked to take a photograph via Instagram and use the hasthags #SmoothieKing and #LeanIntoLife to take part in the contest.

Panera Bread Company promote ‘hidden menu’ via Social
Panera Bread Company last week sent out a tweet that announced their new ‘hidden menu’ and was met with a range of reactions from excitement to confusion. The idea is that the menu is not mentioned in store, but simply via social, meaning that in-the-know Twitter followers have to go in store and specifically request one of the protein-rich range. This exclusively-social promotion is an interesting idea and could be a very effective example for restaurant or FMCG brands.

Indy 500 campaign set to use people’s Instagram photos
An Indy 500 campaign is set to use Instagram images tagged with the hasthag #Indy500orBust. These will be placed on an interactive map, whilst users are also given the opportunity to win a VIP race experience by uploading photographs. After the controversy surrounding potential changes to Instagram’s terms of service, it will be interesting to see how many campaigns like this come about.

Bentley releasing cars with hashtag license plates
For the launch of three new models, Bentley showcased each with a license plate that displayed a hashtag of the car’s name.

The move is very similar to We Are Social’s campaign for Jaguar, where we emblazoned the model specific @sportbrake handle on the side of a prototype car. As such, it seems that we are seeing a growing trend in the automotive industry to attempt to support the launch of new vehicles with online conversation, specifically on Twitter.

The NHL’s Foursquare comeback
With the launch of a new NHL season, the league has released a Foursquare badge that can be unlocked by checking in at two games this season. Anyone who unlocks it is eligible for a 15% discount at the NHL online shop. Five separate teams have also released their own badge, which can be obtained by checking in at either a home or away game at any point in the season. Each of these qualifies fans for a separate benefit, including the change to win tickets or discounts at team stores.

Esurance Facebook campaign offers SXSW dream package
Online insurance company Esurance have released a campaign that offers fans the chance to win an all-access pass to SXSW, a $2000 hotel stay, iPad and the opportunity to create a set of videos that details the excitement behind the campaign. To win, fans must create content that displays why they are the right person to be behind the videos. The campaign taps into the technological nature of SXSW and produces a prize that is truly fit for the audience.

Volvic and We Are Social search for brand advocates on Facebook
We Are Social have produced a campaign for Volvic that asks fans to submit photographs that they feel best reflects the ‘Volcanicity’ brand. As an incentive, fans can win ‘once in a lifetime experiences’ around the theme of volcanoes, along with a camera to document them. The campaign is aimed at driving brand advocacy – Deola Laniyan, Account Director at We Are Social, said fans will:

become our community managers meaning the content that’s posted is much more likely to resonate with their peers and drive engagement.

English and Welsh High Court ruling on Facebook privacy
The England and Wales High Court has made a ruling on Facebook privacy, stating that pictures on Facebook cannot be published in a newspaper without permission, even if they are set to ‘public’. The ruling is of interest to all those on Facebook and could display a pro-user attitude to privacy by UK authorities.

Tesco’s horse play on Twitter
You’d think the last week couldn’t have got much worse for Tesco, what with their value-range beef burgers being found to contain horse meat. However, it looks as though it has, after accidentally tweeting what looked like a joke about horses. It goes to show the danger of scheduling tweets and making sure you keep a close eye on all social media channels, especially at sensitive times.

SocialBakers have published their latest edition of Top Facebook Pages around the world for the month of November. Last month, many new features were added to the infographics. Again, there are a couple of new features this month, including change in engagement rate from the previous month and top content from each country. Here’s a selection of reports on some of the South Asian and Northeast Asian countries – India, Pakistan and Hong Kong. Watch this space for the Southeast Asian reports later this week.

India continues to lead Asia with 61 million Facebook users. Top content for the country reflects the nation’s passion for Cricket, with two of the three best performing posts being photos of Cricket athletes. The post that had the most interactions received 61,000 Likes, 12,000 Comments and 3,100 Shares. The second most engaged post was from the brand page Cadbury Celebrations. Everyone loves chocolates obviously. The Children’s Day post garnered 54,000 Likes, 1,975 Comments and 17,000 Shares. The number of Shares definitely made the brand page one of the most talked about page for the month. While Indian marketers are seizing the opportunity to engage with fans on Facebook, response from most brands is still rather low. The average response rate is at 36%, which goes to show that brands still have some way to go in responding to answers or comments from their Facebook audiences and deepening the relationship further.

Pakistan on the other hand is slowly but surely growing. It has gained 300,000 new Facebook users last month. The mobile and telecommunications sector has penetrated the social media scene pretty well in Pakistan, with the three most engaged brand pages in the country hailing from this industry. All three best performing posts were also from the aforementioned brand pages, as shown below. Noticeably, the response time in Pakistan is way below the recommended benchmark for the industry. The top 5 pages with the best response times included pages where the response took as long as 43 hours, which equates to more than 5 working days.

Hong Kong is a well penetrated market when it comes to Facebook and hence, the numbers are starting to plateau off with a small 0.31% monthly growth.  Shopping malls like Harbour City have captured Facebook users’ attention with their organised events featuring celebrities this festive season. The most engaged post in November was a post depicting celebrity moms that garnered 40,000 Likes, 233 Comments and 3,590 Shares.

SocialBakers have published their latest edition of Top Facebook Pages around the world for the month of October. This month, there are some new features added to the infographics – average engagement rate, response time, average response rate and top brand pages by number of admin posts. Whilst the top pages might have high engagement rates and response rates, it is a better gauge to compare that with the average across the different brand pages from each country. Here’s a selection of reports on some of the Asian countries including India, Indonesia, The Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Pakistan and Hong Kong.

India has garnered 4 million new Facebook users in the month of October. At the time of writing, there were 60,545,100 Facebook users in India, which is only 120,640 shy of beating Brazil. At the rate that India is growing in terms of Facebook users, it would be of no surprise if it takes the second spot after the United States by the end of November. Average response rate stood at a low 29%, which goes to show that many brand pages still do not have a solid social strategy that directs the page owners to be more responsive to fan posts and questions. 

Indonesia, having added 2 million new fans in the month of October, continues to grow steadily.  Whilst the engagement rate for the top five brand pages range between 0.4% and 1.2%, the average engagement rate across the different brand pages in the country stands at a mere 0.086%. This gap in the average engagement rate reflects that fans are not engaged across Indonesian brand pages in general.

The Philippines has not grown much in recent times upon reaching 30 million Facebook users. This is because the country already has a Facebook penetration of 101% of its online population.

Similarly, Thailand has also reached a stage of saturation with 99% of its online population on Facebook. Also, unlike most Asian countries, Thailand has greater response rates on its brand pages with an average of 64% of fan posts and questions being responded to.

Malaysia comes in second to Thailand with a relatively higher response rate than the other Asian countries. The average response rate for brands stood at 53%.

Pakistan is showing slow but steady growth. With Facebook penetrating only 41% of its online population, Pakistan continues to see growth in numbers.

Hong Kong is a market that is only being analysed in recent times by SocialBakers with last month’s report being the first of its kind. With top brands such as Volkswagen HK, Hennessy HK and Nike HK garnering high page engagement, the average engagement rate of brand pages in Hong Kong proved to be the highest amongst the other Asian countries reported.

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.