Hello Asia, We Are Social
News
News
Today marks another exciting step for the global We Are Social family, with the launch of a new office in Singapore. Our Asian adventure has been a few months in the making, but I’m thrilled to announce that the office is now fully open for business, and we’re already helping a variety of clients and organisations throughout the region to take advantage of social media.
The Far East was an obvious next step in the continuing growth of We Are Social: with almost 1 billion existing users of social media across the region, and growth that continues to accelerate thanks to improving mobile access, the opportunities in Asia are simply too exciting to ignore.
However, Asia also presents a unique set of challenges to marketers that want to harness social media. Each country has its own unique social ecosystem – from the platforms that people use, to the people who use them, to the things they use them for.
For example, Facebook still enjoys a strong presence in Asia, but – despite its 190 million local users – it’s far from being the region’s favourite network. That honour goes to China’s QZone, clocking in at almost half a billion users. Sina Weibo – China’s answer to Twitter – also counts more than 200 million users.
This variety continues beyond China too, with Japan’s Mixi, Korea’s CyWorld, and Vietnam’s Zing all attracting an impressive proportion of their respective country’s social media users.
Meanwhile, different Asian cultures use social media for different purposes. Twitter is indispensible to Indonesian teenagers, who access the service via mobile devices to stay connected with friends while on the move. Social gaming is prolific amongst housewives in the Philippines, while the Japanese love affair with social video shows no signs of waning. In contrast, young Indians make significant use of social media to find employment and work opportunities.
This amazing diversity can appear daunting, so We Are Social’s Singapore team offers marketers a wide range of Social Media consultancy services to help organisations identify and take advantage of specific brand opportunities in social channels across the region.