As social media adoption continues to grow in Asia Pacific (AP), so too does marketers’ spending on social advertising. Forrester’s just-published Asia Pacific Social Media Advertising Spending Forecast, 2014 To 2019 report projects that social media ad spending will continue its rapid growth over the next five years. In this period, marketing leaders in Australia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea will increase their investment in advertising on social media (excluding mobile messaging apps) at a 21.6% compound annual growth rate, reaching $5.8 billion by 2019. The rapid pace of growth is mainly due to:

  • Low market maturity coupled with a large and active social media population. Collective social ad spending in these five AP markets end up being less than half of that in the US in 2014. The maturity of the AP social ad market is low considering the large numbers of people in the region who use social media, and as this market matures it will grow faster than in the US.
  • Increasing social media consumption will continue to boost ad spending. The percentage of the online population using social media in the five AP markets will increase by double digits from 2014 to 2019. Forrester projects that further Internet adoption will bring even more consumption of social media.

Marketers planning their Asia Pacific budgets should understand two important dynamics when designing their social advertising campaigns for the region:

  • Social advertising maturity levels vary in the five largest AP markets. Japan is the largest and most mature social advertising market; it contributes quite a large portion of social ad spending in the five markets, even with a rather small share of the social population. China is the greatest contributor to growth; its social ad spending will almost triple in the next five years.
  • Mobile is the key driver of social ad spending growth. The percentage of AP users accessing social sites through mobile devices continues to grow. On average, more than three-quarters of consumers in the five AP markets already access social media from a mobile phone; this number will continue to grow quickly through 2019.

To learn more about the Asia Pacific social media advertising spending forecast, please read the full report.