K-Pop, Korean pop music in other words, has been an online phenomenon the past couple of years. K-Pop artists’ music videos on YouTube have reached more tens to even a hundred million views. There are even US tours by certain groups going on now and popular group Girls Generation’s recently had performances on the Dave Letterman show and Live! with Kelly Ripa. US audiences are aware of K-Pop’s presence in the music industry, but K-Pop itself has not been much of a presence in the social networking world until now. Now to increase their awareness, global reach, and market worldwide to attract new fans in the process, there are hub pages of K-Pop music on Facebook and Google+.

The Facebook page by SM Entertainment will contain info about their stars along with pictures, videos, and other forms of multimedia. They will also post status updates in both Korean and English to please not just their core audience but their overseas fans as well.

Google is using K-Pop as part of their integral marketing plan to push Google+ in Korea. They had to delay their launch of their hub until they were cleared to launch their mobile app. It was a smart decision by the search giant since 50% of the Korean population has a smartphone.

Currently, the Goggle+ hub contains four groups: Beast, SISTAR, After School, and INFINITE, but Google plans to add more soon. Similar to the Facebook page, updates will be posted in Korean and English, but Japanese will also be used in the Goggle+ hub. Before being involved in Google+, K-Pop has a huge presence on their official YouTube channel, which was approved by Google themselves last year. That channel alone has 800 million unique visitors on a monthly basis. Even though Facebook and Google+ have gotten K-Pop official pages, what about the other big social network site, Twitter? Twitter is not as big in Korea compared to the other two social networks and unlike Facebook and Google+, is not used in a multimedia way.  That said, the K-Pop groups themselves are pushing the effort to generate interest in twitter. One group, 2PM star Nichkhun, for example already has 1.2 million followers and tweets daily in multiple languages.

With K-Pop expanding their reach online in the social networking world and its artists touring more in other countries, K-Pop music is truly a phenomenon and it is only to get bigger once more people are aware how popular it is.  To give you an example of K-Pop music, here is the performance by Girls Generation on the David Letterman show as well as Live! with Kelly.