By: Joseph Seabra
It is
interesting to see that the Philippines which has a strict government control
over businesses within the country, and limitations to entry of foreign
companies happens to be extremely progressive with its allowance of social
media. After researching social media usage in the Philippines there is no
inherent bans on any social media sites that are popular in many first world
countries. According to the website inquirer.net citizens of the Philippines
are one of the leading countries in social media usage with the average
Filipino spending around “3 hours and 57 minutes a day on social media sites,
mainly on Facebook” (Camus, 2018). Further evidence to suggest that the
Philippines heavily uses social networking platform was a study done by We Are
Social which ranked the Philippines as the number 1 country in terms of social
media usage in 2017 compared to other Asian countries (Camus, 2018).
The six main social media sites that are currently being
used according to the database StatCounter are Facebook, Twitter, Youtube,
Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr (2019). Facebook which as mentioned previously
is currently the largest social network is currently being used has 67 million
Filipino’s using the platform (Camus, 2018). This means with the current population
of the Philippines approximately 65% of the country uses the Facebook platform.
In the social networking market of the Philippines the Facebook platform has
89.76% of the current audience with the second largest sites being Twitter with
6.01% of the social networking audience (2019). It was interesting to see that
Twitter was the second largest social networking platform in the Philippines
because of the platforms decline of users in North America.
The use of social networking platforms in the Philippines
has been on a steep rise and will most likely continue to increase in the
future. It comes as no surprise that people in the Philippines spend an
increased amount of time on social media as the overall use of technology has
increased within the country. According to The Guardian the average person in
the Philippines spend around “10 hours and 2 minutes of screen time every day”
with the country being the ranked as the highest for daily internet usage in
Southeast Asia (Lamb, 2019). The Filipino governments allowance of social media
platforms within the country is quite a smart move when looking at the country
from the perspective of infrastructural and technological growth. The countries
lack of restraints on social networking platforms should allow for the country
to market its growth, which is extremely important for a country that generates
a large majority of money from tourism.
References
Camus, M. (2018). PH is world
leader in social media usage. In Inquirer.net. Retrieved November 6, 2019, from
https://business.inquirer.net/246015/ph-world-leader-social-media-usage
Lamb,
K. (2019).
Philippines tops world internet usage index with an average
10 hours a day. In theguardian. Retrieved November 7, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/01/world-internet-usage-index-philippines-10-hours-a-day
(2019). Social Media Stats in Philippines.
In StatCounter. Retrieved November 6, 2019, from https://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/philippines
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