[YONHAP / AP]
SEOUL -- According to an online big data analysis, the number of South Korean monthly active users of the Facebook smartphone app has dropped below 10 million for the first time in two years since South Korean big data analysis solution company Mobile Index started monitoring. South Korea currently has some 54 million registered smartphones and an average of about 65 percent of people access social media using their phones.
According to a survey of 10,154 South Korean people, conducted by the state-operated Korea Information Society Development Institute in 2022, about 55.1 percent of smartphone users in South Korea, used at least one kind of social media platform. "Generation Z," the group of people who were born between the mid-to-late 1990s and the early 2010s, was the heavy user group who used social media apps at least two hours a day.
Gen Z's favorite social media platform was Instagram (40.3 percent), followed by Facebook (38.4 percent) while the older generation favored domestic social media platforms such as Kakao Story and Naver Band. Teenagers especially loved Instagram because the social media platform mainly focuses on sharing short posts with pictures or video clips.
Mobile Index said in a statement on March 9 that the number of South Korean monthly active users (MAUs) of the Facebook app in February 2023 was 9,795,810, down 2.5 percent from January's 10,056,845. The number of MAUs decreased by 16.3 percent compared to the same period last year.
The online data analyst said that the popularity of short-form content including short texts and video clips increased and young users came to favor Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest over Facebook. According to Mobile Index, the number of Instagram's MAUs increased to 18,528,538 in February, up seven percent from a year ago.
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