7 observations of Singapore’s Social Media scene

About 10 – 15 years ago back in the 2nd half of 90s, every brand wanted to have an online presence, but now, every brand needs to have a social media presence. Social Media is every where, we check our tweets on the bus, flick thru our Facebook in the train, comment on this, share that, like this, rebuttal on that. And all this is all done in public online space.

As I’ve been more active on social media lately because of work, I’ve jumped in to the deep end and experimented on lots of stuff which was all in theory for me in the past. Knowing and experiencing it first hand is definitely two very different things.

I’m no social media guru, but I though it would be good for me to list out a few interesting observations i’ve had so far that are not usually openly discussed online.

1. The Singapore circle is small

People who do social media are active on social media obviously. If you follow and study enough of them, you will slowly find out that there are only a hand full of real online influencers, some are real genuine online celebrities with good reputation, some are just trashy and everyone takes them as entertainment and follow them anyway, some are not even real people.

Also because the audience of these influencers are constantly changing, some are trying hard to maintain their followers and are constantly reinventing themselves.

2. People can be quite cryptic

The online space is a place where rants are a plenty. People complain, have their out bursts online on anything and everything. But because its done publicly online, the art of #cryptic messages and sarcasm have reached an all time high. Its sometimes entertaining for those in the know, but for others, they would have no clue, but know that some one is really pissed off.

3. Brand Personas

There are quite a lot of brands having an online social media presences. Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, Blogs, etc. All these are usually either ran by an internal team or via their digital / advertising / media / PR agency. The thing is, form the start, their objectives should be quite obvious. They either have a marketing objective, a customer service obligation or are just broadcast channels. Follow is the new Opt-In.

4. Individual Branding

You are who you are and online, what you say, blog, do, share, engage with determines your branding. Some talk about current events, some focus on their niches (eg. technology, marketing, food, fashion, parenting, toys, gov issues, porn, etc.), some purely talk for talking sake while others give well analysed insights.

When a list of social media influencers are drawn up, these individuals need to fall into some category / blog topics, etc. So do you know what is your branding?

5. Auto-Followers

Using tools like SocialOomph, one can set their twitter accounts to auto follow back twitter accounts. This naturally created a market of I-follow-you-you-follow-me-back arrangements. There are lots of auto follow back lists out there and when you see some people following more than 1000 people, you really start wondering if they really do read all those updates. If on average each have 2 updates, we are looking at 2000 updates daily to go thru, omg.

6. Social Media Politics

On Twitter, Social Media Marketers follow other Marketers and everyone taps on each others publicly available followers (of cause if you want can put them in a private list). When certain marketing messages goes out with a “pls RT”, you can be sure its conflict of interest to some to retweet. There is this invisible tension on the net that is so visible between them.

7. There is currently no reliable list out there

The following are some places to find who are the influencers in Singapore. Although I don’t totally agree with the lists as some of the logic are not sound while some are opt-in lists. Some of those who are high on the list have also figured out how to be at the top, hence you can say some of the lists are manipulated.

• Twitaholic – Top 100 Twitterholics based on Followers in Singapore
• TwitterGrader – Top users by Location
• WeFollow – Most influential in Singapore
• TwitterCounter – The 1000 most popular Twitter users in Singapore
• NetworkedBlogs – Top 50 Blogs in Singapore

What ever the case is, the lists are somewhat a good place to start your research. Personally i also look at the curated twitter lists of people that I respect, but then again its purely from their perspective.

If you know more out there, do share and i’ll add to the list and give credit. :)

I’m no social media guru, so do give me some feedback or views if you have any. Thanks.