More than 96 percent of Taiwanese Internet users said they had used social networking sites within the past two weeks, with Facebook remaining the most popular outlet for people to interact online, according to a survey.
In a report released yesterday, the Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute (MIC) of the Institute for Information Industry said it found that YouTube was the most popular multimedia sharing platform, while local Web sites Mobile01 and PTT were the most frequented online discussion forums.
Of the Internet users in the survey, 96.2 percent said they had used social media within the two weeks prior to the survey, while 54.7 percent reported using multimedia sharing platforms, 39.6 percent had used discussion boards, 28.9 percent had used blogs, 15.5 percent had used microblogging sites and 13.8 percent had used photo-sharing platforms.
Facebook was the most-used social networking site by a huge margin, with 95.8 percent of respondents having used it, with Google+ claiming a distant second at 24.7 percent.
The third, fourth and fifth places went to Taiwanese sites Pixnet (20.7 percent), Xuite (12.7 percent) and Plurk (8 percent).
Following YouTube (96.5 percent), the most popular sharing sites were Chinese site Tudou (23.6 percent) and PPStream (20.3 percent), Yahoo Screen/Movies (19.5 percent) and Xuite Vlog (17.7 percent).
Mobile01 (51.4 percent) was named the most popular forum, with PTT (51.2 percent) close behind, followed by Yahoo Knowledge (46.2 percent), Eyny (35.5 percent) and CK101 (23.4 percent).
The survey found that social networking is a platform for respondents to keep in contact with real-life friends (73 percent), family members (60.3 percent), people from work (42.4 percent), friends who they have not seen in a long time (35.4 percent) and friends they know only online (27.9 percent).
The online survey was conducted in March and collected 2,187 samples with a margin of error of 2.1 percent.
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