It's not all Twitter on the Internets.
I started running sessions on social media and its impact on business in 2006, often using the byline “It is not just Facebook and Twitter…”. It’s not, but even today, the two social media powerhouses seem to be the only platforms recognized by a large number of people in the business world. Even some of the post-graduate students in those sessions are still “offline” when it comes to social media. Some students, however, are far ahead of the curve and are harnessing social media to create new business ideas.
However, just as social media is a foreign language for many people, social media in some countries can be dramatically impactful. Most English-speakers will think only of platforms from the USA when they think of social media – the ubiquitous Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Though those platforms do have international reach and dominate the global social media netscape, individual countries and regions often use them in different ways or have their own platforms that have proven far more popular with the native population.
Students pursuing their Master of Digital Marketing at Hult International Business School presented their views during Social Media Week in London on just this topic. The presentation, entitled “Views from inside: Social Media from around the globe” gave a whistle-stop tour of ten countries and how social media has been used there – more information can be found on my TechnoWaffle blog.
There are some commonalities that permeate social media usage across the globe, but each country and region has its nuances.
The key takeaways from the session were that there are some commonalities that permeate social media usage across the globe, but each country and region has its nuances.
- Colombia, for example, has a lot of young, creative digital talent making it easy to create clones of platforms such as Groupon and it also has a tech-savvy population that demands high quality products and services. Brazil, in contrast, doesn’t grow its own social media but is the largest user of Google’s Orkut social network.
- Germany also has a number of local social networks that mimic the larger, better known American ones: SchülerVZ, StudiVZ and MeinVZ are aimed at accompanying German networkers from their time at school to university to the workplace. Xing is also far more important there than LinkedIn. Greece, in contrast, doesn’t focus on home-grown networks but on how social media can be used to bring about social change, whether it is to bring the Elgin marbles back to Greece or to rebrand Greece.
- Egypt has also embraced social media for change on a grand scale. The use of Facebook and Twitter by the protestors in the 25 January movement that brought about regime change in the country has been well documented – but less well known is the ‘Speak-to-Tweet’ service set up by Google and Twitter to provide a voice-activated version of the micro-blogging platform to overcome the internet blackout imposed by the outgoing government.
- Russia, however, suffers from what can at best be described as inclement weather, forcing people to stay at home and embrace social media to socialize running up almost double the global average of hours spent on social networks. The platforms used tend to be local ones such as vkontakte.ru and odnoklassniki.ru and there seems to be a preference for native, rather than foreign, websites. Entrepreneurs who can launch Russian versions of Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Yelp, Quora, Kickstarter or Pinterest are sure to find a willing audience of users and investors. Russians also have an average of 1.5 mobile phones, which contrasts with India where only 5 percent of the total population have a mobile. Given, however, that the total population is 1.2 billion, that equates to 61 million people or almost the entire UK population.
- Singapore, as one might expect for the original ‘Asian Tiger’ economy, has a high level of household broadband penetration (104 percent) with 70 percent of the 5.1 million population owning a smartphone – the highest level in the world. Singapore doesn’t have any domestic social networks to speak of but favor Facebook, Blogspot, Twitter and LinkedIn. There is, however, a large gap between individual usage and corporate usage, with organizations generally unable to make the mental switch to a platform where the individual rules and communication must be done on a humble, personal level.
- Taiwan, one of the other original ‘Asian Tigers’ could not be more different. In Taiwan, Facebook penetration has grown by 7000 percent in the two years since a Chinese language version was launched but still tends to be the preserve of good looking young people who like posting photos of themselves. ‘Normal’ people tend to prefer the anonymity offered both through not needing to post photos nor use real names on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) – old-school forums such as PTT and PTT2 where 10% of internet users communicate on a wide range of subject-specific topics with a ‘gossip’ forum operating as a pseudo Wikileaks for journalists.
- Finally, the Philippines has over 80 percent penetration of mobile phones amongst the 94 million population, helping the country be the leading user of SMS text messaging with over 2 billion messages sent every day – an average of 26 texts per person. The new, Facebook, and the old, Friendster, are popular there, but there are also some local clones such as PicLyf and Churp Churp for photo sharing and microblogging.
So what does this mean for the future of social media? Marketers need to remember that, as with all marketing, one needs to know where one’s target market is and how to reach them. It really isn’t just Facebook and Twitter. Social change, furthermore, is not the best backdrop with which to push messages that don’t support those movements. And finally, people use social media for very different reasons. To have a fully functioning strategy, organizations need to think of ‘Glocial Media’: Global, Local and Social.
