Which social apps do you have on your smartphone? Twitter, Facebook, and Skype are some of the usual suspects in US. Would you be surprised if I tell you that none of these are the most popular social apps used via smartphones in Japan?

According to MMD’s “Business Person’s Communication Tool Research,” LINE came on top of list of the popular communication apps used for businesses in Japan. During the past 2 years, LINE grew rapidly and has become one of the most popular social networking sites and tools in Japan. However, this results (43.3%: using LINE for business communications all the time) was surprising to me, too, that I didn’t think it was largely used for business communications.

Of those 43.4%, who responded that they used it all the time, more than 62% are in 20-29 years old, 41% are 30-39 years old, and 26.4% are in the 40’s. It looks that there are huge generation gap in the LINE user profile, at least for the business use.