Social Media & Mobile Trends in Asia

As a self-confessed social media junkie, spending roughly half my work day on the topic, I am constantly on the lookout for solid data that can assist my colleagues both on the U.S. higher education side as well as our over 450 EducationUSA Advisers in 170 countries.

What I continually encourage our centers to do as part of their local outreach to student populations in their countries is to conduct market research. From simple ideas like surveying their current advisees, to reaching out to local companies that might collect & share the kind of statistics and trends that could be applied to their work, I always hope for the best.

A company out of the UK with offices around the world, We Are Social, has quickly become a fast favorite of mine. In late 2011, over a series of weeks these guys produced a series of 16 "social, digital and mobile" trends in Asia reports covering 24 countries via SlideShare presentations, and available on their blog site. Below are a few of the key data points for the South & East Asian regions from the folks at We Are Social from their Asia Summary report.

• 750 million+ social media users
• 75% of Asia’s population have mobile phones;
• 66%+ of Asia’s internet users access the web via mobile devices

To help my colleagues have access to all these reports in one location, I have summarized the reports via linked country names:

• China
• Hong Kong and Macau
• India
• Indonesia
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Mongolia
• Nepal and Bhutan
• Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Maldives
• Philippines
• Singapore and Brunei
• South Korea
• Taiwan
• Thailand and Myanmar
• Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos

Each report is full of the kind of market research I only wish I had the time to compile. So, dig in and enjoy! And a big thanks to We are Social for all their amazing work.

EducationUSA and the Social Media Wave Roll On

Back in early 2009, EducationUSA launched four main social media channels focusing on global audiences: our global Facebook page, two Twitter feeds (one for students @EdUSAupdates, one for the U.S. higher education community @EdUSAtips), and our YouTube Channel. We always knew YouTube would be popular, but Facebook really surprised us.

Every six months, one of the folks I follow on things social media, Nick Burcher, out of the UK, puts together a top 30 list of countries on Facebook. His most recent effort for year ending December 2011, reveals where the growth of Facebook has been and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Interestingly, both India and Indonesia have past the UK into 3rd and 2nd place worldwide respectively.

In my role as Outreach Coordinator for EducationUSA, as a service to the U.S. higher education community, I go a bit deeper with these Facebook users to get at the actual numbers in each of these top 30 countries (excluding the U.S.) that are in the college age demographic (16-25 yrs. old). This report reveals how dramatic the difference is in more mature vs. newer Facebook markets with regards to the percentages of users who could be looking at U.S. higher education as an option.

Recently, a Mashable.com article shared how significantly the U.S. State Department has adopted social media as an essential public diplomacy tool. I can happily report that in the last three years, our network of EducationUSA Advising Centers have truly adopted social media as a core part of their work. I encourage my higher ed colleagues in the States looking to connect with our centers via social media to review our 2012 EducationUSA Global Social Media Presence report with links to all the available centers' pages, groups, & profiles on Facebook, YouTube Channels, and Twitter feeds. The highlights include:



Facebook 

1. 127 Pages/201,813 fans/likes (plus our global fan page that has 30,000 additional fans)
2. 9 Groups/10,151 members
3. 27 Profiles/8672 friends

YouTube

• 10 Channels/141,993 video views (plus our global channel that has received 108,000 video views)

Twitter

• 71 Feeds/83995 followers (plus our two global feeds with nearly 6000 additional followers)

Get connected, stay involved!

Introduction to EducationUSA's "Your 5 Steps to U.S. Study"

As visitors to our EducationUSA website will have noticed, particularly the "For International Students" section, we have rolled out for the first time a comprehensive guide to U.S. study options for international students. Called "Your 5 Steps to U.S. Study" we sought to simplify the oftentimes confusing process to it's essential elements, hence our 5 steps approach.

The feedback received so far has given us renewed faith that we are on to something special here. In the months ahead we'll be launching stand-alone versions of that 5 Steps web content as well as an exciting new 3D EducationUSA Virtual Advising Experience that will be distributed through our advising center network hopefully on CDs/DVDs & flash drives as part of their ongoing outreach efforts to broaden the scope of potential students who might have previously seen study in the U.S. as only a far off dream. And here's a teaser for you all, sometime in February, we'll be launching our first Facebook app based on this upcoming 3D version of "Your 5 Steps."

The above video is meant to capture some of that initial excitement about study in the U.S. and direct students to our EducationUSA site to begin their journey. We welcome your feedback and comments.