Asian markets appear set to dominate the focus of FB after the world’s largest social network lost users in mature Western markets recently.
The wonderful people at Social Bakers shared some recent data on Facebook’s growth in Asia over the last 6 months.
With the increase of 11.3 million users is India, the No.1 growing country on FB in Asia. At the beginning of year 2011, India had an FB population of 17.3 million users and during the six-month period the number of users increased to 28.6 million. The huge increase corresponds to 65.3 % change.
While some US critics have proclaimed the lack of growth as ‘the beginning of the end of Facebook’, it is clear that Asia and other developing markets are key to Facebook’s future growth, as has been said many times before.
Facebook is doing its part to help improve accessibility to the internet, and thus open up potential new users, by focusing on mobile through the purchase of Snaptu and deals with operators like Bharti in India.
More details of the Facebook Indonesian market from our post of Jan 11th 2011.
Of course, one notorious country could raise FB’s captive market by hundreds of millions, China.
But as Inside Facebook notes, and has been discussed here and strongly rumoured, entry to China would “compromise its reputation in the US and many other countries around the world” and then there is the awkward issue of China itself and how it would actually manage such a move.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on how things unfold.
