The Evolution of Social Media & How UAE Based Media Agencies Responded
According to a recent study conducted by The World Economic Forum in 2016: “It’s estimated that by 2018, 2.44 billion people will be using social networks, up from 970,000 in 2010.” The use of social media has been on the rise in the UAE were according to the Global Media Insight: “The UAE has the biggest Facebook user base in the gulf region, with more than 93% of the population logging into the platform”. The tremendous rise in the use of social media in the UAE has prompted the government to take several initiatives in order to rise to the trend. As the UAE Government continues its use of social media as a new method of communicating with its citizens and residents, agencies throughout the years have also began shifting their focus to the use of social media as one of the main pillars to communicate the brands message to the consumer. The purpose of this paper is to show how agencies began to adopt social media tactics and how social media became a main pillar of communication as the people in the UAE became more reliant on social media to communicate.
As the most affluent agencies locally and globally began to shift more focus onto advertising on the social media sphere with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google, and YouTube getting more attention and budget year on year.
It has become abundantly clear that they have begun to notice the flexibility and tracking efficiency on which online advertising and in particular social media advertising provides. In a recent case study conducted by GlaxoSmithKline through Mediacom, an experiment was conducted were in the month of July 2017 a media campaign was launched without the use of TV to determine if using social media and in particular Facebook and YouTube can communicate the message that the brands want while reaching the same amount of people. The results were astonishing, “We overachieved all reach targets, reaching over 80% of the target audience for top brands within the YouTube universe across Arabia.” — Unusheah Khan, Brand Manager, Sensodyne. “The market share of our top brand increased by 5 percentage points year over year, and by 0.2% month over month despite the category shrinking by 2.6% during the same period.” Unusheah Khan, Brand Manager, Sensodyne. What the case study has shown is that over the past couple of years is that the consumers’ constant rise in the consumption of social enabled agencies to leverage this and increase and enhance their communication to them.
Year on year, there was a trend rising were the split between online and offline budgets keeps changing as the budget split was 85%-15% (Offline — Online) as of 2014 and now it currently stands around 60% — 40% as of 2017 on average. From the other side of the coin, with the rising increase of ads on social media, people’s behavior on these sites have begun to change when they started noticing these ads more and more. The behavior of scrolling past the ad and ignoring it completely is a major concern that agencies all share.
In a recent interview conducted with the social media team in Starcom Middle East about social media and the way they handle the daily and constant changes in social media:
It is only normal that with the increase of social media usage advertisers shifted their spends from one platform to another. The percentage of investment behind social platforms has increased throughout the years especially with the increase of its effectiveness and its Return On Investment. In terms both reach and engagement, no other platform delivers on these two with the same cost. Of course, the split has changed behind online. Internet is more and more becoming the core of consumers lives and their go-to platform for anything — be it information, entertainment, video consumption or merely just socializing. With these new trends, brands had to adapt to these changes therefore inserting more investment behind digital and shifting from traditional offline media channels. It is well known that the attention span of consumers surfing their social media pages is very low. With that, advertisers have to make special tailor-made ads that fit these facts. In one example, the branding of the ad and the messaging the advertiser wants to send should come in the very first so that if the viewer scrolls down or skips the ad he would at least have seen the logo and got the message — therefore increasing awareness. The creative of the ads have changed to answer the type of ads the consumers are most attracted to. For example, the user won’t be engaged or interested to see a text ad with all the information. The more the ad is appealing in terms of creative, genre (humor, attractive, emotional…) and relative, the more the user is bound to engage and interact with the ad. Ads will always follow the users’ behavior. With the tools available and AB testing advertisers are now able to detect the genre most attractive to each target audience. Ads should be catchy, simple and relevant. Internet usage and interactivity on social media platforms is increasing year on year and users are more and more becoming influenced by these platforms. They can be highly convinced or highly demotivated to buy, like or recommend. It is becoming a basic need to be on social media platforms and check the updates on them with users having the fear-of-missing-out (FOMO) syndrome.
As people’s behavior’s and online usage continue to evolve with the passage of time, agencies have been evolving to capitalize on this. With creating more appealing ads to conducting more precise targeting, it is apparent that social media has become a place where agencies learned how to communicate with consumers in a more direct manner and will continue to evolve, only time will tell.
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