The social media situation in Asia is very different from Europe and USA. Here are some very interesting facts and figures giving a good overview of who are the big players.

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The material in this blog posting should all be credited to Thomas Crampton, who is a former New York Times correspondent and now the Asia-Pacific director of digital influence at Ogilvy. He has been so kind to allow me to reuse this material.

Being based in Hong Kong, Thomas is one of the biggest experts on the social media scene in Asia. And it is indeed very interesting to see how different players have been able to build very strong positions in that part of the world.

Here is a presentation Thomas recently made about the social media in Asia. Click through it and I promise that you will get a quite good overview.

Some of the facts that I found interesting:

• Among China’s 338 million Internet users, only 400.000 use Facebook. 183 million use the Chinese social network site Qzone. In search the scene is dominated by Baidu – with twice as many users as Google.
• Facebook is strong in some countries, like Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Cambodia, while losing to other networks in other countries. For instance Friendster is very strong in the Philippines and Orkut dominates in India.
• Sale of digital goods is very important source of revenue for sites like Qzone

For some more elaboration I recommend that you look through this interview with Thomas Crampton, recorded by the blogger Robert Scoble: