Social Media in South Korea

I think most of you have an account of Facebook. Nowadays, Social Media Service is growing up rapidly and smart phone boost it. So it became one of the important tools for everyone in private or public sector.

There are many social media services in South Korea. Koreans use global services such as Facebook, Twitter as well as Korean services like Cyworld, Metoday and Many portal websites offer blog service. Cyworld is the most famous SNS(Social networking service), which is similar with Facebook. Metoday is a same type of social media with Twitter. We call it microblog. I will explain the most popular social media service in South Korea, Cyworld compared to Facebook.

1.   The Biggist Korean SNS that Facebook can’t win in Korea, Cyworld

Cyworld that most Koreans are using launched in 1999. It is earlier than launching time of Facebook(2004). Cyworld offer the space to communicate with friends online like Facebook. The big difference between Cyworld and Facebook is openness.

If you sign in the site, you can get a “Minihompy” (Abbr. mini homepage) for the personal space.

 

Cyworld Minihompy

  

It is like a virtual home of each person. So Cyworld users visit friend’s home(Minihompy) to communicate with them on Cyworld. It is the way to use Cyworld. On the other hand, in the case of Facebook, it is like that people who hold their profile communicate one another in one big place. The way of cyworld is more inconvenient and closed.

We can see comments of strangers in News Feed page

 However, because of openness of Facebook, it is hard to personal communication that people don’t show to other people happen on Facebook. If you write on the wall of someone, all who are friends of the person can see it and it is easy. But Cyworld offers the feature to lock post and it can be shown to only the owner of MInihompy.

In conclusion, Facebook is good for communication with more people simply because of its openness. Compare to it, Cyworld is convenient to be used for communication with close people and when people share secrets and deeper things online.

2.   The present situation of Social Media in South Korea

-          Steep increasing of using SNS

According to a study of a Korean consulting company, the amount of a SNS used in South Korea increase 2.9% during last one year.  This percentage is the amount of a SNS used compared to the whole media using.

-          The purpose of using SNS

Most of Koreans using SNS have a clear purpose to use it. The study says around 70% of survey respondents use SNS in order to network with more people. The following is the result of Survey.

1.   to network with more people – 69.8%

2.   to get more information – 56.6%

3.   to update my situation – 38.9%

4.   to keep and arrange information they got – 31%

There is an interesting related to a second answer. 40% of respondents answered they trusted the information from SNS. It is much higher than 12.3% that answered they did not trust it. They think information from SNS is believable because of ‘retweet’(Twitter) or ‘like’(Facebook). It means they believe it because the source is their neighbor.

I think there is no big difference between Korean and American social media users. Both want to communicate with people more convenient. The interface of the service is the only difference. In fact, people who use Korean service and global service at the same time increases in South Korea. In my case, I also use several services depends on the purpose. I hope my writing be the chance that you can know Korea is also located in the trend of social media.