Although social media will play a more important role for businesses this year, APAC teams are struggling with reduced resources and leaning more heavily on AI tools.

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 programme – a notably higher percentage than their global counterparts (44%). 

Across APAC, marketing and communication professionals are embracing 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 to save time on writing content, and 36% indicated that AI tools have helped them improve their copy.

The struggle to execute
Although 48% of APAC teams surveyed said that social media will play a more important role in their company this year, many teams are struggling to maximise their social programs due to reduced resources. 

Meltwater conducted an email survey with about 2,000 professionals working in social media, marketing, PR and communications in Q4 2023. The APAC edition of the State of Social report analysed the responses from the approximately 400 respondents based in the region.

The survey showed that even respondents from large companies with more than 1,000 employees operate in small social media teams of 2 to 5 members. Further, many social media teams find strategy and execution a challenge, 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 include:

  • 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 better understand their target audience or to manage brand reputation.

While video is widely accepted as the format that is more engaging on social media, companies in APAC are surprisingly 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 video, teams in APAC will need to consider their strategies carefully, and balance the possibility of higher return on investment against production time.

Doing more with less

“Social media teams are in an unenviable position of doing a lot more for their organisations this year with limited resources and budget. Concerningly, not having a defined social media strategy is a more prominent challenge in APAC than 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 customise content accordingly, ” shared Mimrah Mahmood, Vice President – 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.” 

For instance, Meltwater’s ChatGPT-powered writing assistant helps marketers brainstorm, create and improve their social copy, speeding up the writing process by up to ten times. Its DALL-E-powered image generator uses natural language text prompts to create royalty-free images.

“While the usage of AI is currently centred 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. This can help brands save time and money as it reduces the need to outsource content production to an external agency.” 

The full APAC State of Social Media report is available here.