South East Asia social media 'dependence'.

People attempting to get onto public mass media is what's transcending internet penetration across Asia now, where social usage is normally above the global average - to the main point where one observer has described it as a “dependency”.

In 2018, nearly a million people went for the very first time online, propelling the world’s internet population to almost 4.4 billion, according to Simon Kemp, CEO and founder of marketing consultancy Kepios.

“We see that the desire to use the social media is in fact one of the primary things that bring people online for the first time,” he told a recent Singapore event.

Citing numbers from We Are Hootsuite and Sociable, he noticed that Southern Korea (95%) and North Korea (0.1%) were at contrary ends of the Asian internet penetration spectrum, but added that “as an area, we are doing pretty much and very near to the global average”.

With regards to social media, however, APAC is above average, he noted. (To get more, read WARC’s survey: Gaming, groceries and sociable: Asia’s biggest cultural media tendencies.)

Social media marketing is “one of the primary drivers of that time period that people spend online as well as the number of users utilizing the web”, said Kemp, adding that only 17 million from the world’s 3.5 billion active social media users aren't accessing the internet by mobile.

In conditions of entitled penetration, or share of users older 13 and above who use social media, the worldwide average is 58%. That most APAC marketplaces are well and above this global average, he observed, is “fairly demonstrative of the known fact that a lot of individuals in APAC are totally addicted to social media”.

While YouTube and Facebook remain the world’s top public systems, new regional players are emerging - like TikTok, the Chinese short-form video-sharing application which features more than 500 million users.

TikTok happens to be upgrading its initiatives to woo marketers and users in small-town India, where its engagement rates are reported to much outweigh those seen on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.