With the popularity of mobile devices, there are more than 1 billion smartphone users in the Asia-Pacific region, driving the rapid development of social media such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Weibo, WeChat, etc., and the growth of these platforms has also provided more opportunities for brands to interact with consumers.

A recent Connected Life study by Kantar TNS, an international market research agency, found that the penetration rate of Instagram in Hong Kong reached 70%, and Snapchat also reached 46%, a significant increase compared with 2015.

The rise of new platforms has provided more opportunities for brands, but social media has many ways to play and different target audiences, so there is no one-size-fits-all book, and a growing number of users does not necessarily mean a large customer base. If brands don’t understand the characteristics and trends of each platform, they can be foolish and waste money by blindly launching ads.

Take Instagram, for example, as a sharing platform for high-quality photos, and the majority of users in Hong Kong are working women who are young, have high purchasing power and educational qualifications. According to the Connected Life survey, 23% of users will actively ignore brand posts or content, 33% of users are concerned about being tracked or disturbed by online advertisements, and nearly half of Hong Kong Instagrammers aged 16 to 24 tend to trust peers or unknown users to share, more than brand ads are hard selling, so brands should consider how to target Instagram’s characteristics to improve user acceptance and interactive experience.

In this regard, the author thinks that Coca-Cola Hong Kong’s Instagram has done a good job, and they can respond to the style of Instagram and users’ resistance to the same product promotion images, starting from the color tone, composition, filters and other aspects of the pictures, combined with the copywriting to produce colorful, eye-catching, authentic and humanized posts, creating a vibrant, colorful, attractive and tracking brand image.

In the face of the continuous introduction of new social media, the rise of Instagram and Snapchat does not mean that it can replace other original platforms, it is precisely because different social media have different characteristics that the emerging social media has increased the channels for brands to have more diversified promotion. Therefore, it is advisable for brands to strategically select the most suitable social media platforms according to the product features and target audiences, so as to give personality to the brand, enhance the brand image, and build long-term and loyal interactions with customers/potential customers.