The Social landscape in Asia

I refer to a post by Simon Kemp from We are Social, Singapore, referring to a statistical analysis of their Social Media report for Asia (March 2013). This is a very impressive report as it clearly details how much active users are now using social media in the Asia region. Of course, there should be a tremendous increase in social media usage as technology and smartphone penetration is prevalent in Asia. Judging from the report, it does gives significant insights on how best for marketers to understand the social landscape within Asia. This would serve as a great bonus to assist in planning your busy marketing schedules.

Some thoughts of mine:

Singapore (the country where I now reside in)
Here in Singapore, social plays a big part in people’s lives. While there is still a significant number of people especially the elderly who are not social adopters, the amount of social usage is still considerably compelling. As you can pretty much see from this report that 2.7M people are active users. On this small sunny island, that is easily almost half of the entire(approx. 6M) population.

China (emerging SUPER POWER social nation)
Always a big surprise for me. China surprised many with their incredible usage of social. Obviously, a nation with such huge population would command an enormous record number of social users. China is a very interesting market with a lot of business opportunities. As always, it is very important to do your homework and understand the local culture there. A good strategy you adopted might have worked really well, but it might not be the same in China. Some fine tuning is required. Nonetheless, it is definitely one powerhouse social nation.

Indonesia (amazing social usage)
I have read reports of how social is progressing in Indonesia and they often give great positive insights of how much the Indonesians adopt social. Seems to me that there are so much potential to do creative work in Indonesia. With the amount of exposure and the huge population, there is much to be done and more to be appreciated. I am expecting more and more great creative work from there.

Here is the graph from We are Social, depicting the overall penetration and the median of growth.

Simon provided us with great insights on how he perceives social in Asia. I totally agreed with his view points that mobile is quick to emerge due to this huge appetite in social. As smartphone devices gets more and more efficient for daily usage meeting people’s social demands, more and more work could done to leverage on this growth. Simon also talked about how in Korea, KakaoTalk is progressing so well and in China, WeChat seems to be infiltrating the other regional markets just as fast as back home. All these are tangible results and statistically proven as tell tale signs of an unimaginable social appetite that is growing in Asia. I think it is time that brands should now take on more strategic measures to embrace this growth to their marketing advantage.