Facebook’s primary goal in Indonesia remains advertising sales and it aims to boost its ad revenue from small to medium companies while also looking for ways to increase user activities across its many properties. Its hiring of Anand Tilak as country manager for Indonesia reveals the general direction of its plans for the country in the foreseeable future.
Digital advertising is one of the most practical and cost effective ways that smaller companies can use to raise their profiles and reach their intended audience. Facebook is expecting that it will be able to convince Indonesian companies to take advantage of its tools as opposed to, for example, Google’s.
Despite having the fourth largest number of registered Facebook users in the world with 65 million monthly users, it is widely understood that Indonesia remains low in terms of revenue for Facebook, especially when calculated as revenue per user. Although the company does not disclose revenue details, a TechCrunch report in August pointed out that Facebook’s revenue per user in Q2 2013 outside of North America is only USD 0.63 whereas North American Facebook users earn the company USD 4.23 per person.
Back in April, Affle group founder and chairman Anuj Khanna Sohum told DailySocial about the potential in mobile advertising in Indonesia. “Right now the total mobile ad spend by companies in Indonesia is less than 1% of the entire advertising spend. It’s going to grow much higher”, Sohum said. A study by eMarketer said that the digital ad spend in Indonesia is 2.2 percent of the entire advertising spend across all media. Whether digital includes mobile is uncertain but it would be logical to assume that mobile ad spend is part of digital.
According to SocialBakers which publishes Facebook statistics, Facebook’s largest demographic in Indonesia in 2013 is the 18-34 age range at over 60 percent, followed by teenagers between 13 and 17 at nearly 25 percent. In the United States, the same age groups record less than 50 percent and less than 10 percent respectively. In other words, the company faces a clearly different market which means it needs to implement different strategies and tactics to win either one.
Facebook’s numbers say that 33 million people in Indonesia use Facebook daily while throughout the month, that number goes up to 65 million. Facebook VP for Asia Pacific Dan Neary said that out of the 65 million, 55 million Indonesians log on to Facebook primarily from mobile devices. Given this behavior, the advertising numbers mentioned previously become even more significant.
Facebook is expected to earn 15.8 percent of global mobile advertising revenue in 2013, up from 5.35 percent in 2012. That growth, if achieved, represents a massive increase in such a short time although it remains behind Google which is expected to hold over 51 percent of share.
Recently Facebook revealed that 121 million of its users in the US and the UK are actively accessing Facebook daily from mobile devices. That’s nearly 80% out of the 152 million daily active users in both countries and this is very likely the trend that Facebook is seeing across all of its markets.
The company’s recent moves in mobile advertising activities, which includes a recently relauched ad network, and its experimentations with regards to mobile interfaces whether on Facebook itself or on Instagram, with the recent introduction of Instagram video ads for the US audience, show just how driven the company is when it comes to achieving results from the mobile market.