Indonesian Facebook User 2016 - Survey Report

Among all social media platforms, Facebook could be the most outstanding one. Facebook is surely not the first social media platform, but it has tremendous impact on all aspects. The popularity of Facebook as platform that connect us with people around us, people from the past, and even the perfect stranger lead to the hype of Facebook fever among countries. Indonesia was no exception. In global scale, Indonesia has always been staying at the top five countries with highest number of Facebook user. Up to the end of 2015, the number of Facebook user in Indonesia was reaching more than 78 million users. As Facebook still has a place in Indonesian netizen, we conduct a survey aimed to describe how Indonesian Facebook users use Facebook in their everyday life. We asked 730 respondents in nationwide about their daily habit on using Facebook. According to the Krejcie and Morgan (1970) table, 730 respondents were considered as an acceptable sample number for the total population of more than 78 million with 99% confidence level.

We filtered our respondents by asking whether they actively use Facebook in their everyday life. Apparently, 89% Indonesian Facebook users actively access their account in daily basis. However, their pattern of accessing Facebook may low in frequency, but it remains high in duration. Averagely, most respondents access Facebook up to 1-6 times in a day, as well as 3-10 minutes in each access time. This finding shows that Indonesian Facebook users usually spend 3 minutes in minimum to 60 minutes a day on Facebook. More importantly, although the number was still relatively low, but we found a trend that the older the user, the longer time they spend on Facebook.

Different pattern on accessing Facebook was also be found between men and women. Among several activities we listed as choices, our male and female respondents show different activities when Facebook-ing as shown on the infographic image below.

Regarding the number of content posted in Facebook, most Indonesian Facebook users said that they usually post about 1 to 10 posts in a month. In general, Indonesian Facebook users between sexes were more likely to post similar content. However, a notable finding was found when we found that 17% of male respondents were more likely to post their photo works, while in our female respondents were more likely to share special moments in their lives.

Another notable difference between male and female respondents also be found on two activities. Related to the “notes” feature offered by Facebook, eventually male respondents were more likely to use it than female. In other hand, our female respondents said that they were more likely to update their life milestones such as graduating, working, engaged, married, and having kids than male respondents.

As social media was popular as a virtual place of befriending, we asked our respondents about people on their friend list. Interestingly, we found different finding about people on the friend list between Path and Facebook. In Path, respondents were more likely to be friend with their actual real friends at the first place and their family at the second place. However, this finding was significantly different in Facebook. In Facebook, family do come first. Family was mentioned as the number one person in respondents’ friend list, followed by their regular friends, close friends, friends they rarely interact, office mates, and so on. Moreover, we also found that Indonesian Facebook users were more likely to be friend with a perfect stranger than famous celebrity they liked.

We further discovered about respondents’ considerations on confirming Facebook friend request. The mutual friends between them were mentioned as the primary reason on confirming someone’s friend request. This finding then followed by checking on the occupational identity, profile photo, display name, and the least of them considered the marriage status of friend request sender.

In case of marketing communication, Facebook has been long known as a promising promotion channel. Numbers of local, regional, and global brands bet their luck in Facebook by creating Facebook brand fan page. However, this effort seems like do not come in vein. 87% of Indonesian Facebook users said that they ever liked brand fan pages.

At last, we asked whether our respondents were using Facebook Messenger service to chat with others. Interestingly, 74% of them said that they use the service. We then prolonged our investigation by asking respondents’ reasons of using and not using Facebook Messenger. Respondents who use Facebook Messenger said that Facebook Messenger was a simpler way to chat while they were accessing their Facebook account. Moreover, they were also being able to talk with people on their friend list although they do not have their personal contact number. Facebook Messenger was also considered as comfortable, more private, and has attractive emoticons.

However, for those who did not use Facebook Messenger, their reasons were mainly about chatting platform preference. They prefer to use other chatting platform than Facebook Messenger. This finding then followed by respondents’ opinion that Facebook Messenger was less simpler, less private, and it did not offer any call/video call feature.

For more detail you can download XLS report at the button below (bahasa). JAKPAT report consists of 3 parts which are 1) Respondent Profile, 2) Crosstabulation for each question and 3) Raw Data. Respondent profile shows you demographic profiles ( gender,age range, location by province, and monthly spending). Cross tabulation enables you to define different demographic segment preference on each answer.