The Golden future of networking sites in Asia

It’s no secret the developing markets have one of the largest user base with regard to social networking. It is estimated last week that the number of social networks in the Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region are up to 1.18 billion users in December 2014. 2015 growth figure is estimated to be 1.4 billion new users. According to same source, Facebook saw its biggest growth in terms of new users in the Asia Pacific region this year. India, Indonesia and Japan were leaders with a growth of 26% in the year 2014. This growth was significantly higher than the worldwide average growth rate.

This suggests that the future of social networking is golden. The website comScore published a new study that showed that the General Internet activity dominated social networking sites. Average citizens spend four-minute online on social networking site.

Looking closer to India, we discover that 57.8 million Indians with a minimum age of 15 years regularly from home or work have accessed Facebook in December 2014. This corresponds to 83.4 percent of the total Indian market. In general, social network generated nearly 51 million new users within few months. Three months ago, Facebook had about 46.3 million users. At this time, India is the third largest market for Facebook, according to the US with a total number of users of around 157 million users and Brazil, with approximately 48 million people.

The same comScore report also revealed that users spend in about a four minute on social network sites and spend on average around four hours a day in order to be active on Facebook. For comparison: Google achieved approximately 2.5 hours per day, but recorded a growth rate of approximately 94.8 %. Among the local brands, the most popular social network posted was network 18 with an average 31.6 minutes per day penetration.

With regard to the activity in the network, Indian Internet users spent around 25.2 percent of their time per day to surf pages which represents a slight increase of 0.8% compared to last year on the social network in December. Entertainment sites were present at the second most popular with an average 10 minutes – an increase of 1.2% over the past year. Also the shopping area grew to 0.5 per cent this year in India.

The Indian Facebook number will increase in the coming year on 22% every six months. If this is indeed the case, then India will overtake the leader United States by the end of 2015. Currently, it is estimated that both countries will reach peak numbers from 170 to 175 million users, according to businessweek.com. If India actually meets those expectations, a country having more than 1.2 billion people, then surely that will be interesting new insights into a market that has so far been relatively untouched. Because converting all the Facebook users of the United States constitute just four percent of the total population of India. In addition, social networks are precisely for the young generation, which will most likely bring a certain social media revolution in India with it.