Chinese Social Network Breaks 1B Users | Social You Should Know

Pressure on Facebook from Marketers Rises

Some people were surprised that I challenged Facebook ad investments in my new book Earn It. Don’t Buy it. and had some critical things to say about how the site is treating marketers. But I’m not the only one. The very influential Forrester Research released a survey of 395 marketing executives in which Facebook scored last in business value. Forrester tells Mark Zuckerberg, “You’ve done little in the past 18 months to improve your unloved branded page format or the tools that marketers use to manage and measure those pages.” Mine and Forrester’s complaints are fixable, but only if Facebook increases its focus on organic engagement to ensure that budgets for paid advertising continue to make sense.

Chinese Social Network Grows Beyond China

Several years ago, Chinese social networks grew by copying the functionality of sites like Facebook and Twitter, which were banned in their country. Now, QQ has broken the 1B monthly active users mark in part because of the innovative features of its WeChat app. This is part of a conscious effort by the company to appeal beyond China, and its international users base has doubled to 100m people in just four months this year. This is a trend worth watching, even for companies without a significant investment in Chinese social media marketing. As these sites expand globally, brand opportunities could be significant. Hear more on this in our weekly Social Conversation.

Social Video Changing While We Watch

Two trends in social video to watch. First, Facebook is now testing its autoplay News Feed videos. Right now, the test is limited to just a few users, who see native Facebook videos automatically playing (without sound) from their friends, verified pages, or brands, but clearly the goal is monetizing these as autoplay ads for brands. Brands are both eager (for the exposure) and anxious (to learn how many ads users will tolerate) about the experiment. Separately, if you’ve seen some high-end Vine videos from brands like Oreo and Tide recently, this behind-the-scenes video will show you just how much effort (and budget) went into these 6-second shoots. Wow.



Ignite Social Media