With the world becoming increasingly mobile first, below are the 2015 trends Facebook is looking at for the Asia-Pacific region.
1. APAC is primary region of growth
An indication of how fast our region is growing can be seen from the latest quarterly earnings report – Asia saw 28% year-on-year (YOY) growth in Daily Active Users (DAU) to 242 million and 21% YOY growth in Monthly Active Users (MAU) to 426 million.
Over the last year, we’ve invested in programs to help educate agencies and businesses on how they can leverage our platform to drive better returns. We have seen how brands are now able to run campaigns more efficiently and effectively on our platform and be able to reach targeted audience groups.
Asia Pacific, a region that is made up of many different countries and culture, is home to two-thirds of the world’s population, and is also likely to be the region where the next billion internet users will come on board. This is also a mobile-first region. In India and Indonesia, with over 112 million and over 71 million people accessing Facebook monthly respectively and where feature phones are more prevalent than smartphones, their first internet experience is a Facebook experience.
2. Mobile Engagement is Deepening
Whether you are in Japan, Indonesia or Australia, it is very likely that you will see every person on the street holding or using a mobile phone. People are on mobile all day, every day. Asia-Pacific is home to the largest mobile phone market worldwide, with 2.6 billion users this year and people will continue to come online via mobile (eMarketer, April 2014).
In Australia, people are heavily engaged with their devices and the way people consume media is changing rapidly. More than 12 million Australians own a smartphone and of those, two-fifths completed a mobile transaction in December last year (ACMA). Despite this clear mobile opportunity, advertisers have not caught up. Nielsen reports that one in three of all mobile minutes in Australia are on Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp. This makes mobile a crucially important channel for business and brands to connect with people.
3. Multiscreening
51% of young people in Australia use their mobile devices while watching TV, up from 35% three years ago (Roy Morgan, October 2014). This means TV is no longer able to provide the reach it once was, as people are obsessively checking their phones and media platforms all the time. This is making it crucial for advertisers to reach people on their devices—even during primetime. Of people who second-screen while watching TV, 85% visit Facebook the most (Millward Brown, March 2014).
4. Growth in video, particularly on mobile devices, is exploding
From 2012 to 2014, video consumption on mobile and tablet has grown by 532% (eMarketer, July 2014). Two-thirds of video views on Facebook are happening on mobile. Since June this year, there has been an average of more than 1 billion views on Facebook every day and 76% of people who watch video online say Facebook is their top source for video discovery, meaning that of the 13 million Australian active users, many are discovering their friends, families and brand stories within their newsfeed through the power of video.
This fundamental shift in the way people consume video content means there is a greater opportunity than ever for marketers to leverage a rich storytelling format in order to target people across devices and deepen engagement with them.
A great example of where video has worked well was with McDonald’s in Australia. They were the first to trial Facebook’s new Premium Video Ads during the 2014 FIFA World Cup, driving over one million video plays in just 24 hours. McDonald’s wanted to increase brand scores and bolster brand association between itself and the 2014 FIFA World Cup. To achieve this, it encouraged Australians to watch its campaign videos as soccer fever started to sweep the country.
Results:
1,165,736 video plays
2.3 million Australians reached
12 second average video play
3-point lift in brand scores among 34–49 year-olds (Nielsen Brand Effect)
5. Marketers are increasingly focused on real business outcomes that are measurable
For Facebook, measurement effectiveness is an important priority, and our focus for 2015 is on advertisers getting real business results and measurement metrics on their campaigns on Facebook.
In addition to being where people spend their time, Facebook is the world’s largest network of real people. Facebook knows what individual people and their friends like on Facebook and we know we have real people across the devices. This enables us to show relevant ads, resulting in actual business results for marketers.
This year, we’ve introduced cross-device reporting for Facebook ads, enabling advertisers to see for the first time how people are moving between devices before they convert. We already offer targeting, delivery and conversion measurement across devices, so with the new cross-device report, advertisers are now able to view privacy-safe reports about the devices on which people see ads and the devices on which conversions subsequently occur.
Dan Neary
Vice President, APAC