Culture & Ethnicity in Social Media

Understanding cultural and ethnic behaviours and uses of Social Media can often play a key role in developing an engagement strategy for Social Media; whether that be for marketing, general communications or other purposes.

In our research, we’ve found that ethnic and cultural groups use tools in similar patterns, no matter the group. What we’ve found is that either a cultural our ethnic group that resides inside a non-indigenous state will use a Social Media tool that can connect them globally across all cultures and also use tools that connect them just within their cultural or ethnic group. Yeah, so what does that mean?

We define Global Social Media Tools as those tools or services that are agnostic to a culture or ethnic group and enable communication in any language (text, audio or image) and have global reach – doesn’t matter what country you’re in, you can access them (for the most part). Examples would be Twitter or Facebook or Buzz.

Then you have what we call Group Specific Social Media Tools. These are tools that are language (usually indicating culture or ethnicity) specific or culture/ethnic group specific. Examples would be Vkontakte which is Russia’s “Facebook” or Sonico.com which is for Latin Americans and Portugese speakers or AbairThusa, a Gaelic speaking Social Network. Ameba is an example of a microblogging service in Japan that is like Twitter but for those speaking Japanese.

In the case of cultural and ethnic groups in countries like Canada, the United States or UK, almost all active people from cultural and ethnic groups also speak English and will have English friends and business connections and so will also use Facebook, Twitter or similar. But the majority of their activity takes place on services that are specific to their culture or ethnic group.

This is important when considering engagement in Social Media. Since you may also want to reach those people and measure activity, within their ethnic or cultural group. This adds a layer of complexity however, since you’ll need to understand their written language.

Think these groups are too small to really be concerned about? Not at all. Societally we all belong to different cultural, ethnic and social groups. Immigrant populations inside a country can be very positively engaged in their new home country. This can offer significant opportunities.

(Author: G. Crouch, MD)