SINGAPORE — The APAC edition of Meltwater’s State of Social Media 2024 report found that more than half of APAC businesses (55%) see artificial intelligence (AI) as important to their social media program — a notably higher percentage than their global counterparts (44%).
Across APAC, marketing and communication professionals embrace AI tools to enhance their social media work. More than half of the people surveyed (55%) say they plan to increase their use of AI tools in 2024, 64% in APAC said that AI tools help them save time on writing content, and 36% indicated that AI tools have helped them improve their copy.
The struggle to execute
Though almost half (48%) of APAC teams surveyed said that social media will play a more important role in their company this year, many teams struggle to maximize their social programs due to reduced resources. The survey showed that even respondents from large companies with over 1,000 employees operate in small social media teams of two to five members. Further, many social media teams find strategy and execution challenging, with 34% of respondents saying that they are still working on defining a strategy, while a quarter are in a tougher spot of having a strategy but lacking the resources to execute it.
Other key findings:
- Instagram is the highest channel of interest (45%) for APAC teams, closely followed by TikTok (43%)
- Teams in APAC are more likely to dedicate the same budget to social media that they did in 2023, unlike teams globally who are increasing social media budgets
- 64% of respondents in APAC agree that social listening is a key component in strategic planning. A majority indicated they use social listening to understand their target audience better or manage brand reputation.
Though video is widely accepted as the more engaging format on social media, Surprisingly, companies in APAC are more keen on written content and single imagery over video. This could be a reflection that most companies are operating with smaller teams and have fewer resources to create assets.
This dovetails with the Digital 2024 report finding that TikTok has the highest average time per Android user of any social platform globally, clocking in at an impressive 34 hours per month on average —equating to more than an hour per day using the platform. In second place is YouTube, with the average user spending just over 28 hours per month on its Android app.
Given the popularity of videos, teams in APAC will need to consider their strategies carefully and balance the possibility of a higher return on investment against production time.
“Social media teams are in an unenviable position of doing a lot more for their organizations this year with limited resources and budget. Concerningly, not having a defined social media strategy is a more prominent challenge in APAC than in other regions. With the typical social media user using 6.7 platforms each month, brands need to understand the usage intent of their target audience for their platform of choice. With bandwidth being a major concern, it is crucial that teams identify which are priority channels and customize content accordingly, ” shared Mimrah Mahmood, Vice President for Enterprise (APAC) and Partner at Meltwater Asia-Pacific.
He added, “Brands typically post three to four times each week, and the challenge is to consistently create engaging content in a scalable way. AI will continue to be a technology of interest as it augments the capabilities of social media teams. Meltwater’s writing assistant, powered by ChatGPT, helps marketers brainstorm, create, and improve their social copy, speeding up the writing process by up to ten times. While the usage of AI is currently centered around finding inspiration and creating copy, we can expect greater usage of AI to further boost content creation as text-to-image and text-to-video AI models improve and become mainstream. For instance, Meltwater uses a DALL-E-powered image generator to use natural language text prompts to create royalty-free images. This can help brands save time and money as it reduces the need to outsource content production to an external agency.”
