My students and I (Adam Acar) have been constantly monitoring the Japanese social media landscape as part of our social media seminar. After checking the demographic distribution of Facebook users in last August we repeated this procedure again today, just about a year later. The results were quite interesting as can be seen in the figures below.
To sum up the findings
#1. The number of Facebook users in Japan currently stands at 10,305,880 (August 9, 2012)
#2. The number of Facebook users in Japan increased by about 6 million since August 2011. This means there was about 153% annual increase.
#3. The number of Facebook users who are older than 60 increased by 178%. This finding is in line with the recent Comscore report which suggested that Facebook users over 55 are the fastest growing age segment in the world. The numbers also showed that there was a significant increase (74%) among young users of Facebook in Japan who aged between 13 and 18. This number makes sense as according to a recent Recruit survey, the percentage of highschoolers who use facebook rose from 13.7% to 22.6% within a year.
#4. There are more male users (53%) than female users (47%). However, the increase among female users is higher (174% vs. 133%). Additionally, there are more female users than male users among the population between the ages of 19 and 34. Young Japanese women are more likely to use Facebook than young Japanese men.
#5. Although the total penetration rate of Facebook stands around 9%, the adoption rate among young users (ages 19~24) is quite high, about 27%.
Methodology: The numbers were pulled from Facebook’s database (# of total ad reach).
Figure 1. The number of Facebook Users in Japan
Figure.2 % of Yearly Change
Figure 3. Facebook Penetration Rate 2011 & 2012
Figure. 4 Percentage of Increase in the number of Facebook Users
Adam Acar