Asian Muscling into Social Media World:

Asians are muscling their way into traditionally western-dominated social media networks such as Face book, twitter and internet blogs, prompting major players to sit up and take notice.

With more than 220 million bloggers in China alone and nearly three out of five people in Singapore having a facebook account, Asia is presenting a huge commercial opportunity for online advertising. Facebook launched an Asian sales office in Singapore last month in order to be better placed to sell ads to companies aiming for the region’s consumers. The growing number of Asians connected to the internet is seen to be a key driver behind the region’s social media craze.

A report in July by research firm Nielsen said that “while the US pioneered much of the early web 2.0 and social media innovation, Asia is playing no small role in shaping- and in some cases leading-the new social media landscape.” The report added that “Asian social media adoption rates have surpassed Western adoption rates.

As on December 2009, China had 221 million bloggers-more than twice the number of United States-it added. Data from market research firm inside Network estimated that monthly active Asia-Pacific users of Facebook numbered 117 million, or more than 20 percent of the global figure. In June this year, Asian also “tweeted” the most on micro-blogging platform Twitter, outpacing the United States, according to data from internet research company Semiocast. It said that US-generated tweets now account for only 25 percent of messenger on Twitter, down from 30 percent in March. Data from research firm Forrester showed Chinese, South Korean, Japanese and Australians creating video, music and text content for social media at a much rate than Americans did last year.

Despite China’s ban on Facebook and Twitter, the nation still boasts the largest number of social media users in any country thanks to locally-developed substitutes.