What mattered in 2011? Zeitgeist sorted billions of Google searches to capture the year’s 10 fastest-rising global queries and the rest of the spirit of 2011.

Based on #1 International Best Selling Book Socialnomics by Erik Qualman. This is a shorter version that includes new social media statistics for 2011.

I had the chance to meet Facebook representatives from their Singapore office the other week. While their presentation was mainly on using Facebook for business, we also talked about Facebook’s growth in the Asia Pacific region. Facebook shared their latest numbers which I found extremely interesting, so I’m sharing them with you too.

As of July 7 2011, the fastest growing markets are Korea and Japan, with a growth of more than 260% year over year. In terms of mobile usage, Thailand is leading the APAC countries with 17% growth month over month. The latter is astonishing considering India being the world’s second largest mobile market after China with 262 million users. So where is India? According to Facebook, India is far behind and actually shrinking by 1.2% month over month.

Which is the largest Facebook country in Asia Pacific? No surprises here! Indonesia is at the very top with almost 44 million users and a growth of 65.72% year over year.

Overall User Growth (Year over Year)

Overall Monthly Active Users = 764.8 million
Data as of 7 July 2011, Source: facebook.com

 Mobile Growth (Month over Month)

Overall Monthly Active Users = 331.8 million
Data as of 7 July 2011, Source: facebook.com

• Creators are people who at least once a month publish using social media (eg. blogs, pictures, videos, websites)
• Critics react to other content online (eg. comments on blogs or forums, ratings and reviews of products, editing wikis)
• Collectors save web links or tags using social bookmarking sites (eg. Digg, del.icio.us) or use RSS feeds (eg. bloglines, myYahoo). Activities of collectors help organize and filter the vast amount of online content for others.
• Joiners participate in or maintain profiles on social networks (eg. Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, CyWorld)
• Spectators consume what the rest produces – blogs, online videos, podcasts, forums, reviews, etc.
• Inactives don’t currently take part in social media

Global participation

Now, how does the ratio of these different “social technographics” differ across geographic regions? According to data shared by Facebook, this is how it looks like:

While the US pioneered much of the early Web 2.0 and social media innovation, Asians enjoy creating and sharing content significantly more than people in the US and in Europe.

Having a robust content plan in place, seems crucial for marketers in Asia, to make use of these different social media habits.

Great video by TO-FU about 29 ways to stay creative in life.

It is often called China’s Twitter clone, which doesn’t do justice to what Sina Weibo has to offer: blog-like posts and comments, polls, embedded picture, video and audio attachments, and a comprehensive portal page just to name a few.

These features are not only convenient for users but also for brands, as rich media posts provide opportunities for marketing.

With the introduction of the corporate edition of its micro-blogging service, Sina Weibo has taken it even a step further and added more functionality for brands.

This is what a corporate profile has to offer:

Sina Weibo corporate profile page

Sina Weibo announced more marketing tools for the future, which allow brands to create engaging experiences for their fans, and let them measure their success with metrics around content and a keyword-driven monitoring solution.

Sina Weibo has a lot going for it and the added functionality sets it apart from other micro-blogging platforms. Not to be regarded as a clone anymore, it has evolved into a platform other social networks can learn a thing or two from.

In Asia 166,498,640 people are on Facebook (June, 2011)

Facebook is making progress in Asia. It’s user base in the region grew 13.8 percent over the last 5 months to over 166,4498,640 people. The guys at  Penn Olson have created a nice infographic showcasing a breakdown of the Asia user base into it’s respective countries. You can see the results here.

Fascinating to see Indonesia being on the top of the list, outranking India by 10 million people, considering it’s population of 250 million is only 20 percent compared to India.