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Why aren’t more Malaysian brands spending on social media?

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The social media landscape in Malaysia is vibrant, with many APAC marketers citing the market as one of the most engaged on various social media platforms.But therein lies the disconnect between user behavior and where brands are in targeting them.“Social media is a refuge for some and this is true for the general Malaysian population. We’re quite a reserved lot but incredibly animated when you get up-close. On social media, it gets even more animated because you can hide behind a certain veil of anonymity,” said Izlyn Ramli, VP of group brand and communication of Telekom Malaysia (TM).While Malaysians are incredibly active on social media, Malaysian brands are not doing enough on the social media sphere.Quoting a McKinsey study, Ramli said consumers in the digital space interacting with content is about 22%. However many Malaysian brands are only spending about 4% on their social media spend. That shows the disconnect.In contrast, TM decided to increase its digital and social media spend from 12% to 25%. On the TM marketing team, there is a digital team of 10 working on social media alongside its recently appointed social media agency UM for marketing campaigns.The key is to only bite off what you can chew, says Ramli. She added that TM in general started off small. TM currently manages social media conversations from a corporate communications perspective.“Social media is a real-time gratification platform where you have to manage the platform 24/7 as part of customer service. Because we started out small, we defined our period of engagement which was from 9am to 5pm daily,” said Ramli.Now that this service has been extended to midnight, consumers are still constantly commenting and engaging with TM. This just goes to show that the more you engage with the public, the more they will engage back with you, said Ramli.She added that in terms of mentions a day, TM has approximately a thousand mentions – but extreme positive or negatives comments only come up to 6% either way. The rest are all rather neutral.“In managing the conversation, we tend to move negative into neutral. But moving neutral into positive - that is the next big challenge,” said Ramli.“When it comes to marketing and engaging with your consumers, you need to keep it real. You only have a certain amount money and that small window of opportunity to engage with your consumers. A two minute tear-jerker says more than your cheapest product in the market. The best campaigns consumers always remember keep things real. Keep it real. Make it real,” said Ramli.

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