According to Social Bakers’s Facebook list, Indonesia is now #8 largest country on Facebook slipped down significantly for the past 3 months. The list also notes that for the past 3 months Indonesia has lost 5 million Facebook users, a concerning number indeed. Social Bakers also claims that Indonesia now has 36 million Facebook users, down from 40 million users just a few months ago. This number is confirmed via Facebook’s Advertising platform stating they have 36 million users in Indonesia.
Losing a few users in really something common for a website but losing 5 million users from a country that’s basically famous for loving the service? That’s gotta hurt. It’s not surprising, but it hurts.
Ian Hogarth, CEO of Songkick recently made a trip to Jakarta and talk to some of the most influential people in the industry. From the conversations he had, he came up with a conclusion that Facebook is declining heavily in Indonesia. Hogarth highligted the fact that Indonesian users are bored with Facebook and is moving on to a new social platform such as Twitter and Path.
Hogarth has a point.
If you live in Jakarta and hang out with the people long enough, you’ll see that cultural switch regarding the preference for social platforms. Facebook is now the old-school and mainstream service that everyone is using, while service like Twitter and Path are more controllable in terms of what goes public and what remains private. Of course you can do exactly these things on Facebook, but most Indonesians don’t know and don’t even bother to find out.
Just yesterday, we found out that Semiocast published a report that point Jakarta as the top tweeting city globally. According to Semiocast, Jakarta is accountable for 2.5% of global tweets ahead of Tokyo which is very close behind and London at 2% of tweets. Another Indonesian big city, Bandung, ranks 6th as the most active Twitter city with around 1.2%. Put together, Jakarta and Bandung make up nearly 3.7% of the world’s 10.6 billion tweets, which means the two cities produce about 371 million tweets.
As of July 2012, Indonesians have created 29.4 million Twitter accounts, almost 60% of which were created before January 1, 2012. That’s a lot of tweets from only two big cities in Indonesia. This report confirms the growth of Twitter users (parallel with their activeness) in Indonesia.
Two facts : Facebook is going down, Twitter is going up. Is this the beginning of the end of Facebook?
