Study: Which type of social platforms are Hongkongers using for brand research?

Hongkongers have been using social media for many years and the adoption of social platforms has no signs to stop. In a recent study conducted by We are Social and Hootsuite, it was found that today, many social media users in Hong Kong use their accounts to conduct brand research. Many of them also follow influencers, experts, brands, celebrities and TV shows and channels.

According to The Digital 2022 report, Hong Kong had 6.68 million of social media users last year, equivalent to 88.1% of the city's population. The number of social media users increased by 3.7% year-on-year. Moreover, 99.7% of the entire population aged over 13 used social media too. The majority of Internet users (94.8%) used social media as well.

Social media platforms were crucial to brand research among Hongkongers with 69.4% of respondents in Hong Kong aged from 16 to 64 stating that they used social media to conduct brand research. Around 39.8% and 23.5% of them went for social networks and forums or message boards for information about brands respectively.

However, only a handful of them relied on messaging and live chat services (11.6%), micro-blogs (9.5%), and vlogs (9.1%).

In a previous interview with MARKETING-INTERACTIVE, Eric Thain, general manager - brand and customer at HK Express predicted that social commerce is going to take centre stage in the upcoming years. "Although China has seen this adoption earlier on, more global social media platforms have introduced social commerce functions to capture this opportunity. This will fuel the growth of this trend," he said.

Social media users in Hong Kong had various purposes when going online. For example, 47.5% of them followed friends, family and people they know, followed by TV shows or channels and bands, singers and musicians (both 29.9%). Around 26.7% of them followed influecners and experts, while 24.6% said they followed brands that they bought from.

Thain added that the proliferation of live streaming and user-generated content, due to short consumer attention spans, would increase the number of more bite-size content.

The report also examined web traffic referrals from various social media platforms. Facebook boasted the highest percentage (58.36%), increasing by 15.9% year on year. Facebook was followed by Twitter (16.12%), down 34.4% year-on-year, and Pinterest (11.26%), down 26.5% year on year. 

Wilson Wong, marketing director of Price.com.hk previously said that to make good and effective use of social media to drive eCommerce is always a challenging topic for marketers. To stay competitive in the eCommerce battlefield next year, brands that have better social commerce performance will be more likely to gain more market share and attention. Conducting new trials with continuous performance evaluation and optimisation is the key to success.

On the global front, there were 4.62 billion social media users around the world as of January 2022, representing year-on-year growth of more than 10% compared to January 2021. There were 424 million new social media users worldwide in the past year. The number of social media users is equivalent to more than 58% of the world’s total population. Meanwhile, social media took the largest share of connected media time in 2021 and people said they had spent a total of 2 hours and 27 minutes on social channels each day, increasing by 1.4% when compared to January 2021.

Facebook remained the world’s most used social platform. However, YouTube was closing the gap, with its audience growing twice as fast as Facebook’s. YouTube had 2.56 billion active users, equivalent to 88% of that of Facebook. The third most used platform was WhatsApp, followed by Instagram.
The report has also studied some social media behaviours. For example, Internet users worldwide were not averse to paying for digital content. More than 7 in 10 working-age internet users (71.5%) said that they had paid for some form of digital content each month. Internet users worldwide spent almost US$300 billion on digital content in 2021, with more than half of this being spent on video games.

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