The top social media app of choice among Singaporeans is Meta-owned WhatsApp, which ranked number one in both being a favourite and most used platform among the population, according to social and media intelligence company Meltwater.
About 27% of the population rated WhatsApp as their favourite app, while 74.7% said it was their most used social platform.
This finding comes from Meltwater’s Digital 2024: Singapore report, a nation focused report of its global digital report surveying the digital footprint of countries worldwide in collaboration with creative agency We Are Social.
The report finds that Singaporeans spend an average of 2 hours and 14 minutes a day on social media across an average of 6.9 social media platforms each month. About 85% of the population, or 5.13 million social media user identities are from Singapore, which brings the country to rank 10 globally for social media adoption versus total population.
Meta’s Facebook ranks second place as favourite (16.7%) and most used (72.7%) social media platform in Singapore, while TikTok tops the spot for most time spent in the Android app with a total of 33 hours, 23 minutes per month.
TikTok was the most downloaded app in Singapore in 2023, followed by messaging app Telegram and Bytedance-owned video editing tool Capcut, according to the report.
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Meanwhile, the report underscores the growing significance of money spent on digital advertising in Singapore. In 2023, expenditure on digital advertising grew 10.5% to $2.34 billion, making up 59.7% of total advertising spend.
In that, social media advertising made up 24.5% share of total digital advertising spend, increasing 11.8% in 2023 to $573.5 million.
Meltwater says that Singaporeans like to stay connected with chat and messaging, where 97.5% said that this is the number one type of app or website they visit, followed by social networks at 95.8%.
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Besides that, filling in spare time and reading the news are the primary reasons that more than a third use social media in Singapore.
Globally, Meltwater finds that by January 2024, the number of unique mobile phone users sits at 5.61 billion, and 69.4% of the world’s total population now uses a mobile device. Active social media user identities have passed the 5 billion mark, with the latest user figure equivalent to 62.3% of the world’s population.
A “typical” social media user now spends 2 hours and 23 minutes per day using social media, which makes Singapore’s average user spend lower than this.
