Take a leap back a couple of years and the emerging social media platforms would appear to you hardly anything beyond sources of entertainment and socializing. The role these social mediums play today in promoting a business among the targeted demographics and bridging the once impossible gap between products/services and their potential consumers would actually have seemed a far fetched dream in the recent past.
Today, social media has become a single, cohesive experience embedded in most of our activities and technologies. And how businesses have started jumping on the social media bandwagon for the promotion of their products and services is not just somebody’s guess – a salient feature of the post-recession business scenario is squeezed marketing budgets forcing businesses into finding more effective alternatives at lesser costs. eMarketing presented the best solution to the problem and social media marketing became an effective and affordable tool for online marketing.
Just like other major global markets, the use of social media for business purposes is also gaining huge popularity in the Middle East. The region’s population is increasingly becoming web savvy and there’s been a remarkable overall increase in the region’s online adspend over past few years. An Arab Media Outlook 2008-2012 report co-created by Dubai Press Club and PricewaterhouseCoopers shows a remarkable increase in compound annual growth rates of online advertising revenues in the Middle Eastern countries. Countries with major CAGRs include Qatar with 82%, Lebanon 81%, Egypt 43%, Bahrain 27%, Pan Arab 25% and UAE with 9%.
The report summarizes the region’s opportunity potential in these words: “Our analysis points to significant opportunities for media companies in the region to use the power of web 2.0 to develop new revenue streams and to maximize the value of both new and existing premium content. Distribution to mobile broadband devices including mobile television will play an important part in this. Another priority area is the development of audience measurement processes for both print and broadcast media. The absence of reliable audience figures makes it difficult for advertisers to target their advertising and to assess its effectiveness, which reduces their willingness to spend.”
The Arab region has seen a remarkably swift upward trend in its social media usage in the recent past. In March 2009, Facebook launched an Arabic version in an attempt to expand its presence in the Arab region. Even before the launch of the Arabic version, Facebook was very popular in Arab region with 900,000 users in Egypt, 300,000 users in Lebanon, and 250,000 users in Saudi Arabia. In Oct 2009, Twitter introduced Arabic interface at artwitter.com which is likely to increase its share in the region. Competing directly with its Arabic counterpart Watwet, Twitter is becoming increasingly popular as a microblogging force in the Arab world.
Seeing these interesting facts and figures, it’s not hard to foretell a brilliant future for social media in the Arab region. Businesses in the Middle East have already started optimizing the online social platforms for spreading their word to the global audience. The social media potential of the region is still untapped and the opportunities are endless.
If you would like to find out more about how you can use SMO (Social Media Optimization) to your business’s advantage, call us today on +971 (0)4 446 2629, or visit our SMO Services.
