Are marketers in South Korea losing interest in social media? According to longitudinal research by KPR Social Communication Research Lab and Macromill Embrain, usage of Facebook, blogs, Twitter and YouTube have fallen?substantially?since 2014.
Social media executives responding to this year’s survey were 11.2% less likely to use Facebook than a year earlier. They were also 14.1% less likely to use blogs, 22.2% less likely to use Twitter and 32.3% less likely to use YouTube.
There was rising interest in some social venues, however. More social media marketers were using KakaoStory, a native South Korean service, and Instagram nearly tripled usage over the same time period.
In addition, looking at social media marketing as a whole, budgets are more likely to be up than down. Though a slight majority of respondents reported holding budgets steady in 2015, nearly two in five said they had increased spending, vs. just 10% who decreased it.
eMarketer estimates that on the consumer side, 26.7 million people in South Korea will use social networking sites on at least a monthly basis this year, up 9.4% over 2014 usage. Facebook will reach just over half of this population?a share that’s in decline even as absolute Facebook audience size continues to rise.
