Marketers to face social media saturation, Mindshare says

The trend is the result of digital media technology and changes in consumer behaviour, said the leading marketing and media network.
Nuilufar Fowler, managing director at Mindshare Thailand, said yesterday that use of social media such as Facebook would continue to grow in the next two years.
Current Thai penetration by Facebook is about 18 million of the country’s 25 million mobile-phone users. Bangkok is now Facebook’s largest global city, with 13 million accounts.
“With this trend, social media are expected to reach saturation soon,” she said.
Meanwhile, though brand owners put more focus on getting “fans” to interact with customers on their fanpage, in fact, only 10 per cent return to the page after they initially “liked” it.
Fowler suggested that advertisers and marketers should focus on paid media on Facebook, or create the best content on their fanpage.
The full launch of third-generation mobile connectivity this year will help the mobile channel become the primary platform for Internet access in the Kingdom, with smart phones overtaking personal computers.
By 2016, there will be three times as many mobile searches as those undertaken via desktops.
As a result, she said, there would be a huge amount of data generated by consumers and companies in the digital word.
According to leading technology firm IBM, 90 per cent of the data in the world today has been created in the past two years. This presents a big challenge for advertisers, marketers and brand builders to avoid being buried under an avalanche of data.
“The important thing is how to turn the data into insight to forecast accurate marketing performance and improve return on investment,” Nuilufar said.
Mindshare, which is part of GroupM, a global media investment-management company, also expects to see more a rapid fragmentation of viewing across many channels by 2015, when digital terrestrial TV broadcasting takes full effect in Thailand.

XAXIS LAUNCH
In a separate matter, Xaxis, the world’s largest audience-buying company, yesterday announced the launch of operations in Thailand, via a partnership with mInteraction, the digital unit of GroupM Thailand.
US-based Xaxis will work directly with mInteraction in providing regional marketers with the full suite of Xaxis audience-buying solutions.
“The Thai market place, like other areas in Asia-Pacific, is quickly developing in terms of publisher maturity and consumer behaviour,” said Michel de Rijk, managing director of Xaxis APAC.
At launch, Xaxis Thailand will coordinate with mInteraction to provide clients with the capability to implement coordinated audience-buying campaigns across multiple platforms and channels, he said.
The chief executive of GroupM Thailand, Kevin Clarke, said Xaxis represented the cutting edge of online audience targeting and |“our clients stand to make great competitive gains through the opportunities these products provide”.