Brands in Singapore have spent the year sprinting deeper into social. McDonald’s finally jumped onto TikTok, Samsung opened a TikTok Shop, and the Singapore Tourism Board rolled out a gamified TikTok miniseries. With the market's social ad spend up 15.9% to $510 million, the industry is betting big on “show up where the audience is.”
But new data from YouGov suggests a hard truth that there is no single “social media audience” anymore. In reality, Singapore is split between two very different social worlds and treating them as one could be undermining campaign effectiveness.
YouGov Profiles segments Singapore into:
Heavy social users (HSU): those spending 2+ hours daily on social (26% of the population)
Light social users (LSU): those spending under 2 hours (74%)
And these groups behave nothing alike. But that's not the surprising part. What's surprising is how differently the two groups behave, what they expect from brands and how mismatched many social strategies are to both.
Who they are and their response to advertising
Heavy users skew young (43% are 18–29), predominantly female (59%), and highly online. They shop online, live in creator culture, and move through digital touchpoints quite efficiently.
Light users skew older, 41% are 45+, more gender-balanced, and more anchored in physical retail and marketplace-led paths. Their discovery path starts on marketplaces, not social feeds
The paradox, and the part that brands won't love, is that the most active social users are also the most ad-resistant. The heavy users glued to TikTok, Instagram, etc, are also the quickest to tune your brand out. In fact, more than half (56%) feel bombarded by ads, approximately the same number (54%) find ads annoying, and 37% skip ads immediately.
Across multiple measures, HSU show higher ad fatigue, stronger avoidance behaviours and despite living online, they expect a real-world connection, innovation and effort from brands. They want brands to show up meaningfully and not just show up everywhere.
Light users, meanwhile, are less emotional about advertising. They tend to be more task-oriented, less bombarded, and more likely to respond to clear, structured, marketplace-led information.
Their paths to purchase look nothing alike
This is where the divide sharpens. HSU discover through people and platforms: Recommendations from peers are top of the pile (55%), social ads (46%), content creators (44%), reviews on platforms (45%)— all high for this cohort.
For light social users, online marketplaces (47%) are the number one discovery channel. It's not TikTok or Instagram. And when they research, they lean on editorial sources, articles, blogs, structured information—the more traditional proof layer of the journey.
Safe to say that high social users move through culture, and the light social users move through commerce.
Why does this matter?
Because brands are doubling down on the social-first, TikTok-heavy, creator-led, velocity-driven playbook.
When done well, this absolutely works for heavy users. But the majority of Singaporeans simply don’t behave like that. When brands use one social strategy to hit both audiences, they usually hit neither because the heavy users tune out because the content lacks depth, novelty or cultural fluency. And the light users tune out because they’re not looking for discovery in those channels.
More than a media optimisation problem, it becomes a misreading-human-behaviour problem.
Data comes from YouGov Profiles’ rolling surveys, using a nationally representative 52-week Singapore dataset (Nov 2024–Nov 2025) weighted for race.
Laura Robbie is the APAC CEO of YouGov.
