[Youth] Access to technology, Media Consumption & Social Media Networking

The challenger for attitudes’ stereotype identification is researches and reports – be it a focus group, qualitative, or even quantitative processes can help unveil or unleash real findings towards certain attitudes in a society, community, or group of people of the same interest. 

A new report of face-to-face interviews of Arab nationals and expatriates youth between the age of 18-24 in 9 Middle Eastern countries revealed the truth about Youth consumption to media and access to technology, apart of other findings.

Youth Society has always been unclear and marketeers been lost accordingly; therefore, a couple of reports are these days focusing on Youth to help marketeers design their marketing plan (online or offline); this time done by Asda’a PR firm, covering Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates to unleash country differences at first place and conventionally common trends looking a multiple factors; but as mentioned we covered here on the following that we founded related to you as interactiveME reader:

• Access to technology

• Media Consumption Trends

• Social Media Networking

Okay, but what stereotypes the index of the above three will challenge, let’s see:

1. Women have less access to technology or none in some Gulf countries.

2. Internet is not a trusted source of any type of news

3. Saudis biggest consumptions are online news

4. Online music is not the top content-type consumption

5. Social networking sites are abused as dating sites

Access to Technology

The report shows that almost  4 in 5 of youth own a mobile phone, and 1 in 4 own a web-enabled phone. The report shows also that there is a very minimal correlation between surveyed countries in this report as well as very minimal correlation between women and men access to technology – be it mobile, laptop, desktop, blackberry, iPhone, games console, and music player devices.

The report findings say that nearly 3 in 5 say they use the internet at least once a day, with music and email as the main online activities. Music activities dominate the top five while social networking comes the 6th activity.

Media Consumption

The report findings reveal that TV and newspaper are the main sources of news, followed by internet.

Jordan, Lebanon, and UAE are top in terms of news consumption online. This probably proves why maktoob.com, ammonnews.net, alrai.com, alghad.com, sarayanews.com, andkhaberni.com among the top 20 sites in Jordan according to alexa.com among the top western website like youtube, google, etc…

Websites are the 3rd trusted source of information after TV news channels and newspapers. The top country users who trust website news are from Saudi Arabia then UAE.

Social Media

The report findings show that when online, young people in all regions are most likely to use sites like Google, Facebook and Yahoo. Also, three quarters of the users utilize social networking websites like Facebook for keeping the connection with friends; the 2nd activity is to share and upload photos. Making new friends activity (call it partially “dating” ) comes the 3rd activity and not the first.

The challenge continues for stereotypes carries and researches defender because the attitudes of Arab youth changes with time. However, marketeers in the MENA region can find this report a direction and guidance on where their target audience really is, which medium and how much consumption is happening… The link to the report’s presentation.