Thais Are Even More Addicted to Social Media This Year, Research Shows

With 18 million Thai users on Facebook, it makes the country the 16th biggest country in the world on Facebook. Bangkok is the city with the most Facebook users in the world and the top two most-Instagrammed places in the world for 2012 are in Bangkok.

So it’s not a surprise that the latest numbers from Thailand’s Electronic Transactions Development Agency (ETDA) survey show that Thais are more addicted to social media ever this year. From a sample of 23,907 people, ETDA found that Thais spend an average of 32 hours per week on the Internet, an increase of 76 percent compared to 12 years ago. 38.5 percent of those spend more than 20 hours a week on the web. Surangkana Wayuparb, the agency’s CEO, stated that:

The survey revealed that Thai Internet behavior has changed a lot over 10 years. The use of the internet nearly doubled and being able to connect to the internet has become a part of the daily life of people to Thailand.

Getting online at community centers

The number of web users went up since Thai people started relying on web connections at community centers provided by the MICT (ICT Free Wifi campaign).

ETDA’s CEO added:

The government has been encouraging greater use of the internet through One School One Tablet policy and the ICT central learning communities. The government expects the free wi-fi and broadband internet access to cover more 80 percent of the population by 2015 and more than 95 percent by year 2020.

In terms of the activities that Thai people engage in on the Internet, 54.4 percent of people use it for emails, 52.5 percent use it for searching stuff, and 33.2 percent use it for social networks. The survey results indicate that over 90 percent of web users use social media. Facebook is still the most popular channel (Facebook 92.2 percent; YouTube 63.7 percent; Line 61.1 percent), which are normally used via smartphones.

It’s very interesting to find out that almost half of the social media users have bought products or services through these channels at least once.

55 percent of Thai people have also used the Internet through devices such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets. The most popular device for browsing the internet is still desktop computers (45 percent), followed by notebooks (25.3 percent), smartphones (22.7 percent), tablets (6.8percent), and others (0.2 percent).

(Photo credit: thai-blogs.com)

(Editing by Steven Millward and Anh-Minh Do)