According to the Asia-Pacific director of Ogilvy Public Relations’ global social media team, Social media guru Thomas Crampton, more and more Asians are blogging, joining Facebook and Twitter. Fact: 3 of 5 Singaporeans are on Facebook. Fact: 220 million bloggers in China. There is a big opportunity for online advertising.
Here are some excerpts from article via AFP – Asians muscling into social media world (27 Sept 2010):
With more than 220 million bloggers in China alone and nearly three out of five people in Singapore having a Facebook account, Asia is presenting a huge commercial opportunity for online advertising.
Social media guru Thomas Crampton, Asia-Pacific director of Ogilvy Public Relations’ global social media team, said regional users were jumping on the social media bandwagon at a faster rate than the rest of the world.
‘Asia is … the most exciting part of the world for what’s going on in social media,’ he told AFP on the sidelines of a social media forum in Singapore.
A report in July by research firm Nielsen said that ‘while the US pioneered much of the early Web 2.0 and social media innovation, Asia is playing no small role in shaping – and in some cases leading – the new social media landscape’. The report added that ‘Asian social media adoption rates have surpassed Western adoption rates’.
As of December 2009, China had 221 million bloggers or more than twice the number in the United States, it added.
Mr Crampton noted that Facebook’s ranking of leading markets showed Indonesia was already a close third behind the United States and Britain in monthly active subscribers – and poised to take second spot within months
In June this year Asians also ‘tweeted’ the most on micro-blogging platform Twitter, outpacing the US, according to data from Internet research company Semiocast.
‘Twitter users in Asia, mainly located in Japan, Indonesia and South Korea, account for 37 per cent of tweets,’ said Semiocast, which studied 2.9 million tweets over a period of 24 hours on June 22.
It said US-generated tweets now account for only 25 per cent of messages on Twitter, down from 30 per cent in March.
Asia-Pacific users are also creating social media content ‘to an extent that is unheard of almost anywhere in the world’, Mr Crampton added.
Data from research firm Forrester showed Chinese, South Korean, Japanese and Australians creating video, music and text content for social media at a much higher rate than Americans did last year.
And despite China’s ban on Facebook and Twitter, the nation still boasts the largest number of social media users in any country thanks to locally-developed substitutes, the Hong Kong-based Mr Crampton said.
Read more at AFP – Asians muscling into social media world. Image via AFP.
