Facebook, WhatsApp Survey Report from Singapore

About 55 per cent of respondents here said they use WhatsApp, while more than nine in 10 Internet users in Singapore have a Facebook account. Coming in just after online dating, social networking is the second-fastest growing online activity across the world over the last five years, according to research firm GlobalWebIndex (GWI), citing a 187 per cent rise globally and 242 per cent rise in Asia Pacific. And over the last two years, mobile networking has also seen a boom, with four in 10 global internet users using mobile messaging applications.

This rises to 46 per cent in Asia Pacific. Here are some social and mobile networking insights, according to GWI’s latest research, which covers 32 countries representing 89 per cent of the global Internet population. More than nine in 10 Internet users here have a Facebook account, ahead of the global average of near seven in 10. YouTube and Google+ are also among the top three social networking sites in Singapore (69 per cent and 64 per cent respectively) and globally (51 per cent and 55 per cent, respectively). Yet, have user’s behaviours changed and are more just passively consuming content on their social networks? GWI’s data showed a steady decline in users who have “messaged a friend in the last month” on Facebook, from 512 million in the first quarter of last year, to 313 million in Q3 this year.

In Singapore, about a quarter of Facebook, Twitter and Google+ members said they have “logged in to see what’s happening without posting/commenting on anything myself”. GWI’s Head of Trends, Mr Jason Mander, attributed this to “certain direct behaviours shift(ing) to other platforms”. For instance, conversations are shifting to mobile chat apps. As of the third quarter of this year, four in 10 respondents have made use of mobile messaging. This worked out to 616 million users globally, and is a 6 percentage point increase from the fourth quarter of 2012.. The figure is higher in Asia Pacific, with 46 per cent saying they use mobile messaging. The main motivations, according to respondents globally:

The applications are free, it’s quicker than using social networks or text message, and lots of their friends are using them. Mobile messaging application WeChat has come up tops globally and in Asia Pacific among the chat apps, with healthy growth between last year and this year. This is chiefly because it has “a huge active audience in China”, impacting strongly in the rankings. In Singapore, specifically though, WeChat trailed at third place – with just 18 per cent of respondents saying they used the app – together with Skype, and ahead of Line and Viber. Nonetheless, WeChat has seen an impressive near 500 per cent growth in user numbers between 2013 and 2014 in the Republic. Skype, in comparison, saw just 38 per cent growth.