On YouTube, PSY’s ‘Gentleman’ hits record 38M views in 24 hours
Following the mind-blowing popularity of his hit single, ‘Gangnam Style’, PSY dropped another new single earlier this month.  As TheNextWeb reports, ‘Gentleman’ has already filled the proverbial big shoes of its predecessor on YouTube. An earlier account of the video’s performance clocked the video views at over 22 million in less than a day. While this rate is a record-breaking achievement in itself, Google has recently confirmed that this number actually stands at a whopping 38 million views. This figure indicates that ‘Gentleman’ has surpassed some other YouTube record holders by a long shot; for instance, Google notes that KONY had previously held the most views in a single day, with 30 million hits. The video has even surpassed ‘Gangnam Style’ in its rapid rate of growth: while ‘Gangnam Style’ took over 7 weeks to hit 100 million views, Gentleman reached the nine-digit milestone in under four days. ‘Gentleman’ currently has over 228 million views–still a far cry from the all-time record held by ‘Gangnam Style’ (1.55 billion and counting)– but a sure sign that PSY has continued to dominate on YouTube.

Chat app gains lead to 11% decline in SMS in China
As we reported earlier this year, mobile chat apps continue to be on the rise in 2013. In particular, they have uprooted dominant social channels in some Asian markets to become the most popular platforms amongst social media users. In Japan, for instance, chat app Line surpassed Twitter as the top platform in the country. According to TheNextWeb, this increasing preference for chat apps has had a considerable effect on traditional text messaging in China as well. Based on a report by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the findings suggested that SMS usage had increased by 0.5% on a yearly basis. However, when this figure is recalculated to exclude mass texts, the results indicate that peer-to-peer messaging has actually decreased by a significant 11%. This downturn may be particularly alarming given the recent tension between China’s state-owned telcom providers and locally established chat app, WeChat. The study illustrates that peer-to-peer messaging was down to 120 billion, marking a 10.9% decrease from last year. The findings also demonstrated that the average user sent 52.6 peer-to-peer messages in the first quarter of this year, down by 11.2% from Q1 2012. By contrast, chat app usage remained on the rise: 22 bilion mobile messages were sent through chat apps in Q1 2013, indicating a 37.6% increase since last year. Peer-to-peer messages stood at 1.3 billion, also up by 15.6% during the period. In effect, the results may illustrate a strong correlation between the adoption of mobile chat apps and the decline in peer-to-peer SMS messaging in the Chinese market. While the encroachment of chat is far from strong, China’s telcoms have taken to a potential countermeasure–of reviving its own messaging app, Fetion, in the near future–to better compete with chat apps in the market.

Google and Facebook face off on social sign-in share
eMarketer recently reported that Facebook remained at the top spot amongst social networks that gave users an option to use social logins across platforms. Based on a report by user management platform provider Janrain, the findings concurrently indicated that Google’s popularity was increasing as well. While Facebook held the lead with a 46% share in Q1 2013,  that proportion actually signals an 8% decrease since Q3 2012. Meanwhile, Google’s share rose by 9% in the same period, from 25% in Q3 2012 to 34% in the first quarter of this year.

Google similarly experienced the most growth on consumer brand sites. As indicated in the graph below, Google ID sign-ins increased from 23% in Q4 2012 to 28% in Q1 2013. By contrast, Facebook sign-ins decreased from 58% to 55% in the same period.

Although Twitter claims the smallest portion of the pie, eMarketer notes that the microblogging platform has been carving out a niche amongst social logins in other areas. On music sites, for instance, Twitter logins increased from 12% to 19% in Q1 2013. While it’s still a far cry from Facebook’s 51% share, the platform’s percentage actually demonstrates a substantial decrease, from 60% in Q4 2012.

In China, social network Renren launches its own chat app
The rise of chat apps, coupled with the dominance of microblogging platforms like Sina Weibo, has made it difficult for China’s social network Renren to grow its user base. In the past few years, it has seen new messaging apps like WeChat soar to over 300 million users, making Renren’s 170 million pale in comparison. Perhaps with this in mind, Renren has decided to jump on the chat app bandwagon, as TechInAsia reports that Renren has launched a new messaging app called TongXueShuo (the literal translation: “classmates say”). This chat app additionally consists of an eclectic mix of social features; TechInAsia notes that there are “elements of Path, Google+, regular social messaging apps, plus the find-and-flirt capabilities of apps like Momo”. While these features are apparently meant to attract a wide range of early adopters, TongXueShuo last month has yet to gather momentum since its launch last month. Despite Renren’s sizable number of users, the battle nonetheless appears invariably uphill given the existing social giants that constitute its competition amongst chat apps in the market.

In India, digital ad spend up 30%; shift to social and mobile
A recent report by eMarketer suggests that digital ad spend has increased significantly over the past few years. Based on a study by The Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Indian Market Research Bureau International, the findings indicated that there was a 29% increase in digital ad spend over the course of fiscal year 2012. While spending has increased to 22.6 billion Indian rupees (SGD 517 million), it is also estimated to rise by another  30%, to 29.4 billion rupees (SGD 673.4 million) in fiscal year 2013.

Digital ad spending has also moved away from traditional formats such as display and search, and started leaning toward mobile and social. While Display and Search constituted 92% of digital ad spend in 2010, they collectively took only 67% in 2012. By contrast, social media and video increased by over 71% each in 2011, and claimed 13% and 7% of digital ad spend respectively in 2012. The increasing adoption of mobile web has also shifted spending to mobile, as the format increased to 10% of digital ad spend during 2012.

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We’re pleased to share the latest of our SDMW snapshots for social media use around Asia.

Today’s snapshot offers a more comparable definition of ‘users’, and is based solely on active users*, rather than the overall user numbers we used for some countries in previous reports where active user data was not available.

Social Media Users

Despite this recalibration, the total number of social media users across the top network in each of our 24 SDMW Asia nations has increased to 874 million, reflecting 18% growth compared to our last full report in October.

This represents growth of more than 10 million new users of social media every month – a figure that’s all the more impressive considering Facebook’s recent clean up of ‘fake’ accounts.

Penetration

However, social media penetration has fluctuated around the region in the past few months, with a number of ‘mature’ markets – including Brunei, Singapore and Hong Kong – registering a drop in penetration as the frequency of Facebook usage begins to slow.

Overall though, regional penetration remained static at 23%, in line with the overall global average:

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More importantly, the drop in penetration across mature markets has been balanced by on-going growth in markets like India and Indonesia, both of which continue to see social media usage expand at impressive rates.

Mobile Chat

However, the most interesting story comes from North Asia, where we’re seeing accelerating mass adoption of mobile chat applications.

Neither Japan nor Korea was a ‘Facebook market’ in our previous report – Korea’s primary social network was CyWorld, while Japanese social media users appeared to prefer Twitter – but the rapid growth of newer chat platforms may scupper the world’s favourite network’s plans to grow in these countries.

Indeed, KakaoTalk and Line already dominate the social media landscapes of South Korea and Japan respectively, with both platforms registering significantly more users than Facebook and microblogs.

Similarly, while Qzone continues to be the region’s largest social network by active users, we expect to see this situation change in the coming months as a result of the increased implementation of China’s real name rules for social media use, and the continued expansion of platforms like WeChat (Weixin).

Indeed, WeChat’s success beyond its home market of China looks set to be one of the biggest social media stories in Asia over the next few months.

At well over 300 million registered users, WeChat is already 15% bigger than Facebook in Asia, and its growth trajectory suggests that this gap will only increase further during 2013.

Given these trends, it’s clear that mobile’s role in the Asian social media landscape looks set to grow in importance, so look out for our upcoming post on using mobile to connect with Asian social audiences.

* Figures reflect monthly active users, except for Korea where we’ve used daily active user numbers. Note that user numbers for Japan and Korea have been extrapolated from available data.

Social Brands Part 2

In Friday’s first post in our series on Social Brands & The Future Of Marketing, we noted that, “the most successful brands don’t just predict the future; they define the future on their own terms.”

We’re continuing that theme in today’s second post in the Social Brands series, exploring the importance of building social marketing activities around the people you care about, and not around specific technological features or platforms.

The Motivations Driving Social Networking

Most people visit social networking sites in order to connect with other people: to stay in touch with friends and family; to share things with colleagues and professional peers; and even to meet strangers with similar interests and needs.

Because of this, most people see social media as a means to an end, with that ‘end’ being social interaction.

Of course, there are many times when technology plays an important part in facilitating these connections; things like the filters on Instagram, or the sharing features common to most social networks, are all important aspects of our social networking experience.

However, people connect around the personal, social benefits these elements provide, and not around the functionality itself.

Critically, if those social benefits don’t exist – if the people we want to connect with are not present, or if our networks move on – then the platform quickly loses its value.

We’ve seen this happen many times before; the declines of Second Life, MySpace, and Friendster were all driven by the migration of their audiences, not by technical failures.

Single-Serve Audiences

Sadly, when audiences move on from an incumbent Big Platform – and they invariably do – marketers quickly lose out.

The investments they’ve made in building large audiences specific to that platform stop delivering meaningful returns, because those audiences are invariably ‘non-transferrable’ (how many brands succeeded in migrating their Second Life audiences wholesale into Facebook without paying for the privilege?).

As a result, marketers need to stop relying on buying attention within specific platforms, and find a more resilient way of managing their social media activities.

From Platforms To Communities

The trick is to stop seeing social media as media, and to focus on the motivations and behaviours that drive people’s social activities instead.

Instead of buying attention in the hottest platforms of the day, tomorrow’s top brands will spend time understanding how to deliver value to the same people across different settings and contexts.

They will focus on nurturing active communities that choose to engage with and around the brand and its activities wherever and whenever they can.

Critically, they will use new platforms to offer incremental value – not simply as another means to interrupt people.

From Eyeballs To Heartstrings

The secret to building these ‘migratory’ communities is to understand people’s wants, needs, and desires, and to build engaging connections around them at every opportunity.

We need to understand what brings communities together, and build our strategies around their shared interests and passions, and not around technical functionality or platforms.

Above all, we need to add value to their lives at every opportunity – a topic we’ll explore in more detail in the next post in this Social Brands series.

Want to join the conversation? We’d love to hear your thoughts and reactions, so why not share them in the comments, tweet us via @wearesocialsg, or drop us an email? 

Continuing our series of data snapshots for Social, Digital and Mobile usage worldwide, we’re pleased to share the latest numbers for the different regions around the world.

All indicators show significant growth since last year’s worldwide report, with mobile clearly the driving force for all aspects of our connected lives.

Internet

Internet penetration adds an extra 3 points year-on-year to reach exactly one third of the world’s population, posting growth of a quarter of a billion new users in the past 12 months.

Much of this growth has come from ‘developing’ nations, with Asia accounting for a significant proportion of the global growth.

Social Media

Social media usage is up by almost the same volume, registering an additional 240 million new users in 2012.

However, in markets like China, the biggest shift we’ve been tracking is a change in usage patterns between different platforms, rather than growth in the absolute number of users of social networks.

Facebook continues to dominate the worldwide picture with close to a billion monthly active users, but Chinese platforms take the remaining 4 of the top 5 slots.

Sina and Tencent’s weibo offerings are clearly the biggest success stories over the past year, growing both their registered and active user bases by hundreds of millions.

Google+ has also made big gains since last year, although its 235 million monthly active users don’t quite give it enough weight to achieve ‘Global Top 5′ status. However, with more than 500 million registered users, it’s clear that Google+ has plenty more potential, and is surely one to watch in 2013.

Twitter continues its stellar growth too, passing 200 million active users a couple of months ago. The West’s favourite microblogging platform also passed the half-billion registered users milestone last year, and its popularity shows little sign of slowing.

Vkontakte continues to play an important role in Central and Eastern Europe, with the latest figures suggesting the platform has amassed just shy of 200 million registered users.

Meanwhile, the new breed of ‘Instant Messenger Plus’ platforms like WeChat (Weixin), Line and KakaoTalk look set to change the global social media landscape over the next few months, with Tencent’s WeChat already surpassing 300 million registered users.

Mobile

The mobile growth story continues to impress, with more than half a billion new subscriptions activated around the world in 2012.

Mobile subscription penetration now exceeds 91% of the world’s population, and although like-for-like data are hard to come by, it seems mobile now reaches at least as many people around the world as television.

The Future

All indicators suggest continued growth throughout 2013 too, so the critical question marketers need to answer now is,

“How are we going to integrate all of these opportunities into a consistent and engaging approach that builds real brand value?“

The answers to that question will be central to our posts in the coming months here on the We Are Social blog.

Stay tuned…

40.8% of Japanese smartphone users on free voice call, chat apps in 2012
A recent survey by MMD Laboratory, a Japanese research house that specialises in mobile marketing, indicated that there were changes in how smartphone users in Japan used their mobile devices in 2012. In particular, there has been a noticeable uptake in the use of free voice call and chat applications in Japanese users. As TechinAsia notes, the survey highlights this increase as it occurred between July 2012 and December 2012. The result indicates a 12.4% increase in chat app users during that time period, from 28.4% in July 2012 to 40.8% by the end of the year. Interestingly, this significant increase in Japanese chat app users marks the highest increase as a genre in smartphone application usage.

200 million LinkedIn users in Jan 2013
LinkedIn announced that it has reached an impressive 200 million users on Wednesday. As Mashable reports, this number indicates that the professional social networking site has doubled its user base in a little over a year, which claimed about 100 million users in 2011. Since then, the site has seen significant increases of 10 to 15 million new users per quarter in the past year. Although LinkedIn’s numbers are small in comparison to Facebook’s 1 billion users and Twitter’s 500 million accounts, LinkedIn has surely established itself as a serious contender in social networking, as it currently adds an average of 2 new users per second.

LinkedIn sees strongest levels of growth in Indonesia
As LinkedIn announced its recent milestone of reaching 200 million users, it also reported significant trends in its growth in Asian markets. As TechInAsia reports, Indonesia has the third highest number of users in the Asia region, with about 1.7 million active users on the social networking site. This number is compared to China’s 2.8 million users and India’s whopping 18 million, the highest number of users in the region. It is interesting to note, however, that Indonesia has the highest level of growth in the Asia region. Indonesia also ranks third on a global scale, in terms of the country’s growth rate of active users on LinkedIn.

How big is Facebook on mobile?
Multi-screens has become a rapidly growing trend in the past year, and many have predicted that it will continue to gain traction in the future. Facebook has taken significant steps towards catering to this trend by revamping its mobile interface and developing significant accommodations for mobile use. It is important to note, however, that many Facebook users are still accessing the site exclusively from non-mobile devices. As eMarketer notes via a survey by AYTM Market Research, 39.7% of Facebook users in the US claimed that they never logged on to Facebook through their mobile phones.

Globally, however, the number of users who access Facebook via mobile has been increasing at a compelling rate. Out of the 1.04 billion monthly active users on Facebook in 2012, over 639 million users were accessing the site through their mobile phones.

Thailand’s Exteen produces 30 million page views per month
A recent report by TechInAsia indicated that Exteen, Thailand’s most popular content management service, has been generating a staggering 30 million page views on a monthly basis. As TechInAsia notes, the “WordPress of Thailand” currently claims over 600,000 blogger accounts in total , with 100,000 of these users actively posting to their accounts. When the Thai CMS was launched in 2004, the number of accounts stood at roughly 1,000 users by the end of that year. Since then, the blogging site has seen astonishing levels of growth and continues to see increases in its user base with no noticeable signs of slowing down.

Social media users in China spent 884 million hours on microblogs
Resonance China reported that microblogs were by far the most popular form of social media in China during Q3 2012. A recent study by iResearch suggests that 422 million internet users are on social networking sites in China, exceeding the reach of news, search, videos and other forms of online communication. Of all forms of social media, microblogging further claimed 302 million users in Q3 2012 – the highest reach amongst Chinese social network users. Although the growth rate has slowed for microblogging platforms, users still spent 884 million hours on microblogs during Q3 2012. This number represents the highest number of hours spent on any social media platform, and also surpasses the number of hours spent on microblogs during Q2 2012.

Korean chat app KakaoTalk reaches 70 million users in 2012
TechInAsia reports that KakaoTalk recently hit its first 1,000 days since the app was launched. The Korean-made chat app commemorated this milestone by producing an infographic detailing its current user base. The insights demonstrate how the Korean-made chat app has rapidly grown its following since it launched in March 2010.  The app has more than doubled its user base in the past year, and increased to 70 million users in December 2012, up from 50 million in June of this year. Interestingly, the app’s reach is growing even in Japan, where homegrown chat app Line has consistently dominated the field. According to AppAnnie, KakaoTalk’s ranking has shot up in iOS free app downloads in Japan. KakaoTalk’s growth is further highlighted by the fact that there are 27 million unique daily visitors to the app. The users produce a staggering 4.2 billion messages on KakaoTalk every day, up from 2.6 billion at the end of Q1 2012.

Asia-Pacific to top Western Europe social network ad spend in 2013
A recent report by eMarketer revealed that spending on social network advertisements will increase significantly in the Asia-Pacific region next year. According to their projections, the region will experience 48% gains, topping a prospective valuation of over $2 billion in 2013. This significant growth in spending is linked to the increasing penetration of both globally-established social networks — such as Facebook and Twitter — as well as the sheer variety of locally-established social networks, such as Tencent and Sina Weibo in China. Collectively, they represent a social media landscape that holds an abundance of potential for marketers in the Asia-Pacific region.

A study conducted by InSites Consulting in Q2 2012 also cast light on the fact that Asian SNS users are more likely to engage with brands on social media than their Western counterparts. In particular, the study demonstrates that 2 out of 3 users in China (66%), and well-over half of users in Japan (56%)  follow one or more brands on social media. These numbers are particularly striking when understood in comparison to the percentage of users who follow brands in the US (53%).

The mature markets of Europe and the US will still claim a larger share of social network ad spending worldwide; however, the growth of spending is predicted to rise at a faster rate in the Asia-Pacific region. eMarketer forecasts that by 2013, Asia-Pacific’s regional share will reach 22.9%, surpassing Europe’s 22.3%. Spending per user is noted to remain low in Asia-Pacific. This may be due to the fact that some of the emerging markets are still developing their digital ad economies, and the fact that there are a hefty 616 million social network users at minimum in the region.

The lack of Facebook and Twitter in China would ostensibly represent barriers to such growth in this particular market. It is interesting to note however that the number of users on local social networks in China is still predicted to double the number of users in the US, to a total of 307.5 million by the end of 2012. As a result, ad spending in China will still experience rapid growth within the region, and even surpass the regional growth rate of 48.3%  with 51.3% gains in 2013.

Twitter now has 200 million monthly active users
Twitter continues to see widespread growth in its user base, with no signs of stopping soon. A report from The Next Web confirms that Twitter has released an update, stating that 200 million active users log onto Twitter every month. This amounts to a 60 million user increase since Twitter last shared a monthly active user base, of 140 million in March of this year. Despite having a fraction of Facebook’s 1 billion users, the microblogging site has seen an impressive average growth rate of 6.6 million new users per month since March 2012.

Facebook and Pinterest trigger more offline actions than other social sites
Through a recent survey by ACTIVE Network, MarketingProfs revealed that Facebook and Pinterest were the most likely to lead its users to take some form of action offline. The survey examined the relationship between offline actions and five social sites–Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest. The results of the survey demonstrated that 87% of Facebook users were influenced to do something offline because of an interaction they had while using the social network. Pinterest and LinkedIn came in close behind, with 70% and 60% of users of the respective sites reporting to have taken offline action. The type of offline action these social sites triggered also varied by platform. For instance, 70% of Facebook users and 56% of LinkedIn users were prompted to make direct contact with an individual after interacting on the respective sites. 23% of Facebook users and 21% of Pinterest users made a purchase as a result of using the platform. Pinterest also fed the creativity of its users, prompting 63% of them to create something new through interactions on the site.

Bangladesh is one of Asia’s giants, with a population of more than 160 million.

This ranks the country 8th in the world in terms of population size, ahead of Russia, Japan and Mexico.

Goldman Sachs also includes Bangladesh in its ‘Next Eleven’ economies, indicating that the country has a high potential to be one of the world’s biggest economies in the coming years.

However, many Bangladeshis still live on less than US$2 per day, and UNICEF reports that 50% of the country’s population lives below the international poverty line.

Despite these economic challenges, however, use of online media continues the stellar growth that we highlighted in last year’s report.

Internet use in particular has jumped exponentially, and according to figures from Bangladesh’s Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, users now stand at nearly 30 million across the country.

Critically, 94% of these users access the internet via mobile devices, the vast majority of which are feature phones.

This puts internet penetration in Bangladesh at 18%; that’s a huge leap from last year’s reported figure of just 1% (although that figure did not include mobile internet users).

However, perhaps the most staggering finding in this report is the fact that this figure is lower than the number of people who have no access to any media whatsoever.

Findings from Nielsen (cited here) indicate that 32 million Bangladeshis still have absolutely no access to media – 10% more than those who have access to the internet.

Much of this relates to economics; many Bangladeshi families still can’t afford a television, and an hour’s internet access in an internet café in Bangladesh costs the equivalent of 70% of the average daily income, putting the web well beyond the means of most citizens.

Perhaps for this reason, social media use in Bangladesh remains relatively low too, currently standing at just 2% penetration.

However, Facebook is adding a new user in Bangladesh every 20 seconds, and it’s likely that initiatives from some of the country’s telcos offering ‘free’ access to Facebook will help to boost user numbers well beyond the current 3.3 million in the coming 12 months.

There’s an obvious business benefit to this approach for the telcos too; almost half of Facebook’s users in Bangladesh are aged in the lucrative 18-to-24 age group.

More importantly, mobile subscriptions in Bangladesh continue to grow at a staggering pace, with the total now exceeding 100 million.

This means that penetration already sits at 63%, but this looks set to pass two thirds of the population in just a few months, with the country’s operators registering more than 50,000 new subscriptions every single day in the first 6 months of 2012.

And with a new mobile subscription activated on average every 2 seconds in Bangladesh, the country should easily add another 10 million subscriptions to its tally before the middle of 2013.

With growth like that, we’ll be putting Bangladesh in our ‘Digital Next Eleven’ as well.

The sources for all the stats can be found at the bottom of each slide in the SlideShare deck above. You can download a high-res PDF of this report by clicking here.