How Asia responds to Social Media Marketing

When it comes to social media, Asians have certain peculiar engagement needs and the following excerpts from a study will help you discover them.

Covering 15 countries including Singapore, China and India the qualitative survey was developed based on the observations of 32 selected bloggers in each country.

According to a qualitative research conducted by Firefly Millward Brown, people from different countries behave  differently when using social media. Here are some key findings:

• Shopping ranks top when it comes to the online-offline activity of people in Singapore. It is followed by interest in food blogs and  banks
• The “shopping association” is less prevalent in Thailand and Indonesia when compared to other countries in Asia
• Thais use social media to create a sense of community. The maximum online conversations  are around expressions of friendship and connectedness
• Singaporeans want their virtual world to be similar to their real lives. Everything that they do in person is expected to be similar in the online world as well
• Indonesians consider social media as a way to establish social status. Social media is a way of self-promotion
• Chinese are also active on various social platforms despite Facebook’s ban in China. Chinese social media users felt left out of global dialogues.
• Due to high mobile penetration in Indonesia platforms that provide brief and quick means of communicating such as Twitter are gaining popularity
• Online consumers in Singapore don’t want marketers to turn social media into “marketplace” unlike other fellow countries in the region

Nichola Rastrick, managing director of the research firm, explained that consumers did not want social platforms to turn into an avenue to hawk goods and services. Instead, they wanted marketers to engage them in dialogues. She warned that the biggest mistake marketers can make is to treat social media networks as a “marketplace”.

“Businesses should cultivate a two-way conversation with the online community and establish a proper social media team to run effective campaigns. Other rules include paying attention to small details, allowing negative comments so that consumers can make informed decisions, and building social media credentials through “humanization” of the brand,” Christoper Madison, the company’s regional director of digital strategy, suggested.

These results explain that companies and marketers have to be more hands-on in maintaining their online presence. Engaging the customers with the right message on social media is of great importance.  Every country in Asia have different behaviors and needs. It is important to understand the how users interact with these media to understand how to target consumers better.

Also catch: The Big Social Media Marketing Plan