We all know the United States is at the steering wheel of online marketing, leading the high-speed chase on every communication channel while everyone else is following along.
Except for China and Russia, perhaps.
How did the U.S. transform the traditional one-way marketing road we used to stride along into the real-time two-way communication highway we're now forced to race on? The short answer is 'The Big Five'. The long answer is keep on reading."
Not to say that Google+ and Pinterest don't play a role, but these five are the major influencers of online marketing in 2014.
In 2006 to train businesses on how to market online, the magic words used to be website, search and email marketing.
Nowadays they've been replaced with mobile, social, and how can we forget, content marketing (hint: which is exactly what I'm doing now!)
From Search to Social
Google initially thrived on selling ads to users searching up stuff, but when they noticed the shift from search to social they quickly acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006.
So now Google owns and sells ads on the two biggest search engines in the world, with YouTube being the second of course.
It's absolutely unsuprising to see them report a whooping$15.4 billion in revenueson their first quarter earnings of 2014. That's 616% more than what Facebook reported in its' first quarter results of $2.5 billion, which is still 63% more than what they reported last year.
LinkedIn came in third with a less-than-impressive $473 million in revenues, while Twitter left speculators everywhere dissapointed with the lowest 1st quarter results of $250 million.
The Beasts in the Middle East
What about the Middle East? Are the big five gaining the same traction there as well?
Let's find out.
From an advertising point of view, only LinkedIn provides a breakdown of the revenues by geography, where they've grouped the Middle East (ME)along with Europe and Africa (i.e. EMEA).
Nevertheless, this doesn't mean brands aren't advertising on the other four networks in the ME.
For instance, have you seen Jaguar's Good To Be Bad campaign?
There's a good chance you did, because it's a successful integrated campaign that reached most Television and Youtube viewers in the Arab region.
Jaguar smartly chose YouTube over Facebook because according to Financial Times, Saudi Arabia watches more hours of YouTube content per capita than anywhere else in the world."
And I remember seeing the promoted hashtag on Twitter, enticing my curiosity enough to click and discover that Jaguar is behind the fiasco.
As for Facebook, we didn't see Jaguar's ads on there but local brands in Kuwait are using the network to introduce cool things like new ice cream flavors.
All I have to say about that is yummy yum yum.
What about Instagram and LinkedIn?
Well Instagram ads are only available in the US and haven't been rolled out to the ME yet.
As for LinkedIn, they joined the advertising game, by selling ads to brands wishing to promote their status updates or jobs.
They also offer simple text and image ads, as shown below where Oracle is currently taking advantage of this ad format to promote whitepapers in Kuwait.
Oracle has also been known to utilize the much-more effective sponsored update format to promote their recent event, "Oracle Applications Strategy Update: Modern Business in the Cloud - KUWAIT."
Do LinkedIn sponsored updates work?
Just ask me, that's how I heard about Oracle's event! After having seen it in my LinkedIn newsfeed as a sponsored update only to then register and attend it.
So why are these brands spending money on social media ads in the ME?
According to the Arab Social Media Report series, there's more than 135 million Internet users in the Arab region and more than71 million of them actively using social media today."
Not a bad audience to pursue.
And their more recent Arab Online 2014 Report shows the five most social media sites Arabs registered for.
The fact that people have social media accounts doesn't necessarily mean they're actively using it.
According to TwopCharts, about 44% of the 974 million existing Twitter accounts have never sent a tweet."
So what's to ensure that these 'account holders' are actively using the social media sites?
That's why the above chart has to be taken with a grain of salt because if we broke it down by country and traffic, we'd see a different picture altogether.
Instagram, for example, has overtaken LinkedIn's spot as being the 4th most preferred social media channel of use in Kuwait.
And Instagram did that organically, without selling a single adin the ME.
Just look at how many times the hashtag #Kuwait was used compared to #USA and #UAE. Not bad for a country with a population of 3.25 million versus 318 million and 9.2 million, respectively.
Social Media Popularity in the GCC
If we were to use Amazon's Alexa tool to view the top social media sites in the GCC, we'll get slightly different results.
Alexa's one month rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors and pageviews over the past month.
You probably realized that the rankings of Kuwait, KSA andBahrain are identical.
While UAE and Qatar have the same exact rankings in the popularity of the big five social media networks.
This could be due to the similarity among the cultures of Kuwait, KSA and Bahrain and those of UAE and Qatar.
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