This article includes the following topics and has a regional focus on China, South Korea, Japan and partly India:

1. Demographics on social media use in Asia (China, South Korea, Japan, India)
2. Developing a social media strategy that pays into SEO and includes PR activities
3. Explanation of social media channels

1. Demographics on social media use in Asia (China, South Korea, Japan, India)

The following graphs and tables show information about the use and penetration of social media in China, Japan, South Korea and India.

» Click on picture to enlarge

Channel usage per country:

Every market is different:

Still, different markets show different user behavior. A reason for this could be the maturity and the development of a country in general. In the following table the item “research / find products to buy” gives an indication: The more developed the country the higher this shopping and comparison related behavior is listed. That’s no proof of course, but an indicator.

» Click on picture to enlarge

» Click on picture to enlarge

» Click on picture to enlarge

2. Developing a social media strategy that pays into SEO and includes PR activities

You need to have a strategy to fully leverage the potential of social media for SEO. All activities should be coordinated by one person/department. It’s possible that different departments participate in the social media execution, e.g. PR, sales, customer support, but one coordinator needs to remain the helm.

Steps of a social media strategy:

1. Understand your target group. Listen and learn and collect consumer insights. Find out where your target group likes to stay online.
2. Your target group consists of different kind of online contributors. Define the right channel for the respective user group.
3. Execute the channels.
4. Make sure that channel manager communicate with each other to leverage content and create links
5. Track, collect more consumer insights, learn more and use this information to refine your approach.

3. Explanation of social media channels

SEO/search engine results:
All content created in the channels will finally be picked up by search engines and add to your visibility especially for brand and product related keywords. It’s important that good and high-quality content is available in the search engine result pages to create upmost influence. If you do a search for your product or brand you will notice that search engine results are consumer dictated.

Just test yourself for your brand name or product name. How many results do you find among the first 20 results that are user-generated content, i.e. blog posts, forum discussions, video uploads, product reviews, Q&A sites? And how many results are based on your own distributed content, i.e. own website, press releases,etc.?

Blogs:
The majority of blogs in the blogosphere are personal blogs and niche blogs which generally don’t have many views. But they are observed by peers and category specialists or found in the search engines. A good story from a small blog can create some good buzz. On the other hand, a negative product or brand comment/experience can spark the flame. The mega-blogs with million of readers certainly have a strong impact when you get some coverage there. Blog marketing is an essential part of your online marketing communication strategy and goes hand-in-hand with online PR.

Forums:
In China, traditional forums and BBS are still the leading channel of user-generated content. More users contribute to a
forum than to a social network or than write a blog. But also for other countries, forums are an equally important channel.  Forums are mostly expert communities that focus around a certain topic or category. There are always a couple of power contributors who are responsible for most of the content. But for the normal consumer, forums are a powerful and very influencing source of information. Moreover, forums have the characteristic that very few people participate, but many, may people read. Also, for marketers forums are a valuable source of consumer insights.

Reviews:
Reviews should be divided into editorial reviews and consumer reviews. Editorial reviews are often based on product samples that a marketer sends out to a blog or review site to write a profound but independent review. Oftentimes this is part of the PR strategy of a marketer. These editorial reviews oftentimes are also extremely detailed and critical. Reviewers have a high standard and lots of professional experience and see things and specs from a different point of view.

Consumer reviews on the other hand are not as detailed and deep. Often they consist just of a few sentences. But they are an extremely important influencing factor. Web pages of products listed on shopping portals or price-comparison sites which have no consumer reviews normally look very boring: Product image, specs, price. That’s it. Totally exchangable, nothing convincing. A web shop which has consumer reviews and star ratings for the products listed has a much higher conversion rates than shops that have only product data. Products with many reviews and ratings are considered popular and worth buying than products without any user experience comments.

» Click to enlarge

Social networks:
Facebook and social networks are a big hype, but when it comes to your online marketing mix you should priorize what can have a big impact and what not. Social networks should certainly be part of your online activity but expectations should be realistc. Remember that only a low percentage of Facebook pages have more than a thousand fans. And to get in the area of 100,000 fans you already must have a strong brand awareness in public life. Before you engage in Facebook be sure where your fans are and what content you can provide to them. Be sure that you have the resources to communicate with them on a daily basis.

Source: The pictures are taken from a globalwebindex presentation and  you can find them on slideshare.

H9AEFJMXKZWJ

In Asian countries, social media is a very important parts of the online marketing mix and many brands use blogs and communities to create brand awareness. This post offers some numbers and reasons about the social media phenomenon.

What is social media?

Actually we just need to split the term into social and media. Social stands for interaction of Internet users and for sharing content, basically characteristics that give technology a human touch. Media is the content that is shared and can be any kind of online media like videos, pictures, text or sound.

So, put together social media is about reading and writing blogs, posting opinions in blogs or BBS, creating accounts in online communities, uploading pictures, videos or music, make friends by connecting to other online profiles and share content with them.

Social media use in Asia

Universal McCann conducts a yearly study about worldwide use of social media. This study has really some great numbers and I summarized some of them with a focus on Asian countries. Asian countries covered are Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Philippines, India.

The key facts:

• Asian countries have worldwide the highest penetration of blogs and communities. Numbers are the same with video upload, photo sharing, etc.
• The inventors of the social media business models (esp. the US and to some extent the European countries) lag clearly behind.
• Use-generated content has become a mainstream online medium in Asia.

I wonder about one thing: You can quite often hear the opinion that Chinese like to use social media because through blogs they can the first time freely express their opinion. This study contradicts that idea because other Asian countries like Japan and South Korea with freedom of opinion embrace blogs and communities in the same way. The inversion of the argument is that it must somewhere lie in the Asian culture and nature of the people.

Maybe a sociologist could help in this matter. Anyway, any kind of idea or comment is welcome!

Why is social media so popular among users?

The use of blogs and online communities has a great stimulation for persons. It allows them to communicate and interact on a very private basis, sharing personal information that one would maybe not so openly and easily share in real life. This “open your soul online” phenomenon is supported by the fact that many people who are online in social media live under a pseudonym, basically being able to be themselves but not showing others their real identity. This allows pushing the border much further than in real life as you’re real identity can’t be tracked back.

Example 1: Opinions in blogs, forums or bbs show very clearly what a person thinks. And people tend to be very open and frank when their real name will not be shown. One can assume that in a face-to-face discussions many opinions that are posted online would be worded more carefully – or maybe not at all.

Example 2: A profile in a social network like myspace. Many people basically expose themselves. It would be like these people place their family picture album in front of a supermarket, so everybody can take a look. Nobody would do that. But online it’s no big deal.

The importance of social media for brands and businesses

1. Social media has become a mass-media in Asia that can’t be neglected due to it’s mere reach.

2. Blogs and communities offer insight about consumer opinions which have never been available before because they are real and true. I.e. businesses and brands can not only find out what consumers really think, but if done wisely they can use the willingness of people to create own content for product development (creative consumer).

3. The word-of-mouth (viral) potential of social media campaigns can create great buzz.

4. Brand management must adopt and create a culture within the company to profit from the social media development.

5. Opinions and reported experiences about companies, products and services are one of the most important influencing factors for decision building prior to the purchase of a product, no matter if the purchase happens online or offline.

• 80% of Chinese sites are running their own BBS and the total daily page view is over 1600 million and 10 million posts are published every day.
• In China around 36.3% users spend 1-3 hours on BBS, about 44.7% users spend 3-8 hours and even 15.1% users are on BBS for more than 8 hours a day. Over 60% of users will login at least 3 BBS more than 3 times each every week.
• More than 80% users are using BBS to search for the information of the product they plan to buy and 61.7% users are keen to ask other BBS users for opinion before make the purchase. 47.3% users have bought products directly from the BBS, which implies the BBS are also becoming an important form of e-business.
• The BBS users are more mature [than blog users], they are mainly at the age of 20 to 40, well-educated and with various professional background, and their contribution to all sorts of forums make BBS a valuable information source.