Social Media Market Overview

As per Forrester’s report on “US Interactive Marketing Forecast 2009 to 2014” the spend on Social Media Marketing to grow at an annual rate of 34 percent – faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums. Forrester estimates that online advertising will grow from 12 percent of total marketing spend this year to 21 percent by 2014.

Number of people on social media platforms is increasing by the minute, if we have a look at the most popular social media platform i.e. Facebook®, it had 350 million users in January 2010 out of which 102 million were from USA and only 5.6 million users were from India where as if you compare the population of these two countries the trend is exactly opposite i.e. In 2010 India’s population has reached 1.18 billion and that of China has reached 1.34 billion where that of USA is 0.31 billion people.

Giants like IBM, SAS, Google and Accenture have jumped into the game with both feet and offer solution offerings ranging from SPSS Modeler data mining and text analytics workbench, Social Media Analytics to Social CRM. There are huge numbers of smaller player which offer more customized solution and number of such players is increasing exponentially.

The hidden potential of Social Media in Asia Pacific

As per Gartner’s press release on Social Software predictions, Social networking services will replace email by 2014 as primary method for interpersonal communication for 20% of business users. This means that more and more enterprises would depend on Social networking services for business communication services. These services would not only act as a mode of business communication but would act as an asset for management to deliver both external as well as internal messages. Social media today has reached a point where it is no longer a mere fad but it has proven the potential it has and what it can do to transform businesses.



Let us have a look at two major economies in Asia Pacific region which are India and China, As per International Telecommunication Union (ITU), out of every 100 inhabitants 28.3 inhabitants use internet but only 7.7 inhabitants are broadband users (Source), where as in India the numbers are as low as 5.12 and 0.65. These figures are for 2009. Considering the total population of 2.48 billion people in these two countries, the potential for growth is implausibly high.