VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI
SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
TRAN THI THU TRANG

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING IN VIETNAM
A STUDY OF CONSUMER PROFILES

Major: Business Administration
Code: 60 34 05

MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION THESIS

Supervisor: Dr. Tran Doan Kim Hanoi – Oct 2011
vii TABLE OF CONTENT

Introduction 1
Motivations 1
Goals and Scope 2
Limitations 3
Chapter 1. Review of social media marketing 4

3.1. Consumer analysis 27
3.1.1. The consumer profile of web 2.0 citizen in Vietnam 27
3.1.2. User patterns in interaction with company 33
3.1.3. The profile of Vietnam social media users – an overview 38
3.1.4. The profile of Vietnam social media users – a deeper look 40
3.1.5. The influence of social media on Vietnamese consumers in marketing
communication 47
3.1.6. Findings 54
3.2. Recommended strategy for marketing management into social media 58
Conclusion and Future Work 61
References 63
ix

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 3.1: Gender distribution of respondents. 27
Figure 3.2: Distribution of age groups 28
Figure 3.3: Income distribution amount respondents 29
Figure 3.4: Average rank of social media services in terms of popularity (the higher
rank – the more popular - means the smaller numerical value). 30
Figure 3.5: Distribution of places and locations. 31
Figure 3.6: Distribution in usage time per week. 32
Figure 3.7: Usage time among young people per week. 33
Figure 3.8: Preference of content types. 33
Figure 3.9: Reasons for users to start a conversation with company. 34
Figure 3.10: Reasons for users to stay engaged with the company. 35
Figure 3.11: Reasons for users to stay engaged with the company, among the age
groups. 35
Figure 3.12: Reasons for users to stay engaged with the company, among the
genders. 36
Figure 3.13: the personal reason to participate in conversation or interact with the

Table 1.2: Opportunities and challenges of social media, Henna (2009) 16
Table 1.4: Why the Vietnamese go online? (Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook 2010,
citing from Cimigo Netcitizens) 17
Table 3.1: Correlation between social media types used and expected outcomes
after company-consume interaction (the numbers are the count of responses). 49
Table 3.2: Correlation between social media choice and responses to marketing
purposes. 51
Table 3.3: Preferences of commercial messages with respect to media choices and
origin of the messages. 52
Table 3.4: Technographics with respect to ads on different media. 54
Table 3.6: Summary of Vietnamese technographics. 57
1

Introduction
Motivations
With the advent of Internet in the last quarter of the 20
th
century and the public
availability of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, the digital landscape has
completely changed. Access to a massive amount of information is just a click
away. Communication is made easy – we can now send emails to colleagues,
perform instant chats with friends, or even make long distant calls at the rate that
was not previously possible.
In the last few years, the change has been more profound – users are no longer a
passive consumer of existing Web content, they are actively creating new content
and sharing it. The change has resulted in a fairly firm body of knowledge known
as social media (sometimes, the citizen media). As the name suggested, this new
media is characterized by the social dimensions – the many-to-many interactivity
between users and the content being generated by the users rather than the
traditional publishers. According to Zarrella (2010), there are more than 346

consultants, and those people who have positioned themselves as social media
experts (e.g. see Weinberg, 2009; Scott, 2010; Zarrella, D. 2010). These are more
about proposing marketing strategies for companies rather than understanding the
users, and there is little backup evidence on the proposed strategies. Furthremore,
very little research has been done for culture-specific social media marketing:
most research is reported on the US or European markets, and very little is on
other areas like Vietnamese users.
Goals and Scope
This thesis is aimed at deeper understanding of social media users in general, and
in the Vietnam market in particular. Despite lagging behind those leading
countries, Vietnam is catching up fast. The current Internet penetration rate is
estimated to be 35%, which accounts for roughly 30 million users – and is ranked
3

7
th
worldwide (Asia Digital Marketing Yearbook, 2010). Almost all young
generation users will be expected to go online in the next few years.
More specifically, we would like to answer three research questions. First, what
are the characteristics of Vietnamese users in the comparison with those of users
from other countries. Second, what are the impacts that the social media users
have on company‟s marketing goals? And third, what can companies do to utilize
the new media for their marketing/branding strategies?
We therefore aim to achieve three related goals:
 Constructing a questionnaire that can help company to create social media
consumer profiles in Vietnam,
 Determining whether social media can be considered as an effective
marketing channel, from the user perspectives, and
 Deriving a list of recommendations for marketing management for entering
social media.

The new media opens a new room for marketing practitioners – the set of
practices known as social media marketing (SMM). According to Garnyte and
Perez (2009), SMM is “a process that empowers individuals to promote their
websites, products or services through online channels and to communicate with
and tap into a much larger community that may not have been available via
traditional advertising channels”. Further, SMM is “about listening to the
community and responding in kind”.
5

In this section, we review the key concepts that give rise to these practices,
including: word-of-mouth, user-generated content and Web 2.0, user-centered
communication. In the next section, each social medium is examined in greater
details.
1.1.1. Word-of-mouth
Word-of-mouth (WOM) is the process of exchanging message from person to
person. The typical information exchanged includes brands, products, services
and organizations (e.g. see Buttle, 1998). In social media, WOM is highly
efficient because a message can be sent instantly and reaches a massive number
of audiences at once.
Another remarkable characteristic of WOM is the division into two sets of roles:
opinion leaders and opinion seekers (Gilly et al, 1998; Chu, 2009, p.9).
Generally speaking, opinion leaders are those who provide and transmit
information to their peers, and as a result, influence others‟ opinions. On the
other hand, opinion seekers look for opinionated information from others to make
informed decision. It should be noted that this does not necessarily mean a person
is always an opinion leader or seeker, although some people have the tendency to
influence people‟s opinions or are generally motivated to share information.
It has been widely known for decades that WOM influences purchase decision,
and can be one of the most powerful sources of information that impacts
adoption of innovations and new products (Chu, 2009). A recent research by

using RSS/Atom feeds, voting for Websites online and adding tags to Web
pages and multimedia objects (photo, music and video)
 Joiners are those maintain their profiles on a social network site or visit those
sites.
7

 Spectators are those who simply consume content available online (e.g.
reading blogs, listening to podcasts, watching video, reading online forums,
rating reviews and ratings from others).
 Inactives are those who do none of these activities.
1.1.4. User-centered marketing communication

Table 1.1: Online community needs. Source: Ivanauskas (2009)
Table 1.1 points out the difference between the needs of offline users and those by
online users. As a result of these new requirements, marketers who used to be in
the center of marketing communication are now replaced by consumers
Thus, it is important for the company to pay close attention to such content and
the media channels. As suggested by Ivanauskas (2009), marketers should make
the best effort to engage with the consumers through social media in order
influence these messages. For example, instead of sending simple messages,
marketers should provide the content which would be relevant for consumers and
would generate conversations among them. In the social technographic ladders,
8

marketers should be concerned about “Creators” as they are most likely to be the
trend setters / brand evangelists (opinion leaders).
However, the change in online user behaviors in response to commercial
messages makes it difficult for marketers to target customers, especially when the
new consumer takes the initiative for transactions, at the place and time they
want. They are also turning more frequently to various types of social media to

blog or website.
Even more exciting opportunities for marketing professionals derive from
external communications via blogs, as blogs can help the organization to develop
and maintain stronger relationships and brand loyalty with its customers,
generate consumer insights. Li and Bernoff (2008) go even further; they suggest
that blogging can increase ROI on the Advertising, PR, Customer Support and
Research value. It is clearly important to join on-line conversation with the
customers, as four in five bloggers post brand or product reviews, with 37%
posting them frequently (Technorati Blogosphere report, 2008).
1.2.2. Chatting software and microblogging
Chatting software like Yahoo! Messenger and Google Talk allows synchronous
communication among users. One of the most useful features in chatting software
is the display of status of a user (e.g. in the form “what I am
doing/thinking/feeling”). Depending on the privacy setting, the status can be
visible or invisible to a certain group of friends. Although a status is not a
conversation, its message is clear: being present or absent, and sometimes, the
carrying the moods. This, in many ways, complements standard blogs where the
content is generally well-edited, and is meant to be read at any time.
A closely related service is micro-blogging which also allows people to
communicate using short messages. As of May 2007, there were more than 100
10

micro-blogging systems in use (Zarrella, 2010, p.33). The most popular site is
currently Twitter. Launched in 2006, Twitter exploded since mid-2007, and by
April 2010, there are over 100 millon accounts
1
. Acting as a live news feed,
Twitter allows users to continuously update their profile with a new line of text.
Users can follow other Twitter users to see what they are doing or search for
topics to see a list of what all Twitter users are tweeting. The ability to search in

of friends. Although we have mentioned early that WELL (found in 1985) had
many characteristics of a social network platform, the Web-basd SMS became
only popular in the early 2000s. Frienster is perhaps the earliest SNS that
generates a strong interest in 2002. However, it was MySpace that made a real
case, where it beame the most popular sococial networking site in the US in June
2006. By 2008, MySpace lost its top position to Facebook
2
. Facebook has over
500 million active users by June 2010
3
.
Google+, a social network operated by Google, Inc., launched on June 28th, 2011
with integrations across a number of Google products, including Buzz and
Profiles. Google+ is a new social network that promises to make it easier for
members to share information to “circles” of friends to whom that update is
relevant.
Social networking is mostly considered among B2C companies, it could be a
valuable tool to create strong bonds with other stakeholders as business partners
and employees. But those skeptical about social networking„s value to business
argue that ―networking can easily turn into ―not-working and damage the
relationships between the parts.
1.2.6. Media sharing and content communities
Media is generally referred to text, image, audio & music and video content or
the mixture of those types. As media is shared among users, we typically need

2

3

12

photos. In addition, many use this service as a web-hosting database for pictures
for their website or personal blog.
Music
Besides Web-based sharing of media, peer-to-peer (or P2P) sharing is also
popular. Typically, this is made through P2P software allowing fast upload and
download. The most famous example was Napster
4
, where music lovers could
freely share their songs using a P2P client. This made a legal battle with the
record industry leading to the close of the service in 2001.
Document and presentation
Currently the most popular presentation sharing site is SlideShare
5
, which was
launched in 2006. It looks like YouTube since it allows dynamic run of
presentation slides. For document sharing, there are currently a number of
services available, including Scribd, Docstoc and Wepapers. Scribd is now
perhaps the most popular sharing site. By 2008, it was ranked one of the top 20
social media sites
6
.
1.2.7. Integrated and mobile social media
In fact, many sites today support multiple media mentioned about. For example,
Facebook at the time of this writing allows users not only to make friend but also
post short status messages, share links, write notes (pretty much like a traditional
blog posts), tags people, posts images, music and videos (much like standard
multimedia sharing sites). Second, many sharing sites are now associated with
popular social network sites. Third, there is an initiative known as OpenID to
allow multiple accounts by the same user in many separate sites to be jointly
accessed.

conversions, (e) Triggering conversations.
Some other authors have more sophisticated suggestions. Henna (2009), for
instance, recommends that the use of social media should depend on the business
goal that an organization attempts to meet (see Table 1.2).
Table 1.2: How social media tools will meet business goals, Henna (2009)

7

15 However, there are also challenges that the social media causes to companies.
Identity and privacy protection are issues related to social media. Users are
concerned of trust issues. The users are expected to trust other users, often
strangers, in social media applications. Confidential and private information can
end up in wrong hands and to be misused. Low entry barrier may affect that the
value of the content may also be low and content misleading. An important
element of the social media is the updated information. Users expect the content
to be fresh and updated at all times so the challenge is to invest enough resources
in order to keep the content updated Challenging is also to keep a balance
between the user-generated and the marketer-generated content. Table 1.3
summarizes the opportunities and challenges of social media.
16

Table 1.3: Opportunities and challenges of social media, Henna (2009)

1.4. Social media and social media marketing in Vietnam
1.4.1. Social media landscape
According to the (Asia Pacific Digital Marketing Yearbook, 2010), Vietnam has
experienced a fast growth in Internet penetration, with estimated about 30 million

69
Playing web games
35
Emailing
68
Playing other online
games
25
Downloading music
59
Sending SMS
24
17

Visiting forum
46
Searching for a job
22
Posting in forums
16
Instant messaging
22
E-banking
10
Downloading/uploading
pictures
21
Writing blogs
19
Downloading movies

largest social network size is ZingMe, which is popular among teenagers.
Recently in the last 6 months we saw an aggressive development of group buying
sites such as nhommua (similar to groupon).
The photo-sharing services were mainly associated with photography interest
forums, but now (August, 2011) Flickr is clearly the winner. For video sharing,
YouTube is leading the game, followed by Clip.vn. There are several musing
sharing sites (e.g., Yeuamnhac.com, Nhacso.com, Zing MP3) but with limited
social interaction.
To summarize, the social media trend is clearly profound in Vietnam. As of June
2011, more than 50% of Internet users frequently partitipate in social network
sites (Vietnam social media report, 2011). Forums are still very popular for
informatione exhange, especially those for technologies, women and children,
music, movies and learning. Despite the wide user penetration, it can only be said
that the development is largely experimental.
1.4.2. Social media marketing
To find out more details about the status of social media marketing by
Vietnamese companies, we conducted two rounds of interviews with four
companies which are actively using social media in Vietnam. One company is
state-own and the others are small & medium size firms. We focus on the retail
market in Vietnam to have deep understanding of how these companies use
social media for marketing communication. The first round of interviews was
organized in October 2010, and the second was in August 2011. The 10 month
19

horizon allows us to see the change in marketing practices and in the adoption of
social media for marketing communication. The data collected from four
companies shows that Facebook is the most widely used social media channel,
followed by forums. None of the four companies has formed a clearly social
media marketing strategy. Rather, they have used social media extensively for
advertising purposes despite none has built criteria to evaluate the effectiveness