Social Media is developing a huge variety of cultures in different parts of the world. Asia is a particularly fascinating market because the number of users is just so vast. I thought I’d list a few statistics to whet the appetite.
To make a comparison, the US has 225 million internet customers and 260 million mobile i.e. they are about even. However in China the mobile market far exceeds the internet market (340 MM internet users, 650 million mobile users). It is clearly worth studying how this market is evolving – with so many users there are great innovations occurring in this market. Western organizations are being slow to learn from their Aisian counterparts.
Internet speeds highlight one difference. In Korea 70% of the population has Internet speeds greater than 5mbps. They have a huge online gaming market (even bigger than Japan) despite the fact that they have a third of the population and are considerably smaller.
In Japan more than 90% of mobile subscribers are on 3G networks and more than 50% of these have mobile TVMobile game content revenue is higher than PC game content. A large percentage of revenue from online games is generated by selling virtual products. The market in avatars is huge. China’s top social network QQ does more than $1 billion in revenue which is about double what Facebook is forecast to make.
So social networking is alive and well in Asia. So how should organizations use this to their advantage? SociaLNK has been exploring the social media space in Asia. What we have noticed is that it is really growing up. Just as the demographic for Facebook shifted from University students to active workers the same is playing out in the Asian market. There are literally millions of working people out there who are used to using social media as part of their daily life. We have some great ideas for how to build a successful strategy to promote your business via social media marketing in Asia. This is a huge market with hundreds of opportunities – why don’t you contact us for a chat?
