Accor Hotels has surveyed more than 6,500 travellers from the Asia Pacific region to produce its second Social Media Monitor highlighting behaviour across the various social networks.
The research shows that Asia-born instant message applications such as WeChat and Line are catching up with the more established and most popular services such as Facebook and WhatsApp.
In Thailand, for example, Line outranks Facebook in terms of daily usage and is also amongst the top three most popular networks in Indonesia and Japan.
In four markets - Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and India - Whatsapp has also overtaken Facebook.
YouTube and Instagram are also growing in popularity according to the Accor research with 23% of travellers saying they use the video channel several times during the day while 11% of travellers say the same of Instagram.
Further findings include:
- More than 70% of travellers across the region now use social media when travelling with those from China, Vietnam and Indonesia revealed as the most active users.
- Almost half of respondents say they use Facebook multiple times during the day, only 13% say they have never used it.
- 54% of women use Facebook multiple times during the day compared to 45% of men. Travellers from the Philippines are the biggest users in the region at 73%, up 13 points from last year.
- In India, Singapore and Malaysia, travellers use Facebook to research and share their trips and WhatsApp during the trip to stay in touch.
- WeChat and Line have increased in popularity since Accor first ran the study last year, by 13% and 11% respectively.