Facebook has become the most popular social network in Hong Kong, so big that advertisement designers and marketing people are willing to put elements such as “Like” and “Facebook Search” into their ad designs.

On the other hand, Japan ad designs are dominated by a simple search box with the keywords and the 「検索」 button, which are commonly seen in mobile devices.

My thoughts:

Non English-speaking culture — both Japan and Hong Kong are not using English as the first language, so it is neither natural to use nor easy to recognize and remember English-character based domain names. However, it seems that people in Hong Kong, due to it’s colonial history and earlier English education, are relatively comfortable to deal with English domain names.

Ways of accessing the Internet — Japan has long been using mobile phone to access the Internet, while Hong Kong folks are more commonly using desktop computers to do so. In terms of context, it is faster for mobile phone users to use web search to figure out the URL of a site rather than entering the domain name with the keypad. More detail below.

Input method and efficiency — until the recent few years where QWERTY keyboard becomes popularized by iPhone and Blackberry, most older mobile phones were using keypad to enter English characters. It is very taxing to enter full URL into those phones. However, Japanese phones are generally equipped with “10-key” input method which most users can type Japanese extremely fast with. Therefore, instead of directly entering a full URL, search engine acts as a translation table between Japanese keywords and English URL addresses.

By the way, sites from Mainland China demonstrate another way to approach the English domain issue: generally, instead of using a domain name with English meaning (e.g. hotmail.com, gmail.com – both has the word “Mail”) they either use:

• numeric (with/without meaning): mail.163.com, mail.126.com
• full pinyin: www.tudou.com (土豆网) www.sohu.com (搜狐)
• first letter of pinyin: www.zndqw.com (智能大全网) www.592zn.com (吾就爱智能)

Social network — in terms of the popular social network in these regions, Hong Kong is pretty much all using the newer, more function-rich Facebook, while Japan started years earlier with Mixi. Facebook is very marketing friendly, where you can use tools like Pages, Apps, Banners, Groups, etc to channel your marketing efforts. Mixi on the other hand, is not very marketing friendly, or at least I

My recently tasks at work requires me to develop Facebook pages and apps, and I can tell that almost every bit of the platform and API feature is designed for self-serve, powerful marketing and profitability. I have no experience developing marketing campaigns with Mixi, but as a (casual) user of the platform I don’t see much ad tools except loads of beauty/hair removal/hair growth animated banners. Banners are leading to external sites instead of keeping you inside the Mixi platform as well. Sometimes they have bigger ad campaigns (e.g. http://mixi.jp/pr.pl?id=512) which seems to cost big money and exclusive development deals with the Mixi company.