SOCIAL MEDIA IN ROMANIA

Social Media in Romania. Statistics. Reports on Social Media usage in Romania

Romania has a total population of 19.3 million people. However, there were 26.63 million mobile phone connections registered in 2020 of which 15.35 million were internet users. But our main focus here, on this article, is represented by the number of active Social Media users in Romania: 11 million.

We’ll analyze their behavior, what’re their preferences, and how to approach each channel for getting the best results on social media in Romania.

Social Media in Romania

Studies say that the number of Internet users in Romania had largely the same growth rate in 2020 and 2019 – 7.3% in 2020 and 7% in the previous year. However, Romanian social media had faster growth in 2020 (13%) as compared to 2019 (9%), a sign that the pandemic kept all of us at home and connected to social networks.

In Romania, in 2020 the average time spent on the Internet per day increased by 5 minutes from 7:21 hours to 7:26. Also, the number of social media users in the country has increased significantly. Last year, 62.6% of Romanians used social networks as compared to 57% in 2019.

On the other hand, the video content watched online by Romanians also had an evolution, but not necessarily a big one. Two years ago, 60% watched movies, series, and TV shows on the Internet. In 2020, their percentage reached 63.3%, an increase, but not significant.

Sometimes the relationships with these social environments become too intense and invasive. Lately, there is a growing desire for alternatives and the evolution of platforms that promise more intimate communities with more valuable social interactions for its members.

The number of smartphone users and active Social Media users has also increased a lot in 2020.

The most important Social Media platforms used in Romania in 2020 are Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, LinkedIn. Snapchat is not a relevant app in Romania anymore.

Ready to grow on Social Media?

For what purposes are Romanians using Social Media

Misconceptions regarding social networks are that adults use Facebook, teenagers are using Tik Tok, the creative ones use Instagram, microbloggers must be on Twitter, gamers get followers on Twitch, professionals praise their corporate positions on LinkedIn and everyone else is on WhatsApp. However, the situation is not like that anymore and we’ll show you some interesting statistics regarding social media in Romania.

For example, Tik Tok is no longer the teenagers’ platform as it used to be at the beginning. According to Global Community, Manager Tik Tok Romania is mostly used by people between 20-35 years of age.

However, from the total number of active social media users, 39,3% are looking for brand reviews or information. It appears that social media became an eligible and trustworthy environment when it comes to brand research.

Social media has extended its area of use in the last few years. A percentage of 33,6% are using social media work-related, but, if we can joke on this, everybody’s using social media at work for personal purposes.

Facebook in Romania

A Facebook user from Romania gives an average of 18 likes and 8 comments per month. Also, there is an average of 22 clicks per month on Facebook Ads, which positions Romanian Facebook users among the heaviest users in Europe.

Facebook had a weekly usage rate of 82% in 2020 in Romania and became the most used social media platform, while Facebook Messenger ranked 4th.

Source: Statista

The most liked Facebook posts in Romania

The most appreciated post by Romanians on Facebook in 2020 regards a number of contortionism of a competitor who kept the judges of Romania`s Got Talent with their mouths dropped. The video was posted on the Facebook page of the show in Romania on May 22, 2020, and gathered over 255,000 Likes.

In the second place, there was also a moment from Romania`s Got Talent. It is about a spectacular dance of the Duo Maintenant couple, which was posted by the Romania singer Smiley on his Facebook page. It gained 164,000 appreciations.

The most appreciated Facebook pages in Romania

The most appreciated page in Romania in 2020 belongs to Andra, a famous Romanian singer and judge at Romania`s Got Talent. Her husband, Catalin Maruta has also a big number of likes on his page, ranking 4th. He is a TV host with ProTV, the most appreciated TV channel in Romania.

The second place belongs to the popular and professional tennis player, Simona Halep. She has been ranked world No. 1 in singles twice between 2017 and 2019. In total, she has been ranked No. 1 for 64 weeks, which ranks tenth in the history of the Women’s Tennis Association rankings.

In the third place is actually the current president of Romania, Klaus Iohannis. He communicates a lot using Facebook posts and gets lots of reactions to them.

TikTok in Romania

According to statistics, there are 7.4 million active TikTok users in Romania, monthly.

Also, statistics show that a percentage of 85% of users posted at least one video on TikTok, and 60% of them posted a video in the last months.

The most-followed account on TikTok in Romania was @andragogan with over 6 million followers and over 222 million likes. Interestingly enough, her Instagram account has only 869K followers, which, compared to her TikTok account, is just a fraction.

So far there have been over 2 billion downloads of the application worldwide and statistics show that there are over 100 million monthly active users in any given month.
As you can see, TikTok is growing and will probably reach or even surpass Instagram or Facebook worldwide as it already happened in Romania.

But, as a business owner, you are probably most certainly interested in the public. TikTok Romania started to look very attractive, meaning that the average users are financially stable and can afford the goods displayed in the ads across the platform.

TikTok users in Romania have an average of 20-35 years, which will most certainly still be active on the application in the next few years.

Source: Manafu

Youtube in Romania

The Youtube account with the most views in Romania is TraLaLa, a channel with cartoons and songs for kids. which recorded 5.15 billion views so far. Interestingly enough, CanteceGradinita.ro is another Youtube channel for kids ranked fifth in Romania, with over 2.85 billion views.

Also, the top ten YouTube channels in Romania, by the number of video views, were dominated by music channels such as “Cat music”, “RotonMusicTv”, “INNA”, “Andra” or “AmmA Music”.

Youtube is the most used Social Media platform in Romania after Facebook and ranked third by market share.

Source: Social Bakers

Instagram in Romania

Instagram is taking it to the next level by integrating the new e-Commerce tools. They also want to further develop the IGTV section and Reels, the last one to compete with Tik Tok and to keep Instagram users on the platform.

Instagram is a popular social media platform in Romania with 34.2% users between 18-24 years and 29.5% users between 25-34 years. As you can see, the average age of the top users on Instagram is less than the one on TikTok. From an advertiser’s perspective, this does matter, as the products advertised on Instagram won’t be the same as the products promoted on TikTok.

The top accounts with the most followers in Romania belong to popular singers like Antonia, Andra, Nicole Cherry, and Smiley. The next ones in this top are Romanian influencers with a big engagement rate: Selly and Adelina Pestritu.

Source: Starngage

Twitter in Romania

Despite its ongoing popularity abroad, Twitter is not such a popular social media platform in Romania.
The most followed Romanian brand account on Twitter was Monster Energy RO, with a number of 36,722 followers. Samsung Romania ranked second, with more than 16,000 followers.

Yet, promoting on Twitter is not as successful as promoting on the other social media networks. Sincerely, we don’t advise our clients to promote on Twitter in Romania at all, but we do monitor the evolution of the engagement on this platform so as to be ready to use it whenever it could bring a good ROI for our clients.

Ready to grow on Social Media?

How much does it cost to promote your business on social media platforms in Romania?

This is a question that is on the lips of any business owner involved in the promotion activity on social media, whether we are talking about content creators, smaller or larger, or brands that want to reach potential customers on these social platforms.

What we know is that over 80% of consumers follow the recommendations of people they trust (word-of-mouth marketing), which is why brands are constantly looking to build and maintain relationships with content creators on social media, known as the name of influencers, micro-influencers, or nano-influencers.

On the other hand, in order to reach potential customers, brands can also benefit from the advantages of highly effective targeting tools, such as Facebook Ads, through which they can run ads on both Instagram and Facebook.

You can run ads on Facebook, Instagram, and the Audience Network regardless of your available budget. Firstly, you have to set on how much you want to spend on advertising. Then the main is to try to get as many results as possible for that amount. If you want to spend $ 5 a week, no problem. The same goes for $ 50,000 a week.

There are two ways to define cost:
– Total amount spent
– The cost of each result you get

You control the total amount spent by setting a budget. You control the cost per result by establishing a bidding strategy. In addition, there are other ways to ensure that you do not spend more than you want:
Campaign spending limit. Set a maximum amount you’re willing to spend on an advertising campaign. Set a maximum amount you’re willing to spend on all the campaigns you run.

However, the average cost per click (CPC) on Instagram in Romania varies depending on the field of activity and the target audience. In this case, the cost for a click can vary from less than 1 RON and, in some situations, can exceed 3 lei. Also, the average CPC for Facebook in Romania is 0.68 RON, but there are cases and industries where you can get clicks for as little as 0.01 RON.

It is expected that, in competitive industries, the cost of Instagram Ads campaigns will reach significantly large amounts, but it is important to monitor whether those ads generate a positive ROI.

There is also an investment in an Influencer Marketing campaign. This can start from tens of Euros or barters with the products in stock, in the case of nano or micro-inflow campaigns, and can reach tens of thousands Euros, in the case of large campaigns in which they are integrated influencers with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers.

Mostly, there are 3 methods by which you can initiate a partnership for an Influencer Marketing campaign:

Direct approach – some influencers are happy to negotiate themselves, directly with brands. However, you must consider that a significant part of this industry is professionally represented by talented agencies, managers, or networks of influencers.

Through agencies – and agency that constantly collaborates with influencers can be a convenient solution, because, most of the time, the costs are negotiated and the brands can benefit from advantageous offers.

Multi-channel networks (MCNs) – networks that represent a list of influencers and that collaborate only with those content creators who are part of their network (which may mean limited options). Also, in this case, additional costs may occur for the media and intermediation services.

When it comes to Youtube, your budget influences how often your ads show and how prominently they’re featured. If your campaign spends the budget fully, either reaching the daily limit (for daily budgets) or the average per day budget (for campaign total budgets), think about increasing your budget to scale your success. If not, adjust your targeting, bidding, and ads to see if your campaign performs better. Your bidding determines the way your budget is spent. You can choose to put your money towards getting people to see your ad, click your ad, or make a conversion on your site. Learn more about campaign budgets and bidding.

There are several types of ads on Youtube: you have unskippable video ads at the beginning of videos, video ads that you can skip during videos, ads that appear to your right or in search results, and so on. However, the cheapest advertisement on Youtube costs as little as 0.01 RON per view.

If you want to make super-targeted ads on certain channels, videos or when searching for certain keywords, you will pay a lot per click or view, there are campaigns with 2-3 RON per click or 1 RON for 1 view. But these are very niche campaigns, where the end customer wants results, sales, not volume or impact.

Ready to grow on Social Media?

Social Media Marketing predictions for 2021 in Romania

In 2021, Facebook will give an opportunity to more businesses to connect with buyers in-stream with Shops as an extension to its Marketplace offering. Also, Facebook wants to create interconnectivity between Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp in order to facilitate e-Commerce opportunities. How they want to do that? Essentially, by introducing every new function in all these apps.

It is difficult to say what are the strengths of Twitter giving the fact that it hasn`t changed at all these years, besides the fact that they have their own version of Stories now. We are looking forward to seeing other updates on Twitter.

TikTok had an amazing and wild ride in 2020 and we expect it to grow furthermore in 2021 as well. They want to focus on offering built-in e-commerce functionalities but it`s not that easy. They have to find more ways to pay their top creators so they won`t move to another social media platform that would pay them better.

The entire Social Media industry is constantly evolving to keep up with user trends and requirements. That’s why it’s almost impossible to figure out what they’ll look like in the next few years.

Will other social media platforms appear? No one knows, but TikTok’s rapid growth offered an example to follow for all those who want to launch a new social media network.

Source: Statcounter

Social media will definitely evolve in Romania as well. The way TikTok appeared out of the blue and overgrown most of the former top popular platforms, such as Instagram or Snapchat, tells us that everything is possible in the years to come.

On the other hand, our clients will always ask for ROI, and the way we approach social media networks is based on this KPI. If we ask our clients to invest a certain amount in PPC, then we have to make sure this investment brings the expected conversions and leads.

From this perspective, TikTok might be more popular than Instagram, but still, Instagram Ads, as well as Facebook Ads, bring better results.

Bianca Blidari – Social Media manager TUYA Digital – SEO & Digital Marketing

Social Media agencies in Romania

Without creating a proper top here, we dare to mention some of the agencies offering social media management and good results on social media PPC in Romania for both foreign and domestic clients.

TUYA DIGITAL

TUYA Digital is an SEO and digital marketing agency based in Bucharest, Romania. Founded in 2010, the services provided by TUYA Digital include SEO and web development aim at small businesses and startups. Our strong point, in comparison to other agencies, is the fact that we are 100% focused on delivering clients to our clients. Thus, our KPI in relationship with our clients is the number of leads, disregard of the other performance indicators, such as the SERP for the keywords specific for the industry or the organic traffic brought to the website.

KOOPERATIVA 2.0

Kooperativa 2.0 is a Social Media, PR, and Digital Marketing Agency for Romanian Marketable to provide all the communication and promotions needed by its customers. They guarantee the use of good practices in the field of PR, Advertising & Online Marketing.

RE7CONSULTING

Re7consulting offers 360 ° Online Marketing solutions to companies that want to successfully expose their offer in front of the right audience, at the right place and time. They aim to bring clarity, inspiration, and an innovative spirit to their partners, becoming at the same time, a solid source of information and education in the field of Digital Marketing in Romania.

FAQ

Most popular social media platforms used in Romania

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn.

What are the advantages of using social media?

Build your brand, reach a large audience, direct contact with your audience, create organic traffic, generate traffic to your website.

Social Media usage in Romania

Romanians spend approximately 2 hours daily on social media platforms.

Ready to get started?

Contact us to start our Digital Marketing project together!