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SEOUL, South Korea — Patricia Augustin, 19, of Indonesia says she scours the Internet every day for the latest updates on Korean pop music. Paula Lema Aguirre, a high school student from Peru, says she is happiest when she sings Korean songs, especially “It Hurts,” the group 2NE1’s single about teenage love.

Neither Ms. Augustin nor Ms. Aguirre is a native Korean speaker, but that did not stop them, along with about 40 other aspiring singers from 16 countries, from making it to the finals in December of the K-Pop World Festival competition in the South Korean town of Changwon, where they belted out Korean lyrics in front of screaming crowds packed into a stadium.

“K-pop is a good icebreaker for foreigners,” said Tara Louise, 19, a singer from Los Angeles. “It gives a lot of affinity for Koreans and the Korean culture.”

For South Koreans, the festival, the first of its kind, was confirmation of how widely their country’s latest export has spread, first to Asia and more recently to Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, mainly because of the broad use of social media.

K-pop is part of a broader trend known as the Korean Wave and called “hallyu” in Korean. The Taiwanese were among the first to notice the invasion of Korean soap operas in their television programming in the late 1990s and gave the phenomenon its name. Until then, the term had referred to the cold winds blowing down from the Korean Peninsula.

The Korean Wave has long conquered Asia, but before the proliferation of global social networks, attempts by K-pop stars to break into Western markets, including the United States, had largely failed.

But now YouTube, Facebook and Twitter make it easier for K-pop bands to reach a wider audience in the West, and those fans are turning to the same social networking tools to proclaim their devotion.