Social Media in BRIC Countries

There are many major social media platforms across the world. To illustrate the diversity, let’s take a look at the social media landscape in the ‘BRIC’ countries.

In Brazil, Orkut is the most popular social network. In fact, over half of Orkut’s global traffic comes from Brazil, which equates to around 20 million monthly visits.

Sonico.com, which is tightly targeted to Latin American users, has around eight million members in Brazil. MySpace has been Brazil’s third largest network for a few years, but it now seems likely that Facebook will move into the number three position.

Brazil’s biggest brand, ‘Omo’ detergent recently used Orkut and Youtube as the main online platform for the promotion of a prize giveaway. The campaign involved hiding GPS devices in boxes of washing powder so the winners could be located by the company and have their prizes delivered in person.

BBC News has reported that Russian internet investors, Digital Sky Technologies (DST), believe there are approximately 40 million internet-users in Russia, and more than 60 million Russian-speaking users in the world. They see a potential audience of more than 300 million people. The largest Russian social network, Vkontakte.ru, had seventy million registered users as of June, and at least 14 million visitors daily.

Reckitt Benckiser’s Clearasil brand has enjoyed social media marketing success in Russia. They identified social media as the best way to engage with Russian teenagers, who don’t watch much TV, preferring instead to socialize with their friends online.

Clearasil used Vkontakte.ru as the platform for the campaign. A group page was created where users could share photos, post comments and discuss expert advice. The company also created an app called ‘Profile Pictures’ which integrated the Clearasil brand into the process of creating cool profile pictures. More than 500,000 people participated in the Clearasil group on Vkontakte.ru, leading to a 30% increase in Clearasil sales in Russia.

In India, Facebook has recently moved ahead of Orkut for the number of monthly unique visitors. Facebook now has 20.87 million, compared to Orkut’s 19.87 (July 2010 Comscore data). These two networks are already well-known to internet marketers in the English-speaking world, which may make India an attractive market to target. BharatStudent is another popular Indian network with 4.32 million monthly unique visitors. As the name suggests, it is a network aimed at the younger demographic.

Renren.com and Qzone.com are the main social networking sites in China. Renren, which claims to have over 120 million users, is a clone of Facebook. It’s very popular with students but it hopes to attract a more diverse user base in the future. Qzone claims to have more than 380 million users, but many of these may be dormant accounts opened using the company’s QQ network, China’s largest instant messenger service.

China’s third largest social media service, Kaixin001.com, is popular with white collar workers. Kaixin001 has developed some very popular social games, like ‘Slave Manor’ and ‘Happy Farm’.