Top Facebook Markets are U.S, Indonesia, U.K and… Asia

January 14, 2011 | Willis Wee 0digg

What’s Facebook’s largest market? Undoubtedly, first place belongs to U.S (146 million users), the country of origin. Second place goes to Indonesia (34 million users) and third goes to United Kingdom (27 million users).

What’s most intriguing is Indonesia’s growth. Out of a population size of 240 million (fourth most populous country in the world), only 40 million people are connected on the Internet. In other words, Facebook has connected more than 75 percent of all the country’s online users and has a lot more to conquer as more Indonesians join the Internet. There is enormous potential in the country no matter how we look at it.

In fact, the continent itself is a booming market. Globalpost reported that Asia houses 112 millionFacebook users, contributing one-fifth of Facebook’s total user count. The raising number of Facebook users mainly comes from 3 fast growing countries that saw 4 digits growth rate in the last 24 months – Malaysia (1,000 percent), Thailand (4,000 percent) and Taiwan (7,500 percent).

Facebook’s secret sauce toward success in Asia is mainly due to its quick adaptability to different cultures and languages. The originally English-based social network allows non-English speaking users to translate the site’s description to their native language. For example, ‘like’ in Facebook means 贊 in Taiwan but 赞 in China. Both are in Chinese, just that the former is in complicated while the latter in simplified writing.

Another reason why Facebook is widely popular in Asia is because ofFarmville, a game hosted on Facebook where players manage virtual farms. But to play the game, a person has to first sign up as a Facebook user. Many people naturally did since it doesn’t cost a cent.

As more people join Facebook for the game, the network became wider and richer. The reason to stay on Facebook slowly becomes more than just Farmville as people got used to Facebook and the community. India, Taiwan and recently Thailand are among the countries that are hooked on Facebook because of virtual farming. Currently, there are 10 million Facebook users in Taiwan and 7 million in Thailand. We expect these figures to rise, as Facebook network in Asia gets richer with time.

One big problem for Facebook is China. The site remains banned in the Chinese community whileRenren has grown to have more than 150 million users. Nonetheless, Facebook still has about 300,000 Chinese national users accessing it through proxy server or when overseas. But the value of the Facebook network is weak among Chinese nations. Most still prefer Renren to Facebook.

Facebook has better luck in Russia as it recorded a 376 percent increase in users from January to August last year, according to comScore data. It currently has more than 4.5 million users in Russia but is still far behind VKontakte, which has about 28 million users. Facebook Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said at an Oct 17 event at Stanford University that if Facebook succeeded in penetrating the Russian market, it might have a shot at doing the same in China. We shall see if this turns out to be true.

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