What does the future have in store? Will mobile phones become smaller or bigger, will Android beat iPhone?
Well, your guess is as good as mine. What I do see, and therefore perhaps can predict, is that social networking will keep on growing in 2013. Facebook is still the biggest social networking site with over 1 billion users, but would it surprise you that in second and third place are Chinese-based sites?
In second place is Tencent QQ, generally referred to as QQ, which is a free instant and video messaging computer program in China with 700 million active users accounts. In third place is Qzone with more than 600 million. An interesting fact is that Qzone was created by Tencent in 2005. It permits users to write blogs, keep diaries, send photos, and listen to music.
Twitter is in 7th place with 170 million users and Skype stands tenth with 145 million. There is in fact a difference between registered users and active users. Skype for example would rank 3rd, looking at their registered users which is almost 700 million, but only 145 million of these are active.
There was a time when SMS was the only cost-effective media to communicate asynchronously. Now a bunch of rich-media applications are replacing SMS with more attractive content such as pictures, video, etc. Thanks to iOS, Android, BlackBerry OS, and Windows Phone, those OSs are powerful but small enough to run on smartphones and tablet devices and consequently opened the doors for Social Networking such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Renren, Windows Live, Pinterest and many more. By the way, any idea how many social networks there are? I stopped counting at 350…
The smartphone and tablet shipments have been growth significant for the last five years, and it is still growing. Vendors will ship more than 1.7 billion smartphone devices this year according to IDC they also forecast that by the end of 2016, the total shipments for tablets would be 198.2 million devices. It is a huge market and you have to tap in one way or the other!
Facebook users began visiting the site more through mobile devices than on their computers. Facebook said it had seen mobile users increase 68 percent over the same period last year.
Mobile use gives Facebook the option to reach more aspects of users’ lives more immediately, and the social network has introduced several initiatives to make the most of the fast-growing platform. In the past year, Facebook has remade its main apps and revamped Facebook Messenger. introducing two new apps – Facebook Camera and Poke. The company still has work to do in figuring out how to better display advertisements on the smaller, mobile screens and has recently said it will concentrate on making effective ads appear in users’ news feeds.
The company is seeing its greatest growth in regions such as Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. In its last earnings report, Facebook said its number of daily active users had grown 28 percent from the same period last year.
Social Media in Indonesia
2012 was a good year for social media, with a steady and healthy revenue growth. On Twitter, Indonesia ranks 5th after the UK, Japan, Brazil, and the USA, and surprising or not Jakarta ranks number one on the worldwide city tweets list in front of Tokyo and London. With more than 175 million tweets per day Twitter is expected to see $259.9 million in revenue in 2012, up from $139.5 million in 2011.
Indonesia ranks forth on the world ranking list of Facebook users.
1. United States – 169,673,580
2. Brazil – 64,048,700
3. India – 61,900,760
4. Indonesia – 51,392,040
5. Mexico – 40,017,140
Facebook registered more than 1 billion active monthly users on Facebook, and is expected to see a revenue of five billion US dollars. Social media is exploding. All of these platforms have launched specific opportunities for brands to engage: Facebook brand pages, Twitter verified accounts and promoted campaigns, Pinterest’s newly launched business accounts, and YouTube’s brand channels. Of course, just because the opportunity exists doesn’t mean that all brands use these platforms to their full potential.
Whereas some countries such as Bangladesh, China, Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam are trying to ban Facebook and other social media’s, Indonesia welcomes their first local spinoff called Kerren (Cool).
On 20th December 2012, PT CPE Indonesia has launched a New Lifestyle Mobile Application to play a significant role in the Social Media market. The theme of launching is also interesting: “Are U Kerren?” or in plain English “Are You Cool?” The features provided by Kerren are Single Signed on (SSO) login chatting features such as “Kerren Obrolan” (“Cool chatting”), Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, and MSN. Plus SSO to login social media features which are “Kerren Remboek”, Facebook, and Twitter. Kerren also has Club features providing several widgets such as Music Store, Free Trading and Category, Mobile Banking, etc. Kerren is now available on Google Play Store, and by February 2013 on BlackBerry Market, then by June 2013 on iPhone AppStore. You can find more information on Kerren’s official website (www.kerren.co.id) or Facebook (Are U Kerren) or Twitter (@AreUKerren).