The Scarlet Pimp
Supreme Member
- Apr 2, 2008
- 1,425
- 4,467
it might be a good idea to be ready for this new contender. especially with all the problems that fb is having.
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It's not Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. It's a company that most people in the West don't know. That, however, is set to change, with the explosive growth of China's Tencent and its mobile messaging app WeChat...
Last week, Facebook, the current king of social networks, admitted that it's losing teen users, and that the overall growth in its monthly active users has slowed to 18% year-on-year.
This isn't helped by the fact that it and other Western social networks are banned in China.
By contrast, Tencent recently announced that WeChat's users have almost tripled from the 85 million of the year before.
And Tencent's reach - unlike local Twitter-equivalent Sina Weibo and Facebook-equivalent RenRen - is not just restricted to China. WeChat was rebranded from the more Chinese-sounding Weixin to appeal to an international audience, and it's now virally coming across here.
In just four months between May and September 2013, its overseas users have doubled from 50m to 100m.
So, in an increasingly crowded mobile messaging, what is Tencent and WeChat doing right?
First, it has managed to differentiate its product with some killer features that keep users coming back for more. On the messaging side, users can "hold-to-talk" and send free walkie-talkie style messages that bypass the need for voicemail.
Yet what keeps its network growing are fun discovery features that can connect users locally and across continents.
WeChat has neatly fused together the open approach of social networks such as Twitter, where anyone can follow anybody, and more closed networks such as Facebook, which rely on mutual friend connections. It's growing virally through social connection and not just social media.
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/...o-has-1bn-users-is-about-to-overtake-facebook
---
It's not Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. It's a company that most people in the West don't know. That, however, is set to change, with the explosive growth of China's Tencent and its mobile messaging app WeChat...
Last week, Facebook, the current king of social networks, admitted that it's losing teen users, and that the overall growth in its monthly active users has slowed to 18% year-on-year.
This isn't helped by the fact that it and other Western social networks are banned in China.
By contrast, Tencent recently announced that WeChat's users have almost tripled from the 85 million of the year before.
And Tencent's reach - unlike local Twitter-equivalent Sina Weibo and Facebook-equivalent RenRen - is not just restricted to China. WeChat was rebranded from the more Chinese-sounding Weixin to appeal to an international audience, and it's now virally coming across here.
In just four months between May and September 2013, its overseas users have doubled from 50m to 100m.
So, in an increasingly crowded mobile messaging, what is Tencent and WeChat doing right?
First, it has managed to differentiate its product with some killer features that keep users coming back for more. On the messaging side, users can "hold-to-talk" and send free walkie-talkie style messages that bypass the need for voicemail.
Yet what keeps its network growing are fun discovery features that can connect users locally and across continents.
WeChat has neatly fused together the open approach of social networks such as Twitter, where anyone can follow anybody, and more closed networks such as Facebook, which rely on mutual friend connections. It's growing virally through social connection and not just social media.
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/...o-has-1bn-users-is-about-to-overtake-facebook
