MANILA, Philippines – “The Philippines is the fastest growing Internet audience in the world,” says Singapore-based social media manager Jonathan See in a recent social media marketing lecture.
In the Philippines, out of the 105 million people, 37.6 million people are internet users, 34 million of whom are Facebook users. They spend about six hours and 12 minutes per day, four hours and one minute of it are spent in social media.
“Almost everyone online in the Philippines is on Facebook,” says See. He also cites a staggering 31% mobile penetration where users spend an average of two hours and 48 minutes using mobile internet. Among the mobile internet users, 62% use mobile social media apps.
iSentia-Brandtology, the company he works for, monitors social media exhaustively for its corporate and government clients using proprietary crawlers to establish online sentiments. It’s large scale, high-tech peeping and eavesdropping at its best.
“As a company, if you are going to launch a product, you need to have your eyes and ears glued online because this is the yardstick you can measure your success,” says See.
These stats come on the heels of a previous Inquirer report that the Philippines, earlier cited as one of the most tech-savvy countries in Asia, has beaten the global average in terms of the proportion of businesses that use social media as a means to market their products and boost revenues.
This is according to the results of the latest survey by Grant Thornton showing that 44 percent of enterprises in the country use social media—one of which is the social networking site Facebook—to improve profitability. This figure is slightly higher than the global average of 43 percent, although slightly lower than the average of 45 percent for the ASEAN region.
Punongbayan & Araullo, a member of the Grant Thornton group, said that the proportion of Philippine businesses that use social media is expected to grow over the short term given the popularity of social media sites among Filipinos.
Today, there are 2.64 billion internet users in the world; 1.85 billion are active in the social media.
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