As the name hints towards, social media was initially created to foster social relationships – but it wouldn’t take long before it veered off to advertising and everything was usurped.
Social media users were no longer viewed as people, but connections that advertisers and marketers paid big bucks for a share of.
Things have changed for the worst, starting with social media being more addictive and detrimental to both our psychological health and productivity. It’s affecting our civil unity and raising a series of other worrying issues that are generally affecting how we appreciate life.
So in foresight, it’s safe to say there’s nothing positive about the future of social media to an average user.
Social Media and Singapore
Social media sites have changed how we communicate as well as how marketers reach out to current and potential customers. Right from the days of Myspace and Friendster, social media has remained the best asset for digital marketers especially in Singapore. The UN Human Development Index has ranked Singapore as the city with the third highest GDP per capita.
There is also increased literacy, and a high smartphone and internet penetration rate that is responsible for pushing up social media penetration. Singapore has at least 4.83 million internet users, and 4.71 million of them prefer to use a mobile device, be it a smartphone or a tablet, as their point of access. Since January 2018, Singapore has recorded a 9% increase in the total number of social media users. Let us take a look at the social media in Singapore for digital marketers in 2019.
Social Media Use
According to the Global Digital Report 2018, Singaporeans spend at least 2 hours and 6 minutes every day on social media platforms. Of these over 75% of them use Facebook and a mere 4% use Instagram and Twitter, and approximately 1% of the population use Tumblr.
Preference for Mobile Devices
Singapore has one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world, and among other mobile devices such as tablets and wearable devices, over 90% of the population use them to access social media platforms. This makes it all the more important for digital marketers to start creating mobile friendly strategies.
Men and Women Using Social Media
It is essential as a digital manager to know your target audience. 50.6% of all social media users are women, and men only account for 49.4%. When crafting a social media marketing strategy make sure that you keep this number in mind. However, it has been shown that to connect with your target audience, your campaign ought to resonate with either gender to increase the chances of being shared with your intended audience.
Ad Blocking Tools
Facebook’s latest algorithm ensures that individual users view posts from their friends by suppressing the reach of marketing ads. However, at least 40% of social media users in Singapore use an ad blocking tool. This makes it vital that you use interesting video ads that users will want to share.
More so, 22% of social media users actively ignore content from brands. This is after 24% of the respondents in a survey by Kantar TNS reported that they feel that they are being tracked by online advertising.
Spammy Stories
Social media has moved from that platform where people used to share their stories to a platform where everyone is regurgitating the same jokes, thus spamming people’s timelines – the result of which there’s a mass exodus of users from social media platforms such as Facebooks especially in Europe and North America.
Lots of social media networks are geared towards making the platform more entertaining, where people come together to laugh at memes and share funny jokes. It’s an escape and NOT just a socializing platform it’s been.
Data Protection
In the current digital age, data has become the ultimate currency, and many Singaporeans are wary of data protection. The recent reports about data breaches and the loss of personal data have resulted in over 87% of the social media users to be keen about how social media and other digital platforms protect their data. For these reasons, it is vital that as a digital marketer in Singapore to ensure that your campaigns are mobile friendly.
Privacy Focused
Social Media has always been an open platform, where people share their sentiments and thoughts with their peers and friends more openly.
But as Mark Zuckerberg hints, this is bound to change as they’re adjusting their system and making necessary calibrations to it in a bid to make everything more private. The idea is to create an environment where people can connect more privately, in a digital semblance of your living room.
In other words, the platform is geared towards giving people the freedom of communicating among themselves more naturally, without feeling like their privacy is being trespassed or interfered with.
Most Used Social Media Networks
According to Statistica, the leading social media is YouTube and then Whatsapp.
source: Statistica.com
Amazon Stepping in as an Ad Player to Reckon With
Whenever someone brings up the idea of online ads, only two platforms come to mind – Google and Facebook. But that’s bound to change soon enough, when Amazon steps into the arena, with their newfangled ad system that’s second to none.
A New Wrinkle in Town
The world of social media is taking an entirely new shift – think Tiktok. There will be more sharing of short videos, and where people will be navigating through the videos by scrolling them up and down, more like a newsfeed – instead of swiping and tapping as it’s always been the case.
Social media platforms will also be presenting video creators with all sorts of video editing tools such as filter and the ability to scour around for unique sounds that compliment their videos. Response videos will also be the craze, where users engage one another is some sort of duet with an option to duplicate other people’s videos and fix yourself alongside them.
Instagram E-commerce
We all know of Instagram as the de-facto social media platform for visual storytelling. It’s widely sought-after by brands and consumers alike for its off-the-wall focus on beautiful videography and photography.
But there’s more to this Facebook-owned, photos-and-videos-sharing platform we all know. Instagram E-commerce is the next new thing in the world of marketing. Imagine shopping on Instagram, where a consumer logs into their account and is able to go through a list of product details without being redirected elsewhere.
Started with Instagram introducing shoppable posts, where consumers get to interact with brands they love and can quickly scan through their posts for relevant information regarding the product and services they’re offering – particularly product description and pricing, and with just a single tap, be able to go through relevant product info without being dragged out of the Instagram app.
Co-Creation
Social media is taking a sharp detour from a world of an open network to that of co-creation. It’s no longer that data harvesting social network we all knew it for, but a platform that works in close partnership with its users to create content.
Featured on the platform will be a series of meme creation, surveys, and other important tools that users will be using to enrich the platform with content. Everything started with TikTok, which took this approach and now the entire world of social media is taking a cue from them.
Facebook expressed their interest to merge their messaging system in a bid to make them interoperable and more secure, but as it appears – a good chunk of their users aren’t hacking it.
Mark Zuckerberg has also admitted that even though the idea rings more appropriate, it’s still too early for them to run with it.
Turns out, more of their users prefer a more decentralized, peer-to-peer interaction operating outside the realm of attention-controlled advertising.
WeChat Is Fast Emerging as a Force to Reckon With
With more than a billion users in China alone, WeChat is fast-emerging as one of the most popular social media networks in the world. Their influence is bound to spread to other parts of the world, as well – making it one of the most prominent social network that marketers and advertisers can’t afford to completely turn their backs towards.
More Sponsored Content
Back in 2017, social media was mostly concerned about online authenticity, where the different networks were more concerned about signing up real people and cutting down on the number of pseudo accounts and catfishes.
But with 2019, the new shift appears to swing more towards sponsored content. Also introduced is some sort of addiction metrics, a digital gauge for dopamine hit that’s supposed to keep content creators more hooked and enticed to share the content on their timeline.
Users aren’t for the Idea of Facebook Merging their Messenger, Instagram, and
The Death of the ‘town square’ Model
2019 will be the year when the mental effect of too much social media will be put in the public domain. This has nothing to do with how good or social a particular social media network is, there’s always a dark side to every single one of them.
Facebook has pointed out that it will be gearing towards walled gardens. But does that uplift the life of an average social media user or lift some of the social media failures?
The answer is NO.
This is strictly a business decision, aimed at gaining more control over their users. Take Facebook, for instance, their business model is mostly built around collecting a broad range of user data that they’ll be using to sell them highly targeted ads.
However, Snapchat and Apple are taking an entirely different approach by adopting walled garden ecosystems.
Either way, the use of social media will continue to be on the rise. Juxtaposed with social media interactions will be a lot of social media noise, lavished with trolling on Reddit, Facebook Groups, Twitter, and Tumblr. Which is to say, unless these platforms manage to figure out how to put a stop to anonymous social media usage, there’ll always be a group of people to take advantage of their freedom to say or do anything in the hallowed streets of social media.
Aggravated Fight against Anonymous Social Media Groups
The social media is fraught with small anonymous groups and the scary part is that their number keeps growing by the day. While this can still be lumped up as part of social media freedom to say what’s on your mind without the fear of getting incarcerated, the trend is actually hurting the reputation of individual social media networks, particularly Facebook.
Facebook has to find a way to strike a balance between privacy and the ethics they’ve installed around their app products
Individual Social Media Statistics
With Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram being the most visited social media sites. We have compiled the statistics from each of the social media platforms to guide you in your digital marketing strategies.
Facebook Statistics
As at the end of 2017, Facebook recorded a monthly count of 33,400,000 users visiting the platform every day. Without a doubt, it is the most popular social media platform, not only in Singapore but in the world. Users aged between 45 and 64 years now account for up to 19.58%, which is 1 out of every five users.
With that said, the statistics for younger users aged between 18 and 24 have been on a decline, with only 17.5% in 2018, compared to 18.4% in 2017. This is attributed to the fact the older generation is adopting technology trends later than the younger generation.
The organic reach for business related Facebook posts is 8% in Singapore which is not a huge margin variation from the global reach. This includes organic post reactions, likes, shares, as well as comments. Besides this, 1 in every 4 Singaporeans confessed to spending at least 17 minutes on their Facebook Newsfeed for every TV hour.
Instagram Statistics
While Facebook remains to be the most popular social media site, the younger generation is flocking to Instagram. This is attributed to the fact that Facebook is no longer fun when the older generation are scrutinizing everything the younger generation posts.
As many as 11.38% of the Singaporean population uses Instagram every day, and this is the third highest Instagram penetration ranked by country, after Hong Kong and Malaysia. 36% of the users are aged between 25 and 34 years, with 55% of the users being women. 18 to 24-year olds make up 25% of the daily Instagram users in Singapore. There is also a rise in the number of older generation people using Instagram, with 6% of the users being aged between 55 and 65 years old.
source: https://www.equinetacademy.com
With such glowing figures linked to social media in Singapore, only 1.6% of digital marketers say that they are good at social media marketing. 45.9% say that they are average skills in social media marketing. However, with the high rate of social media use in Singapore, many digital marketers are not leveraging its power for better digital marketing purposes.
Instagram provides one of the best business post promotions and depending on how good your post is; you will see increased customer engagement. However, more people are viewing stories instead of posts. Snapchat is also one of the platforms that have recorded huge growth. The population of Singapore jumped from 19% in 2017, to 37% by the figures submitted for the third quarter in 2018.
LinkedIn Statistics
This is a social media for the professionals, with over 450 million users to date. On average, users spend at least 17 minutes on the platform. Unlike Instagram and Facebook, LinkedIn is suited for B2B deals although there is substantial growth in B2C and C2C engagements. 71% of the professionals using the platform feel that it is a credible source of content. This ranges from articles to videos and so much more.
Here are tips that will help you get better in your social media marketing campaigns as part of a broader digital marketing strategy.
Use Video Ads
68% of Singaporeans watch videos online not only on YouTube but also on special media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook. This makes video ads one of the best ways to reach out to your clientele. With many people choosing to ignore business related posts, it is only right that you create video ads that will resonate with the users to increase the reactions and shares.
There is also an increase in live mobile streaming. Text, on the other hand, is tedious and does not generate enough organic traffic as video ads.
Create A Better UX With A Responsive Design
Over the years, mobile devices have surpassed laptops and PC from being the preferred point of internet access. Over 75% of the population use a mobile device to access social media, and this has ushered in an age where digital marketing campaigns need to be mobile ready.
However, speed and personalization are the key factors that make responsive design worthwhile. The result will be better brand engagement driven by conversational user interfaces to improve customer insight.
Aspire to Tell Stories
This has to be the oldest trick in the digital marketing hand book, but few marketers are doing it. This is one of the reasons why we keep on seeing many ads and business posts with too much salesy language, and this does not do much to help your conversion rates.
Storytelling will ensure that your customers connect with you on an emotional level to increase brand awareness. This is one of the ways that will get viewers to share your marketing videos and other content with their friends and followers.
Predict the Trends That Will Shape Social Media Marketing
The trouble is that when you consistently keep following trends, you will not do better than the next digital marketer. With the availability of big data, you can analyse your metrics and figure out the trends that will shape the social media space in 2019 and beyond.
Be on the lookout for patterns in the data you to predict trends. This will not only give insight into emerging trends, but you will also be able to act of opportunities before other digital marketers take notice.
Conclusion
2019 will be an interesting year for digital marketers, and social media will continue to take centre stage. However, very few marketers are getting the results that they want because they are failing to create social media marketing strategies other than posting and waiting for customer response. With the above social media statistics in Singapore for digital marketers 2019 and tips, you will be able to create compelling social media content that converts.
