Bangkok has 'most Facebook users' in world
Bangkok has surpassed Jakarta as the city with the most Facebook users in the world, according to reputable Facebook statistic website Socialbakers.
Coconuts Bangkok
Saturday 19 May 2012, 01:19PM
Currently the Thai capital is home to 8,682,940 users of the social network, surpassing the Indonesian capital’s 7,434,580 Facebookers.
Asian cities rank highly throughout the list – Mumbai is ninth (3,700,460), Kuala Lumpur is 14th (3,328,240), Bangalore is 16th (2,931,460), and Singapore is 17th (2,662,680).
Developing Asian countries like Thailand and Indonesia have provided the most explosive growth for Facebook in recent years, helping to line the pockets of Mark Zuckerberg and Singapore’s most famous expat entrepreneur Eduardo Saverin as the company prepares to file for IPO on Friday.
Indeed, India has the third most Facebook users in the world (45,825,620) behind the US and Brazil, Indonesia is fourth (42,272,040), and the Philippines is eighth (27,088,320), according to Socialbakers.
“For the Facebook platform itself, Asia is wildly important. But in terms of the future of the platform, it is even more important,” Tom Crampton, head of Asian social media for Ogilvy & Mather, said recently.
Facebook has exploded in Thailand and specifically Bangkok – Thailand’s mega-hub of business, culture, and technology and home to roughly a third of the country’s population. In 2011, the number of Facebook users in the country effectively doubled from around 6.7 million to around 13.3 million.
According to Facebook’s ad targeting model, there are 6,407,180 Facebook users within a 50 mile radius of Bangkok who are 18 and older. That doesn’t include those under 18 though, and Socialbakers aims to present more accurate statistics in the future.
Bangkok also has quite an affinity for photo-sharing app Instagram, which Facebook recently bought, as three of the top 15 most Instagrammed locations in the world in 2011 were in the city: Suvarnabhumi Airport, Terminal 21, and Siam Paragon.
If the company’s stock is to perform in the coming months after the bell rings at NASDAQ trading floor in New York Friday morning, Zuck will want to keep those user numbers jumping in Asia.
With relatively low internet penetration rates around the continent compared to North America and Europe there’s still a lot of room for growth.
View the original story here at Coconuts Bangkok.
