A Tour of China’s Social Mobile Networks
A Tour of China’s Social Mobile Networks
A recent study of global social networking sites found that Facebook has replaced local networks in countries like Brazil, Russia, and Japan as the leading site.
One country remains focused on local networks: China. Rules prohibiting U.S. companies from entering the Chinese social networking space have kept Facebook and Twitter from dethroning local favorites like QQ and Sina Weibo.
With China having more people online than the total population of the U.S., the country offers a unique glimpse into how digital culture is changing. Recently, the focus on Chinese microblog services like Sina Weibo motivated us to look at mobile social networks in China and how that relates to more subtle changes in social media behavior in the United States.
Mobile Social Services in China
We created the chart below to map out how different Chinese mobile social services compare to their U.S. counterparts.
Sina Weibo and QQ’s Tencent Weibo have mobile use cases very similar to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram here in the U.S. These services primarily focus on status updates and photo sharing, but the depth of the mobile social networking space in both countries isn’t confined to these approaches.
Global brands like Nike have already taken to Sina Weibo as a platform for engaging with fans and customers through status updates and a focus on posting photos, just like how brands engage fans on Twitter and Facebook in the U.S.
Mobile Messaging and Social Discovery
While Sina Weibo is still getting a lot of attention among the U.S. media this year, Chinese tech bloggers say that Tencent’s Weixin is the new service to watch.
Weixin is a group messaging service that moves beyond texting by including a push-to-talk voice messaging feature and some really great extensions such as Shake and Drift Bottle for discovering new people so you’re not confined to only talking to people you know.
The United States counterpart is 2012’s hottest app you haven’t heard of: Voxer. American smartphone users have rapidly adopted Voxer as a free group voice, text, and photo messaging alternative to standard voice and text messaging. Voxer has enjoyed a top 5 spot in the Social section of iTunes and Android for a few months running and celebrities have already used the service to connect directly with fans.
What really differentiates the two apps is Weixin’s focus on social discovery. Voxer has yet to deploy the social discovery tools that Weixin uses, though a new breed of social discovery services like Highlight are looking to make it easier for Americans to find new friends.
Social Curation
After checking out Weixin and Sina Weibo on my iPhone, the App Store genius recommended another Chinese mobile social app: Mogujie.
Mogujie is a social network for curating products you love. Sound familiar? It’s a Chinese equivalent to Pinterest, the curation site that is currently seeing explosive growth in the United States.
However, for brands, Mogujie serves as a model for how sites like Pinterest could be used to fuel product discovery from a single company. Mogujie’s interface makes it easy to browse products only from a single brand, instead of simply sifting through categories and prices like on Pinterest.
What next?
As we’ve stated before, paying attention to mobile is a great way to get ahead of emerging trends. Taking a global perspective to social media not only reveals what sites are popular worldwide, but also what emerging digital behaviors are being developed as a result.
In 2012 we’ll be keeping a close watch on how mobile social networks present new opportunities for brands to create meaningful connections with their followers. Whether it’s one-to-one communication through push-to-talk messaging on Voxer or a sharper focus on promoting product on sites like Pinterest, the new mobile landscape is changing the way people connect to each other, and to brands, the world over.
