Five Friday Facts #7

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Here are Five Friday Facts to round-off this week in social media news in Asia and across the world. Have a merry weekend everyone, it’s the last weekend to shop for Christmas gifts!

Record for most tweets per second broken
The TV screening of highly popular Japanese anime Castle in the Sky set a new record for most tweets per second with 25,088 tweets per second earlier this month. It surpassed the previous record of nearly 9,000 tweets per second following the announcement of Beyonce’s pregnancy. This is testament to Twitter’s popularity in Japan, which has an estimated 10,000 million Japanese users.

Fashion-focused social network
Singapore-based Clozette, a fashion-focused social network, is partnering with Glam Media Japan to launch a Japanese version of its site. Clozette is now seeing around 85,000 monthly unique visitors and 750,000 page views, up from 80,000 monthly unique visitors and 500,000 page views back in September. It’s great to see a niche social network from Singapore grow and expand into the region.

How new ‘e-tailers’ are discovered in China
How does social come into play with e-commerce? 42.71% of Chinese consumers discover new online retailers, or ‘e-tailers’, via Taobao, 27.51% through online advertising and 18.22% through friends. Apparently, search and word-of-mouth (not necessarily online) are still important factors. Surprisingly, 11.18% of Chinese consumers discover new e-tailers through Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) as compared to only 3.14% via social networking. Perhaps we will see a change in these figures as social commerce takes off.

Consumers not turning to social media for local business information
In America, the Internet is the number one source people turn to for information on local restaurants and businesses, followed by newspapers and word-of-mouth. 51% of American adults use the Internet to look for news and information about local restaurants, bars and clubs. Surprisingly, only 3% turn to social networking sites, as compared to the 38% who perform search engine queries.

Marketers stumped by measurement challenges
A survey conducted by voice-based marketing automation platform Ifbyphone found that 82% of marketing executives surveyed expect every campaign to be measured. Yet, only 26% think they can effectively measure Return on Investment (ROI) for social media marketing. Of the various tools used to measure marketing campaigns, only 30% of respondents used social media monitoring tools. These challenges with data analytics and tools similarly resound in our post on how marketers are still struggling with social.