Social Network Use Varies Across Individual Asia-Pacific Markets

comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leading firm in measuring digital activity, yesterday released its latest report on social networking activity in Asia-Pacific excluding China. The study which targeted users aged 15+ from Asia-Pacific nations excluded the activity from public computers and the usage of mobile technology to access social networking sites.

The study found that 50.8 percent of the total online population in the Asia-Pacific region visited a social networking site in February 2010, reaching a total of 240.3 million visitors.

Facebook.com ranked as the top social network across the majority of individual markets in the region, while competing brands commanded the top position in certain markets, including Orkut in India, Mixi.jp in Japan, CyWorld in South Korea and Wretch.cc in Taiwan.

The study findings also support that social media strategies are not a one-size-fits-alls plan that work across the board for all companies and as seen from the study it does vary across geography. Although FaceBook remains the overall top-ranked social networking site across Asia-Pacific, depending on the goals of your marketing strategy e.g. building brand awareness in India, you may want to focus your social media efforts on the dominant social networking site in that context which in India would be Orkut.

“While social networking continues to be one of the most popular and fastest growing Web activities in the world, its dynamics in the Asia-Pacific region exhibit significantly more individual market differentiation than in other global regions,” said Will Hodgman, comScore executive vice president for Asia Pacific.

So what does this mean for the B2B marketer?

There is immense growth potential for social networking and social media as a strategy in Asia-Pacific. It also means that marketers looking to tap into different markets in Asia-Pacific do need to do a little research to find out where their target audience does spend their time in the different countries targeted. However it must be pointed out that FaceBook has made great inroads into Asia-Pacific and replaced Friendster as the top-ranked social networking site in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines.

B2B marketers who have invested their efforts in FaceBook as a major component of their social media strategy could see their audience pool widen as FaceBook continues to grow its user base in the Asia-Pacific region. As mentioned in our article “Inbound Marketing: For those with more brains than money” now is the time to leverage on the growth of social networking in Asia-Pacific to be found online, change your prospects into customers and engage them in meaningful conversations that grow your brand and business.