Facebook plays a big role in our lives. It’s not just an observation but something hard data has confirmed already. In the Philippines, 91 percent of our internet users or over 49 million people use Facebook on a monthly basis (based on data from eMarketer, August 2015) and over 27 million use the social network on a daily basis. That isn’t a small deal.
With numbers like that, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Facebook has entered the country. They’ve opened their first office here to be headed by Digs Dimagiba, who was most recently with Samsung Electronics Philippines as it’s mobile business director.
Aside from supporting its community of users, a large part of why they opened an office here is to support the businesses in the country that want to use Facebook as a platform for the business. If you look at the career’s page of Facebook, you see the open positions (Regional Product Marketing Manager and Outsourcing Partner Manager, Community Operations) support this objective.
Dan Neary, Facebook’s vice president for Asia Pacific, also mentioned bringing the next one billion people online and he sees Southeast Asia in general, and the Philippines in particular, as the place for that, especially in the mobile realm.
When looking at our online consumption habits, it won’t come as a surprise why these social network giants (like Twitter did recently) are paying attention to this side of the world. In SEA, over 241 million people use Facebook every month and over 144 million or roughly 60 percent of the monthly active users return to Facebook every day. We already know the figures for the country.
But it doesn’t stop there. Filipinos are considered by Facebook as one of the heaviest social media users in the world. According to August 2015 data from market research group TNS, we spend 3.1 hours per day on mobile. In a graph Neary showed during the press launch, Filipinos, he says, spend less time compared to the global average watching TV but when it comes to using mobile devices we spend 298 minutes on them, which is almost 50 percent over the global average. The images below also shows what else we do here differently.
And that makes it a prime market for brands to get in touch with its intended clients. According to March 2016 data from TNS, 95 percent of Filipinos on Facebook discover products and brands on the platform and 64 percent of them have made a purchase after discovery.
Facebook putting up an office here will give them an opportunity to get in touch with local companies, from the big corporations to the small and medium-sized businesses. And yes, that could also mean more sponsored content or ads on your Facebook news feed.
Neary says they are constantly working on achieving a good balance between ads and personal content on their site. He says that they are able to give more relevant content and products to its users in the most unobtrusive way possible. It’s not a guarantee we’ll get quicker access to new Facebook tools and features but locally-made sponsored content just might show up more.
