SINGAPORE: Digital connectivity is quickly becoming a part of everyday life for people all over the Asia-Pacific region, according to a new study which highlights the rapid growth of mobile social over the past year.

We Are Social, the social media agency, partnered with the Interactive Advertising Bureau Singapore in producing a report – Digital, Social & Mobile in APAC in 2015 – that provides a comprehensive overview of activity across the region's 59 countries, as well as in-depth data and analysis for 30 of its key economies.

Overall, 36% of the population – 1,436m – now uses the internet, the report revealed. And the share of web traffic attributable to desktops and laptops continues to fall – on current trends, mobile's share of  43.3% will pass that of PCs before the end of this year.

More than one quarter (27%) had used social media in the past 30 days, with Facebook and QZone being by far the region's largest social networks with monthly active user numbers of 1,415m and 629m respectively.

But even since the start of the year, We Are Social had observed significant increases in the number of active users being reported on other social platforms, including WhatsApp (+100m), Baidu Tieba (+100m) and Viber (+27m).

And people appeared to be doing more with their time on these platforms, as 3bn videos were shared daily on Facebook and 30bn messages sent every day on WhatsApp.

"Mobile social is the hottest digital trend in APAC at the moment," according to Simon Kemp, regional managing partner of We Are Social in Asia and the report's author.

The number of people in the region accessing social media from mobile devices climbed 32% in 2014 to reach 900m, with that figure expected to exceed 1bn in the fourth quarter of this year.

Kemp added that there was still plenty of room to grow as less than half the region's population currently had access to the internet, and fewer still to fast broadband.

Data sourced from We Are Social; additional content by Warc staff