The Middle East region is rapidly evolving, especially in the last 5 years, and getting highly influenced by the global trends such as e-commerce, business entrepreneurship, media and fashion influences, and brands lifestyle products.
Most marketing companies follow the strategy of Social media advertising when targeting youth, and the TV channels when targeting 30+.
Youth represent over 60% of the market view in the middle east. While almost 80% of people spend on average 5:30 hours on daily bases on their mobile phones to play games and check their social media.
The Middle East is rising as one of the fastest-growing markets and it is becoming more attractive due to some major factors.
This young segment is spending more time on social media more than the global average. Therefore, there is a great opportunity for marketers to use social media and content marketing especially for industries such as consumer products, fashion, food & beverage, and entertainment.
In the Gulf area, many of these younger consumers are affluent professionals, and this presents a big market for luxury brands and electronics. In marketing language this means a higher customer value and higher revenue per customer. Sophistically, higher Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
Egyptian consumers only engage with the Ads that contains a song. Simply they didn’t want the campaign to be focused on the product features and wanted it more entertaining.
They eventually did have a good understanding of the market and made the choice to stick to what it works. Now, which is 20 years later, you would still see that advertisers didn’t change their tactic. They only adjusted it to fit with the digital media platforms but the tactic is still the same.
Common advertising and campaign tactics are still effective for the mass consumer in the Middle East. The consumers in the region are highly influenced by the media and mass campaign over the personalized experiences. A viral campaign is widely effective in shaping the consumer habits and it works for big brands, media production, and even politicians.
Consumers in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) are among the most active users of social media platforms. The region’s large youth population and high mobile penetration rate have made it the ideal market for companies like Instagram and Snapchat, but it is Facebook that remains the most dominant platform for the Middle East with more than 180 million users, up from 56 million just five years ago.
Arabic was the dominant language used across almost every platform and all industries with the exception of fintech, where English was more commonly used. However, when broken down by country, the statistics show that while 82 per cent of users in Egypt and 96 per cent of users in Saudi Arabia opted for Arabic, in the UAE, 60 per cent of users prefer to post in English.
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia has a social media penetration rate of 75%. The most popular platform in the kingdom is Snapchat with almost 14 million users with an almost equal split between male and female users. With messages and posts that disappear after 24 hours and notifications if someone takes a screenshot, the level of privacy that Snapchat affords is one reason why it is so popular in the country.
In a similar vein, the ability to post anonymously on Twitter has propelled the platform as the second most popular in the country with the 11 million Saudi users ranking the most active and engaged in the world.
Across all the platforms in Saudi Arabia, users mainly showed interest in religion, nationalism, social development and culture and interacted primarily in Arabic.
Egypt
Social media in Egypt was once hailed as the tool for hope and change, helping to bring about the revolution of January 2011. It was during this time that the userbase for both Facebook and Twitter boomed and while growth for the latter has dissipated somewhat, Facebook remains the dominant platform for Egyptians with 40 million users, a growth of 20 per cent since 2017.
There are now a little over 2 million Twitter users in the country, a growth of 18 per cent driven mostly by millennials who are tweeting mainly about food and travel.
Instagram is the country’s second most popular platform with 11 million users posting mainly about fashion, music and travel.
There are 3.5 million Snapchat users, of which more than 2 million are female who tend to consume primarily the news, followed by lifestyle and fashion topics.
Across all the platforms, users in Egypt were interested in a much broader variety of topics, including politics, religion, sports and social development.
UAE
The UAE’s diverse population is evident in the country’s social media trends. English language users tend to outnumber Arabic users while social media penetration stands at 99 per cent according to Bain and Company.
Facebook is the most popular platform with 8.8 million users, similar to the user base recorded in 2017. Instagram has added 700,000 users over the year and now has 3.7 million users while Twitter boasts 2.3 million users, a rise of 15 per cent from 2017 driven mostly by Generation X. The country has the lowest user-base for Snap-chat at just 2 million.
The country also has some of the region’s most popular social media influences including makeup artist Huda Beauty who has 36 million followers. An analysis of the most followed social media influences indicates that the UAE’s interests lie predominantly in culture and nationalism, with users expressing interest in leaders and artists. As of June 2018, social media influences in the UAE must obtain a $4000 yearly license for any commercial work on such platforms.
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