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By adaptive - November 5th, 2014
For corporations their focus may continue to be Facebook, but with other social networks gaining massive number of users, how will the social media landscape change as these new networks gain support?
Over the last year the Internet has been awash with stories of doom and gloom regarding the effectiveness and the popularity of Facebook. Millennials leaving in their droves has been a typical headline. However, corporations need to look past the hype and closely evaluate their use of this social media network, but more importantly, take off the blinkers that many have had firm clamped to their marketing activity, as considering alternative networks is vital for corporations to remain vital in their market places.
Facebook’s recent announcement that its Q3 revenue was up 59% to $3.20 billion was a welcome sigh of relief to many corporations. Facebook continues to be a major component of all corporations’ marketing activity with high levels of referrals. “Year-over-year, only three social networks (Facebook, Pinterest and Google Plus) saw their “share of traffic” grow,” said Shareaholic. “Each experienced at least a 50% bump in share of visits over the past 13 months. The remaining five (Twitter, StumbleUpon, Reddit, YouTube, and LinkedIn) saw their shares decline by more than 24%.”
Says We Are Social: “Facebook’s active user based showed growth of 2.3% in the past quarter, reaching 1.35 billion in time for the company’s latest quarterly report last week. However, Facebook’s data also suggest that growth in some of the platform’s key countries – notably India and Indonesia – has slowed considerably in recent months, although our understanding is that this is likely due to Facebook ‘purging’ fake accounts, rather than an actual loss of interest in the world’s largest social network.”
In Useful Social Media’s State of Corporate Social Media Briefing 2014 we revealed that when the whole social media landscape is considered the use of emerging networks and those not based in the US is slow. This year’s survey found that 85% of respondents don’t engage at all with these networks. As we said in last year’s report, this is a missed opportunity that it seems continues to be ignored by many corporations.
Some 18% of our respondents stated that they were responsible for their corporation’s activities in Asia, but we see low levels of engagement: VKontakte (Russia’s Facebook) having 3.3%, Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter) 6.5% and Renren (China’s Facebook) 2.9%.
It’s a numbers game
Outside of the trinity of leading social media networks, brands have a host of choices to make. However, if you look closely at the research carried out by GlobalWebIndex from this year, just 30% of Internet users have actually liked a brand’s Facebook page. Facebook is clearly at the centre of many corporations’ marketing activity, but increasingly this will have to change as consumers move to more relevant networks.
Corporations should be paying close attention to how Internet usage is exploding across the world, and by extension what this means for social media engagement.
Social Media Today reports that the number of social media users in India grew by an estimated 51.7% in 2012—in a country of 1.25 billion people. China’s social media user base increased by nearly 20%, and Latin America grew at a rate of 16.3%, while Russian grew by 11.1%.
The statistics associated with some of these social media networks are staggering. China of course takes first place here with QZone having 625 million users. More than 300 million online shoppers in China spent a collective $296 billion in 2013 alone, mobile shopping represented 9% of the market.
What is clear for all corporate marketers is that looking past their domestic Facebook presence could pay massive dividends. As the rest of the world comes online and actively engages with brands via a number of social media networks, those corporations that have understood how these spaces have changed will be ready and waiting to welcome millions of new potential customers for their goods or services.
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