Just to recap our analysis earlier on the most popular social platforms in Malaysia, here are the top 5 social media apps on Malaysians’ mobile phones:
- Facebook – 23M users in Malaysia
- YouTube – 20M users in Malaysia
- Instagram – 11M users in Malaysia
- LinkedIn – 4.4M users in Malaysia
- Twitter – 2.2M users in Malaysia
There is another mobile app that is hugely popular among Malaysians, especially for those who drive. That’s right, it is none other than Waze, the navigation app that most Malaysians love.
Waze is only popular in certain regions and countries though. For example, if you go to Thailand our neighboring country, the locals are only using Google Maps and nobody is using Waze there.
You can also head over to Waze Live Map and it seems that Wazers (a term coined for Waze users) are only spotted in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines throughout the Southeast Asia region.
You might be wondering why Waze is so popular here, right? While we don’t have any data to back this up but according to the “myth”, Malaysians use it to spot speed traps and police officers on the road.
This is a feature not available via navigation apps like Google Map, where Waze collects users’ information (crowdsource) and populate it in real-time to help users, be it to make the journey safer or to avoid fines.
Make sense right?
We didn’t really realize Waze’s popularity in Malaysia until we attended a Google conference held in Googleplex, San Francisco back in 2015.
According to a speaker from Waze, Malaysia was one of the top 5 countries with Waze users back then. The speaker even presented a Waze – Maxis case study in the US, in front of a global audience.
We were like “Woot! Super proud of Malaysia!”, Malaysians are actually very tech-savvy as long as there is a clear motive objective to pick up a new app.
So fast forward to 2017, Malaysia is still among the top 5 worldwide, and we have the highest number of Waze users in Asia.
According to the same report, Kuala Lumpur has 2.5 million active Waze users while Jakarta has 2 million and Manila has 1.5 million.
The question is, how many Waze users are there in Malaysia?
If we refer to this recent press release by Waze, there are 5.9 million monthly active Waze users in Malaysia, as of 2018.
Wow, that’s actually just behind Facebook, YouTube, Instagram users here, in front of LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media apps.
Therefore, it really makes sense for you to consider Waze advertising especially if you have physical retail locations.
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