2023 Digital Marketing Trends: [Hong Kong Social Media Usage Habits and Development Expectations 2023] Market Research Report

The global social media landscape saw significant changes in 2022. The rise of TikTok has made vertical, ultra-short, and highly interactive videos mainstream, and the creator economy has driven the popularity of private platforms like Discord and Patreon. But what about Hong Kong? Has the social media usage of Hong Kong residents changed over the past year? Among the many emerging social platforms, which ones are most popular with Hong Kong consumers?

uMax Data, in collaboration with Fimmick, conducted a market opinion survey, including an anonymous online questionnaire and analysis of online discussions using the [xMiner Big Data Analysis Platform]. The goal was to understand the social media usage habits and future expectations of Hong Kong marketing professionals and consumers. Here are our survey results.

Overall Social Media Usage in Hong Kong

The survey found that Hong Kong residents frequently use social media. Regardless of gender, age, or job level, most respondents use Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube daily. Similar to international surveys, we found that Instagram is particularly popular among young users in Hong Kong, with 98.63% of respondents under 30 using it daily. In contrast, Facebook is more popular among older individuals, with a daily usage rate of 93.10%. YouTube showed relatively balanced usage, ranging between 70-80%.

![Age Distribution of Daily Social Media Users]

When analyzing user attitudes, the performance of these three major social platforms varies. Our analysis of online discussions in Hong Kong revealed that YouTube-related discussions are more negative, primarily related to the number of ads and user experience. In contrast, Instagram has the highest proportion of positive content (33.1%), mainly due to the introduction of new features.

Time Spent on Social Media by Hong Kong Residents

The time Hong Kong users spend on social media is relatively stable. The survey shows that users spend similar amounts of time on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, generally less than three hours. Most respondents indicated that the time spent on these platforms would not change in the coming year. Comparing the three major social media platforms, YouTube and Instagram performed best, with 93.33% and 84% of respondents indicating they would increase or maintain their time on the platforms. Although Facebook performed worse, 68.89% still indicated they would increase or maintain their time on the platform. Interestingly, although YouTube videos are generally longer, the time users spend on the platform has not increased proportionally.

Do Hong Kong brands' social media budgets align with consumer habits? We compared the time users spend on each platform with the budgets brands plan to allocate to each platform next year and found that the differences are not significant, indicating that marketing professionals can keep up with market trends. The only difference is in Instagram's budget. 52.14% of marketers said they would increase their budget for Instagram next year, much higher than the 28% increase in user time. This may be because brands have traditionally focused on Facebook for promotion and now need to strengthen their presence on Instagram.

Performance of Different Social Media Content Formats

Social media offers various content formats, but which ones are most popular with Hong Kong consumers? 92% of survey respondents said they like to view images on social media, with text, vertical short videos, and horizontal videos each supported by about 60% of respondents. Live streaming performed the worst, with only 9.78% of respondents indicating they liked watching it.

However, things are not that simple. If we analyze the content formats used by Hong Kong users on Facebook and Instagram and their average heat values, we find an interesting phenomenon. Although image posts are the most shared by users, *the average heat value of video posts is much higher than that of image posts, some even more than twice as high. This may explain why Meta has been heavily promoting video content formats like Reels and live streaming in recent years.

Do brands plan to leverage the advantages of video content? Our survey shows that although images are still the most shared content format by brands, interest in vertical short videos has significantly increased from 56.25% to 78.95%, indicating that many brands have realized the importance of video content and are starting to move in this direction.

Popularity of New Social Media Features

Facebook, Instagram, and Google have introduced many new features on their platforms in recent years, but do Hong Kong users like using them? Our survey found that among the many features, interaction features like likes, comments, discussions, and shares remain the most popular, with 92% of users using them; vertical short videos ranked second, with 52.89%; in-app shopping features ranked last, with 30.22% of users using them.

What about brands? Their adoption of social media features is similar to consumers, with the most significant differences in vertical short videos and social listening. Possibly due to the strong trend of Reels, 71.76% of marketers indicated that their brands would adopt vertical short videos next year. Social listening and analysis also received nearly 70% support from marketers.

Popularity of New Social Media Platforms

Although Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have long dominated the social media industry, many innovative platforms have emerged in recent years. Can these platforms challenge the three giants' status? According to our survey, many Hong Kong users use other social media platforms, with nearly half of the respondents using Twitter.

Podcast, Discord, and Patreon, commonly used in the creator economy, also received considerable support from users. In fact, if we analyze online discussions about these new platforms in Hong Kong, these three platforms receive the most positive feedback. Discussions about Patreon had an impressive heat value of 78.8%, indicating that the creator economy era has arrived in Hong Kong.

Are brands taking advantage of this new trend? Unfortunately, brands are slower in this regard. Our survey found that brands have little interest in new social media platforms, with an average of only 2.74% of marketers indicating they use these platforms. We recommend that brands pay more attention to market developments and keep up with consumer trends to formulate the best marketing strategies. In fact, promoting on these platforms doesn't necessarily require opening an official account; brands can also choose to collaborate with influencers on these platforms, avoiding the costs and risks associated with building a following and creating content on new platforms.

Challenges and Expectations for Brands Next Year

When asked about next year's challenges, most marketers chose "accurately tracking ad performance" (81.20%) and "collecting and using customer data" (78.20%). Indeed, since Apple implemented ATT, the tracking effectiveness of various advertising platforms has significantly declined, leading to highly volatile ad performance, a sharp drop in target audience accuracy, and a substantial increase in advertising costs. Brands may consider collecting first-party data themselves, building customer databases like CRM, CDP, and DMP to fill the data gap.

Many experts are not optimistic about Hong Kong's economy next year, which is also reflected in marketers' choices for future opportunities. Among the many options, creator marketing (68.38%), cross-platform tracking technology (62.60%), and automated marketing (59.85%) received the most support from marketers, indicating that marketers hope to attract customers through more accurate and effective content next year to prepare for the economic challenges.

About This Survey

This survey targeted Hong Kong marketing professionals and consumers and was divided into two parts. The first part was an online questionnaire, covering respondents' attitudes towards different social media, usage frequency, and functional applications. Among the respondents, 62.22% were marketing professionals, and 37.78% were consumers. Male respondents accounted for 24.89%, females for 63.56%, and those who preferred not to disclose their gender for 11.56%. In terms of age, 32.44% of respondents were under 30, 53.78% were between 30 and 45, 12.89% were between 46 and 60, and 0.89% were over 60. Among the respondents, 12% were management, 35.11% were department heads, 43.56% were staff, and 9.33% were other job levels.

The second part of the survey involved online opinion analysis, supported by uMax Data's big data analysis platform xMiner and analyzed by Fimmick. This analysis covered over 8,600 posts and comments from Hong Kong on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, forums, and news sites from November 2021 to October 2022.

Finally, we remind everyone that any survey can be influenced by factors such as questionnaire design, sampling, timing, and industry. Therefore, we recommend staying updated on market developments and closely monitoring trends to formulate more effective marketing strategies.

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uMax Data Technology Limited, founded in Hong Kong in 2016, is an innovative technology company driven by artificial intelligence and data. uMax Data offers a variety of SaaS products and solutions, including Social Intelligence Platform (SIP), on-premises AI server, social listening and online alert systems, all-in-one intelligent research and event management platform, AI search engines, social intelligent customer service platforms, AI Agents and chatbots, brand public opinion insights, social media risk management, and multimodal data processing and digital upgrading solutions. These are collectively known as "Social Intelligence." These products not only enhance enterprise productivity and efficiency but also help businesses make more informed decisions.

Want to analyze customer opinions through online discussions? Understand what netizens are thinking? Emailinfo@umaxdata.com immediately to request related case studies and insight reports.