Facebook remains the top choice for marketers across the Asia Pacific according to the State of Social Media 2023 report by Meltwater, a social and media intelligence and data analytics company. Following Facebook closely are LinkedIn and Instagram.
Though TikTok is highlighted as one of the fastest-growing social media platforms too, it’s yet to be leveraged at the same rate as its well-established counterparts.
1,700 global marketing and communications professionals were surveyed for the report, and the majority of them are using at least four familiar platforms within their strategy. 77 per cent of them plan to either maintain or increase their social budgets in 2023, and 60 per cent of them say that social media is crucial to their growth, thanks to the present economic uncertainties.
The study found that across APAC, five of the top social media channels are ahead of the rest: Facebook at 87 per cent, LinkedIn at 81 per cent, Instagram at 81 per cent, YouTube at 67 per cent and Twitter at 50 per cent.
TikTok, on the other hand, lies in sixth place with 29 per cent. The platform is indeed rapidly growing with 30 per cent across the world, compared to 16 per cent growth in 2021 as more and more organisations across APAC are considering it for their 2023 marketing strategy.
79 per cent of marketers are using social media primarily for brand awareness, while 71 per cent of them are using social media to raise brand engagement. It follows with 53 per cent of marketers using it to acquire new customers, 46 per cent to increase web traffic and 36 per cent to increase sales. Only 19 per cent uses social media to improve customer satisfaction.
Yet measuring social media performance when it comes to marketing remains to be challenging. More than 56 per cent of marketers in the Asia Pacific highlighted this by saying that they are struggling with it. And 40 per cent of them are having an issue proving the value of social media marketing to their management.
Among all channels, social media marketing continues to generate the lowest numbers by revenue generated, said 21 per cent of the marketers. It shows how challenging it is to prove its significant contribution to the company’s bottom line.
For reporting purposes, the marketers usually share these top three metrics as the highlight of the reports—social media engagement (82 per cent of them), web traffic (64 per cent of them) and social media followers (63 per cent of them).
The usage of social listening, usually the behind-the-scene tool, continues to rise as well with 42 per cent of marketers deploying it as part of their marketing initiatives. The rest, 15 per cent of marketers said they plan to adopt social listening in 2023.
