Most Pinoy Facebook users are overseas?

Surprising new data seems to indicate that Filipinos, despite having the fifth largest Facebook population in the world, seem to be accessing the site from outside the country —or at least are playing things safe online.

Social media metrics company Socialbakers.com recently launched Facebook city statistics as part of its monitoring service, adding a higher level of granularity to its continued monitoring of Facebook statistics per country.

"Besides monitoring Facebook users on continents and in all countries around the world, we have decided to take this monitoring one step further and monitor Facebook users in selected world cities as well," Facebakers said on its blog.

Yet, despite being the eleventh largest city in the world and the capital of the fifth dominant country on Facebook, Manila does not figure anywhere on the Socialbakers list. Nor does any other Philippine city.

Overseas —or just cautious?

These surprising statistics seem to indicate that the majority of Filipinos who use Facebook are located overseas —or at least have not indicated their current city or hometown in their Facebook profiles.

Although Facebook allows users to post information about their location to their public profiles, these details are not required to join the social networking site.

In fact, the Philippine National Police (PNP) last year warned parents to monitor their kids' Facebook usage, urging users of the social networking site to limit the amount of personal information that they post online.

Manila didn't make it

Over the past year, Socialbakers statistics have charted the meteoric rise of the Philippines into Facebook's fifth largest user worldwide, with over 22.6 million registered Filipino Facebook users to date.

However, the release of city-specific data from Socialbakers shows a surprising development: none of the Philippines' cities —not even Manila, the country's capital and the eleventh most populous city in the world, according to Worldatlas.com— made it to the entire list of 120 cities.

Not surprisingly, ten of the 20 largest cities in the world can be found on the list. These include Jakarta, Indonesia (Rank 1 on Socialbakers); Mexico City, Mexico (3); London, the UK (4); Buenos Aires, Argentina (6); New York City, USA (14); Sao Paolo, Brazil (15); Los Angeles, USA (17); Mumbai, India (18); Delhi, India (36); and Calcutta, India (79).

Alternatives to Facebook

Other countries not on the Socialbakers list —including Tokyo, Japan, and Seoul, South Korea, the world's most populous cities— can be accounted for as having their own alternative social networks to Facebook.

Japan, for instance, uses Mixi, while South Korea employs Cyworld. China, for its part, has QQ Zone, and Russia has VKontakte.

On the other hand, the United States —which boasts the largest number of Facebook users in the world— has 21 cities on the Socialbakers list. Indonesia, the second largest country on Facebook, has three cities on the list. Third- and fourth-placers the UK and Turkey have four and five cities on the list, respectively. — GMA News