Social Media around the World: What’s the buzz?

Social Media around the World: What’s the buzz?

Tony Proudian, Managing Director- PAN Arab Research Center (PARC), Saudi Arabia

Greetings,

We kicked off the L&T symposium on “ Social Media: Platforms for Interactive communities” today with the welcome address by the Effat University’s president, Dr.Haifa Jamal Al-Lail, which is going great so far! There are many discussions and ideas that are sparking and very soon you will be learning about them in the coming posts.

We moved to the second round of the first session of the L&T symposium which was led by the Managing Director of PARC, Mr.Tony Proudian, who very enthusiastically shared the research highlights about the social media around the world with particular focus to Saudi Arabia. The WIN conducted a survey from March 1^st to April 7 2010, for 27 countries thought out the world. 4 Arab countries Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates were amongst them. Below are some of the important highlights: 

1.The research basically focused on how people were involved with social media and how consumers interact and access social media spaces. 

2.       How social media and user generated content are being integrated on multiple devices.

3.       Net users by geographic reasons by 2010 (Asia  825.1 million, Saudi Arabia 2.5milllion) People interacting on FaceBook  412,000 Qatar, Syria 30,000, United Arab Emirates 1million 7thousand )

4.       The global leaders in the world of social media were Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube which were used for personal and business networking purposes.

5.       Estimates of global net users were 2 billion (June 2010).  Males were found to be the most active social media users around the globe. 

6.       Some of the popular social media activities were browsing the internet, reading news, posting messages, listening and uploading  music, uploading and sharing photos and shopping etc.

7.       The mobile social apps are among the fastest growing apps. 

8.       86% of social media activities comprises of browsing the internet alone.

9.       In view of KSA, the percentages of social media activities are as follows: browsing 96%,blogging 86%, downloading 68%, listening music 67%, uploading media 92%, shopping 38%,  chatting 56%,employement 35%,  gaming 45%.

From Mr.Proudian’s point of view, social media is a phenomenon and he referred to it as an excellent vehicle and thinks it should be used for the good of society and not against it.

posted by: Fauziya Ali Ansari ( Alumni, Effat University )