Social Media: The Global Divide

In the latest issue of Harvard Business Review, Mikolaj Jan Piskorski looked at how social sharing behaviours differ across the globe. Using data from a survey of more than 50,000 users of social platforms in 18 countries – Piskorski looked at the following five broadcast behaviours: blogging, managing a social-network profile, sharing photos, sharing videos, and microblogging.

Interestingly, the research found striking differences between the East and West. Social networks are popular in the West, however, the West lags in certain behaviours compared to Eastern markets such as China and India where users are more than three times as likely to tweet or microblog.

The study found that social networking behaviours in the emerging BRIC nations are far more balanced. The authors believe this is because the majority of the population in these countries went online when these technologies were further along.

This research has significant implications for businesses who market outside of North America. In developing your social media strategy, it’s important to understand how markets can differ in their usage of the various tools available. Understanding what tools they use and how they use them is key to establishing what activities will have the greatest impact on that market.