Facebook is banned in China. But somehow, the number of Facebok users in China has ballooned in recent months, almost reaching 700,000. I got curious and checked out Social Bakers to understand the statistic better.
The chart below captured my attention immediately: 79 percent of Facebook users in China are males. That is of course, a highly imbalanced male-female ratio, especially when we learned that women rule social media.
Why the imbalanced gender ratio? It is probably triggered by Mark Zuckerberg’s visit to China last year. His presence somehow made Facebook better known among Chinese males. A Chinese friend of mine previously shared with me that Mark Zuckerberg is pretty well known in the Chinese Internet community. His visit to China last year was widely publicized in tech blogs and Chinese social networks where readers are usually males. I mean… a successful entrepreneur like Zuckerberg will influence other like-minded entrepreneurs. In the entrepreneurial community, most are males as well, which explains the imbalance gender ratio.
China’s ban on Facebook didn’t stop users from using the service. AnchorFree, a Mountain View, California-based startup, said it saw 1.5 million people using its free VPN service in China during January, a 25 percent increase from the previous month, the Businessweek reported.
With more Chinese Internet users logging on to Facebook through VPNs, we can expect the number of Facebook users in China to continue growing. Meanwhile, I wonder what it takes to trigger Chinese females to join the service. Any thoughts?
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