Social Media around the world: What’s the Buzz? : An Ovreview

This topic was presented by Mr Tony Proudian, who is
the managing Director of PAN Arab Research Center (PARC), Saudi Arabia. He
highlighted the main points on the research of Global media, focusing more on
Saudi Arabia. He started by the saying that “the globe is a small village”
which he confirms is a true statement on the basis of the three researches
conducted, first was the economic Crisis, second was the Swine flu and third
was the Social Media. He said that the research was conducted in around 27
countries.

The main objective of the research as mentioned by
him was to see how people are involved in Social Media, how do users and Social
Media interact on different devices, and finally what do people really want?
This research was conducted from 1^st March to 21^st April
2010. Amazingly, the statistic he presented was that over 22,000 respondents
participated via online researches, face to face, computer based interview.
Majority of the people participated from Asia, which was around 625 million
people, 475 million people from Europe, 266 people from North America, 204
million people from Latin America, 111 million people from Africa, 62 million
people from Middle East, and 21 million people from Australia. According to the
statistic obtained from the research conducted it was found that within the
middle east, 235,000 people are active facebook users in Bahrain, while Saudi
Arabia has 2.5 million facebook users, Syria has 20,000 and 1,700 users are
from Emirates. Other statistic obtained showed that 75% of the people use
Social Media for personal reasons, while 25% of the people use it for business
purposes.

Social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and
myspace were found to be the Global leaders in Social Media among all age
groups. Social Media applications on mobile phones are mostly used by people
aged 36 and below. As an overview of the globe given by him, it was estimated
in June 2010 there are 2 billion people internet users which constitutes about
28% of the population. Also he mentions a very interesting fact, that males are
more active users compared to the females. He went on describing the different
Social Media activities which included browsing, blogging, updating,
downloading, chatting, shopping and many others. He confirmed that the mobile
Social Media networking applications are surely to be developing more in the
near future, as these applications are the fastest growing applications. And
then he proceeded to describe some issues related to the mobile Social Media
application users some of which were; better wifi suggested by 28%, better
mobile device by 24%, better interface suggested by 16%, and other protection
related issues.

Giving more statistics on Saudi Arabia he mentioned
that the most popular websites accessed in this country are facebook, youtube,
photolog, mobile gaming. Also he gave some figures on the age group accessing
each particular site, for example he mentioned that blogs and job searching was
mainly done by the age group of 25-36 years. The remaining activities involved
users from the age group of 16-24 years. Another interesting fact mentioned by
him was that people in Saudi Arabia, mostly preferred to use their laptops than
the other devices.

He concluded by saying that Social Media has now
become a phenomena, mentioning that it is an excellent vehicle for the growth
of the media in communication. He closed his talk with this statement that
Social Media must be used for good things before it is being used against.
Lubna