South Korea has a vibrant online economy, but it can often seem like a tough nut to crack due to a unique language and strong local culture of technology development. Google, Yahoo! and Facebook, three websites that have seen success across other countries in Asia-Pacific, continued to trail local incumbents in South Korea, including Naver, a portal and search engine, Tistory, a blog network, and Cyworld, the popular but declining local social network service. However, the landscape is changing. A May 2012 report from Nielsen KoreanClick, the local operation of Nielsen, found that Facebook surpassed Cyworld’s reach as recently as February 2012.

Social media, including both native sites and global ones, is popular among a majority of internet users in South Korea.

January 2012 data from Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA)found the number of social media users remained fairly flat from 2010 to 2011, rising only 0.8 percentage points to 66.5% of all internet users. However, social media usage via a smartphone jumped nearly 30 percentage points to 31.5% in 2011, indicating a high incidence of existing users accessing via their mobile devices. Expect smartphone access to continue to skyrocket this year, assmartphone penetration in South Korea is forecast to nearly double to 76.2% from December 2011 to December 2012.

Unsurprisingly, younger respondents reported a higher rate of social media use. The survey found that highest penetration was among 20- to 29-year-olds, at 89.7%, in 2011. Males were slightly more active than females on social media, at 68% vs. 64.7%.

Common social media activities, however, may be surprising to people not familiar with the South Korean market. KISA found that 84% of social media users read or kept a blog, 74.6% participated in online communities (often organized by topics such as food, fashion and gaming) and 68.3% maintained a unique site called a “minihompy,” which is a personalized online space such as a homepage or landing page that is associated with Cyworld specifically.

Profile-based social networks (18.4%) and microblogs (12.8%) trailed the other three social media by a wide margin.

For now, South Korea still seems like a unique island when it comes to social media user activities and popular sites like Tistory. As users see the benefit of connecting with the world, expect local users to continue to migrate to Facebook and other multinational services
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