According to global research consultancy firm TNS, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is the most popular social networking platform in India with 51% of users using it daily. On the other hand, WhatsApp is the leader in instant messaging apps. 56% of users listed WhatsApp as their preferred instant messaging app.
The United States has the largest number of Facebook users. India trails the US and is in the second position with more than 125 million users. Facebook has a global user base of 1.49 billion people. The percentage of Indian Facebook users is comparatively less to APAC nations including Hong Kong (72%), Taiwan (75%), and Thailand (78%).
As per the discovery of Connected Life, a worldwide research of the digital attitudes as well as behaviors of over 60,000 Internet users in 50 nations, 55% use instant messaging daily. The study reveals that Facebook is still the world’s premier social platform. Nearly one-third of worldwide Internet users (30%) utilize it daily, and the utilization in Asia Pacific region is even greater.
Parijat Chakraborty of TNS India opined that India’s social networking is dominated by Facebook, which is promoting the use of Facebook Messenger as well as the IM channel for private messaging. Nevertheless, WhatsApp is by a great distance the most used IM platform in the country.
Chakraborty opined that India was always inclined to the text market. This quality and the facility to link with like-minded individuals privately has made instant messaging platforms highly popular.
The excitement among mostly new mobile Internet users has led to the country being among the top rankers in terms of average daily count of messages exchanged.
In APAC, 61%of internet users utilize instant messaging daily while 82% are weekly users.
IM’s reach has surged the last year with a 12% rise in worldwide daily usage as more folk adopted WeChat, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp.
Instant messaging has ramped up high numbers of daily users in Asia. These include 38% in India, 69% in China, 73% in Hong Kong and 77% in Malaysia. While benchmarked against the Asian figures western markets are trailing with the US at 35% and the UK at 39%.
Sources: financialexpress.com
