Vietnam is often considered of the fastest growing market for social media. Indeed, a young population (median age of 29 years old, CIA World Factbook 2014) and a very high smartphone penetration (22 million smartphone users out of a total population of 90 mils, TechInAsia 2014) makes it quite attractive for Facebook and others. Yet there is one social media that is still struggling in this market, for reasons that may not be clear. Twitter, which was founded in 2006 is having a hard time getting new Vietnamese users. We believe 2015 is finally the year Twitter Vietnam is going to get big, but for not for the reasons you may expect.
Twitter in Vietnam, a long history of failure
Why has Twitter struggled to be successful in Vietnam? We believe there are several causes for this failure. First, unlike Facebook, Twitter was never advertised online (Facebook is often seen using PPC ads in Vietnamese) which means that it still not widely known among Vietnamese Netizens. Second and related, there are not so much Vietnamese popular accounts on Twitter as other social media. Indeed, most Vietnamese Netizens that do use Twitter follow Korean pop stars, because there are almost no Vietnamese ones to follow. Moreover as we mentioned in our article related to SEO bad practice in Vietnam, many SEO “specialists” use this social medium to spam their content. Finally one reason which would be hard to verify but we hear often is that Vietnamese Netizens are quite the chatters, and believe that 140 characters is not enough to express their feelings or points of view.
So why is Twitter finally going to grow in 2015?
Early February, Google and Twitter joined together to publish Tweets onto Google results page in real time. Much, much more Vietnamese Netizens will now see Tweets, and hopefully sign in to the service. Moreover with this new partnership, while we expect the Vietnamese SEO spammers to rush on Twitter and share countless numbers of links, we also expect a large number of respectable businesses and public figures to join as well which will in return bring more users and real interactions.
I don’t want to be seen as a spammer, How to do Twitter right ?
There are numerous ways to implement a Twitter strategy online that you may follow with different results. Click here for Golden Speed SEO Twitter strategy which we started in October 2014 and brought conversions by January 2015.
References
https://www.techinasia.com/oops-vietnam-22-million-smartphone-users-33-million/
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/vm.html