Is Facebook still the main channel in Vietnam?

Most foreign teams arrive at this question with a budget split already half-formed. Someone at head office has read that TikTok has overtaken Facebook in Vietnam. Someone in the regional office says Facebook is still where everyone is. Both are partly right.

They disagree because "main channel" is being used to mean three different things, and in Vietnam those three have drifted apart.

"Main channel" is three questions, not one

Reach. How many people a platform can put an advertisement in front of.

Discovery. Where people in your category come across products they were not yet looking for.

Completion. Where the questions get asked, the order gets agreed and the sale is closed.

In many markets the same platform leads on all three, so the question has one answer. Here it does not. Facebook still leads on reach, shares discovery with TikTok and YouTube, and on completion competes with Zalo, the marketplaces and its own Messenger.

So the useful answer depends on which of the three your plan needs Facebook to carry. Every plan needs all three from somewhere.

What the audience figures show, and what they cannot

The most quoted numbers are the platforms' own audience figures, collected each year by DataReportal. For Vietnam, its Digital 2026 report gives these, for October 2025:

Two of those figures are larger than the population they are drawn from. Facebook's is equivalent to 106.4 percent of adults aged 18 and over; TikTok's to 102.9 percent. That is not an error in the report. An advertising audience counts the accounts an ad tool will let you target, and accounts are not people. The report says as much: "Estimated audience size is not a proxy for monthly or daily active users, or for engagement."

Read that way, the table makes one point clearly. Vietnam had 85.6 million internet users at the same date, and every large platform here reaches almost all of them. Reach no longer separates Facebook from TikTok or Zalo, so it cannot tell you which one is the main channel.

The direction of travel says more than the level. Over the year, TikTok's figure grew by 9.9 percent and Facebook's by 7.2 percent, while Zalo's grew by under 1 percent and YouTube's slipped slightly. Platforms revise how they estimate these audiences, so a single year's change should be read loosely. Survey data points the same way: Decision Lab's Connected Consumer tracking for the fourth quarter of 2025 still ranks Facebook first among social platforms, ahead of Zalo and YouTube, while noting its declining appeal among Gen Z as it holds up among millennials.

Where Facebook still does work nothing else does here

Facebook in Vietnam is less one channel than several, grown from the same trunk. Four of them have no real substitute yet.

The page is a credential. Buyers check a seller's page before they trust it: how long it has existed, what people say in the comments, whether questions get answered. A foreign brand without an active local page looks less established than a local seller with one, however much it spends on ads.

Messenger is a till. For considered purchases and for anything paid on delivery, many orders are agreed in conversation. That is why ads that open a Messenger thread, rather than send people to a website, are common here. They work only when someone answers, in Vietnamese, within minutes, at the hours people actually write, which includes evenings and weekends.

Groups hold the recommendations. Parents, pet owners, motorbike riders and many hobbies have active groups where members ask each other what to buy. A brand cannot buy its way into those threads. It can be present, answer questions plainly and be recommended.

The reach still spans ages. Where buyers are over thirty-five, or where the buyer and the user are different people, such as a parent buying for a child, Facebook remains the broadest single place to reach them.

TikTok replaces none of these four. So for most entrants the practical question is not whether to use Facebook. It is whether Facebook is the channel that finds new buyers, or the base that verifies the brand and closes the sale.

The platforms a business uses here, by job

For a business, the platforms divide more usefully by the job each does than by size:

The last column matters more than it looks. Each platform grades its own work, and the routes that close in conversation or inside another app are graded in places that do not talk to each other. A Facebook ad that starts a Messenger chat and a TikTok ad that ends in TikTok Shop are marked by different examiners using different rules. Sales inside a marketplace also carry their own deductions and their own reporting, which are covered under selling on Vietnamese marketplaces.

What has moved to TikTok, and what has not

The clearest evidence of a shift is not in the audience figures but in where money is spent. Q&Me's Vietnam E-commerce Market Report 2026, as reported by The Investor in June 2026, found that TikTok Shop took 44 percent of sales across the four largest marketplaces in the twelve months to April 2026, up from 33 percent a year earlier. Shopee's share fell from 61 to 53 percent over the same period. Buying that starts in a video feed and finishes inside the same app is now close to half of what those marketplaces sell.

What TikTok advertising in Vietnam buys is attention from people who were not looking. It comes in three main forms: ads in the feed, creators' videos promoted as ads, and ads inside TikTok Shop. The economics follow from that. A video's effect wears off quickly, so results depend on a steady supply of new ones. Creators are paid per video, by commission on each order, or both. A TikTok plan is therefore a production and creator-management plan with a media budget attached, and a brand that budgets only for the media finds out within weeks.

What has not moved is just as important:

• Conversation. People still ask questions, negotiate and follow up on Zalo and Messenger.
• Checking. A product found in a video still gets checked against reviews, ratings and the seller's page before a larger purchase. How that comparison works is set out under how Vietnamese consumers find and compare brands.
• Searching for a known product. That still happens in marketplace search and on Google.
• Older buyers. Facebook's position is weakest among the youngest users and holds among older ones.

The shift is real, and it is specific. Discovery in impulse-led and visually sold categories has moved towards short video, and much of that buying now completes without leaving the app. In categories that are researched, negotiated or bought by older customers, the move is far smaller.

Why "Facebook stopped working" is often a measurement result

Foreign teams often hear from local partners that Facebook does not work any more. Sometimes that is true. Four other explanations are worth ruling out first, because each looks identical in the dashboard:

• The sale moved and the credit did not. When the order is agreed in Messenger or completed on a marketplace, the ad that started it records a conversation or a click, not a purchase.
• Part of the reported result is estimated. Browsers and phones block some tracking, and platforms fill the gap with modelled figures. A change in the modelling looks exactly like a change in performance.
• The audience is worn out. An account that keeps showing the same message to the same small audience will see costs rise. That is a creative and targeting problem, and moving the budget to another platform only restarts the clock.
• The benchmark came from elsewhere. A cost per purchase carried in from another market was built on a different definition of a purchase.

Separating these takes the company's own order records, not a better dashboard. Building those records so that chat and marketplace sales carry their source is the core of marketing measurement in Vietnam.

Settling it for your own category: a worked example

The market-wide numbers cannot answer the question for one brand. A funded comparison can. The figures below are illustrative, not client data: a foreign personal-care brand spends the same amount for eight weeks on two routes, Facebook ads that open a Messenger conversation and TikTok ads that lead to TikTok Shop.

On the platforms' own reports, TikTok looks almost three times as efficient. Meta could count only the few conversations that ended in a purchase on the website; the orders agreed inside Messenger were visible only because the sales team recorded where each one came from. On collected orders, the two routes cost about the same.

The TikTok column is also not yet complete. It excludes the commission paid to creators on each order and any vouchers the brand funded, and both belong in the cost before the routes are compared.

Once the reports are put on the same footing, the decision moves to things neither dashboard shows: which route brings customers who buy again, which one the brand can staff, conversation or content production, and how the margin differs between channels. Margin is a figure the company supplies; it cannot be read from any ad platform.

What to put in the first-year plan

• Treat a Facebook page and Messenger as base infrastructure, whichever channel does the discovery. That means replies in Vietnamese within minutes, a page kept current, and every chat order recorded with its source.
• Choose the discovery channel from how the category is found. Feed-led, visually sold categories point to TikTok and Reels. Search-led and considered categories point to search, marketplaces and explanation-heavy video.
• Fund a comparison like the one above in the first quarter, and read it on collected orders.
• Keep Zalo in view for repeat contact, which matters more the more often a customer buys.
• Revisit the split once a year. Marketplace shares moved by eleven points in twelve months, and the answer that was right at launch may not be right a year later.

Where the figures in this article come from

• Audience figures: DataReportal, Digital 2026: Vietnam, with platform figures for October 2025. Zalo's figure is VNG's own statement of monthly active users, as cited in that report.
• Marketplace shares: Q&Me, Vietnam E-commerce Market Report 2026, covering May 2025 to April 2026, as reported by The Investor on 3 June 2026.
• Platform ranking and generational pattern: Decision Lab, Connected Consumer survey, fourth quarter of 2025.
• The worked example uses illustrative figures chosen to show the method, not results from any client.

Where this work stops

MWY does not buy media on any platform, does not manage advertising accounts and takes no commission from platforms or agencies, so it has no stake in which platform wins the split.

Establishing how a particular category is discovered and bought in Vietnam, with the evidence behind each finding, is Vietnam Market Research. Turning that into channel roles, a first-year sequence and a test designed like the one above is Go-to-Market Strategy.

Running the campaigns, producing the videos and answering the messages stay with the brand's own team or its agencies.