The survey results were released at the workshop on social networks for
marketing directors held in Hanoi several days ago.



Vinalink, a media company, which surveyed the application of social
networks at Vietnamese enterprises, said that 53 percent of Internet users in
Vietnam, or 15 million people, are using at least one of social networks.



The survey has pointed out that the number of Vietnamese enterprises using
social networks in marketing work remains modest. To date, 500,000 private
enterprises have registered their business. Meanwhile, according to the General
Department of Taxation (GDT), there are about 350,000 enterprises now
operational.



Ha Tuan, General Director of Vinalink, said that only 0.4 percent of
Vietnamese enterprises, or 2000 enterprises, are using Facebook. 0.07 percent of
enterprises are using YouTube, while 0.2 percent of enterprises are using other
social networks. If reckoning up the percentage of the enterprises using social
networks, including forums and blogs, the number of enterprises applying this
media channel is just about one percent, or 5000 enterprises.



Meanwhile, it is a growing tendency in the world that enterprises use
social networks to boost their sales. At the above mentioned workshop, Associate
Professor of IAE School, Paris Marc Divine cited the result of a survey
conducted by him on 200 international companies, including IBM, L’Oreal,
Unilever, to find out the use of social networks in marketing works.



The survey showed that 54 percent of the surveyed international companies
have been using social networks as a marketing tool for a long time.



The interesting thing the survey pointed out is that the social network
which has been mostly used is not Facebook, but Linkedln. Facebook just ranks
second, while the third position is being held by Viadeo, followed by YouTube,
Twitter, while Dailymotion ranks the sixth.



Talking about the wonderful benefits of social networks as marketing tool,
the associate professor said that social networks not only help advertise
products and polish enterprises’ images, they can also help find potential
clients, receive feedbacks from clients and connect staffs.



Millions of hits for an impressive clip



In fact, there have been some typical examples in Vietnam about the
advertisement via social networks. Ha Tuan said that the ad clip of Vinamilk on
YouTube attracted 10 million views, while the Pond’s ad campaign also attracted
500,000 views on Zing.me during a couple of weeks.



“Enterprises can obtain a high business efficiency if they can use social
networks well,” Tuan said. A research work by Vinalink about the factors that
influence consumers’ decisions pointed out that 35 percent of Internet users in
Vietnam read information on forums and 25.5 percent seek information from
friends, fanpage and ad pieces on social networks before deciding to purchase
goods or services.



Regarding the ad techniques, Le Thuy Hanh, General Director of
Digimarketing, said that most of enterprises usually send the same message on
different social networks instead of developing specific messages. Meanwhile,
every social network has its own characteristics and specific readership. Some
things which are acceptable on Tumblr could be considered spam on Facebook. An
effective style on Twitter could create failure on FriendFeed.



“Therefore, in order to optimize the effectiveness of social networks,
enterprises should think of sending different messages on different means of
communication,” Hanh said.



Pham Huyen