Comscore’s latest report on social networking activity in Asia-Pacific region shows that 50.8% of the total online population visited a social networking site in February 2010. This amounts to around 240.3 million visitors. As expected, Facebook ranked as the top social network across the region.
The report also showed that Facebook was the top social network in 8 of the 12 countries in the region. Wretch.cc, Orkut, Cyworld and mixi.jp were the top social network in Taiwan, India, South Korea and Japan respectively.
Will Hodgman, comScore executive vice president for Asia Pacific said that while social networking continues to be one of the most popular and fastest growing web activities in the world, its dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region exhibits significantly more individual market differentiation than in other global regions.
“In some markets, such as the Philippines, Australia and Indonesia, social networking is one of the most popular Web activities reaching nearly 90 percent of the entire Internet population, while other markets report less PC-based social networking penetration, which can often be attributed to the high propensity to engage in social networking via mobile devices in these markets,†says Mr. Hodgman.
In terms of social networking penetration, the report found out that users in the Philippines have the highest level of  engagement, with majority of the online population spending an average of 5.5 hours on social networks. Users in Indonesia follow with 5.4 hours per visitor, Australia with 3.8 hours and Malaysia with 3.8 hours as well.
The report did not include visits to social networking sites through mobile and PDA devices as well as from public computers such as internet cafes which is a big industry in most Asian countries.
Originally posted on April 7, 2010 @ 7:41 am