In APAC, South Korea Gets Bragging Rights for Mobile Social Penetration

South Korea boasts the highest penetration of mobile phone social networkers as a percentage of the total population of any country in Asia-Pacific, according to eMarketer’s latest forecast of mobile social usage around the world. Just shy of half the country’s population will use their mobile phones to access social networks on a monthly basis this year, putting South Korea 5 points ahead of second-place Australia by this metric.

More than nine in 10 social network users in South Korea access the services via mobile phone, we estimate. That may appear saturated, but it’s a percentage that will continue to rise throughout our forecast period, nearing 96% by 2019.

Facebook usage is somewhat lower on mobile. This year, 80.9% of Facebook users in South Korea will access the social networking giant on their mobile phones. By 2019, 12.4 million people in South Korea, or 84.4% of Facebook users, will be mobile phone Facebook users.

Among mobile phone users, just 26.9% will check out Facebook on their handsets this year. That puts South Korea in the middle of the pack in Asia-Pacific, where nearly half of mobile phone users in Australia and 42.0% of those in Indonesia will use Facebook on their phones this year.