Global Social Media

Social media, although often seen as synonymous with social networks, encompass a much wider range of online platforms, which offer their users a variety of tools to communicate and create content. These include blogging and microblogging sites, instant messengers (IM), forums or message boards, photo- and video-sharing sites, as well as social networks which aggregate many of these functions within one interface.

Around the world, social media have experienced an explosion of popularity and have revolutionised the way we communicate today, but different countries have shown different attitudes and preferences when it comes to social media. For example, Russians and Brazilians are by far the most engaged social network users in the world, Spaniards spend a lot of time watching online video, and the Chinese particularly enjoy instant messaging and reading/writing blogs.

Apart from different communication modes in social media, it is also the tools themselves that vary from country to country. Since the launch of Facebook in late 2004, the online landscape has changed for good, but it hasn't changed the same way everywhere. The idea itself was quickly picked up by other entrepreneurs and programmers, who then created social media sites in their native languages and tailored to the local audiences. And when it comes to social networks – the 'first-mover advantage' is definitely not an empty phrase. After a considerable time investment involved in creating your virtual profile and friends network – it is unlikely you'll be going elsewhere!

And so, we have seen the emergence of many home-grown social networking sites which continue to be important local players despite Facebook's global expansion: Renren or Kaixin001 in China, vKontakte and Odnoklassniki in Russia, Nasza Klasa in Poland, Xing in Germany, Orkut in Brazil or Cyworld in South Korea, are just a few such examples.

Smart businesses have gaged the importance of their brand visibility in social media and have already expanded their online marketing strategy to include social media as one of their customer interfacing tools. But when it comes to operating in many international markets, it is perhaps not so easy to make strategic decisions and distribute the resources wisely. OBAN can provide consultancy on international social media to help your business make the right choices and target the appropriate local sites and audiences.