Chinese Social Networking Sites and How They Operate
Since 2006, Chinese Social Network Sites have started to boom. After Myspace and Facebook became more and more successful in US and Europe, some Chinese Social Network Sites started to imitate the idea and gained momentum over the last several years, such as Xiaonei and Kaixin001. US is the origin of Social Network Site, and some of them also want to take market share in Chinese market. However, we can witness the fact that although Facebook recently celebrated 200 million active users, only 300,000 of those users are in China (only about 0.1% of Internet users in China). I’d like to talk about two most popular Social Network Sites in China nowadays, Xiaonei and Kaixin001.
Xiaonei, meaning “inside the campus”, has 40 million members already, and most of them are students. Actually, Xiaonei is known as “Facebook clone”, as it mimics Facebook in many ways. So why is Xiaonei much more successful than Facebook in China? It’s the issue of localization. When Facebook had a Chinese version, many users complained that the translations lacked accuracy. So when coming across Facebook’s apparent obliviousness to the Chinese language, many users got turned off. In a word, Facebook doesn’t understand Chinese culture. They thought other countries and cultures would adjust to US style. Xiaonei is more like a combination of blog and social interaction. It inherited the alumni website phenomenon which was very popular around seven years ago in China, by narrowing down Facebook’s usual targets to students. The interface is quite well designed. Clean and clear color with user-friendly format. Xiaonei is actually doing a good job as a copycat Social Network Site.
Kaixin001 (”Kaixin” means happy in Chinese) is another social media network with a big focus on online games. It targets white collar workers. “Growing vegetables”, “snatching parking lots” and “friends for sale” are the most popular game applications of Kaixin001, and some people (called Kaixiners hereafter) are crazy about these games. This could be the most important reason why Kaixin001 can realize “viral marketing” among many companies. It’s not very good if you are too close to your superior or a female colleague in the company (in China, at least), but it’s OK to play Kaixin001 with them. Many white collar workers keep Kaixin001 pages open during work. This might explain why Kaixin001 can surpass Xiaonei in traffic: its white collar strategy does work.
Someone says Xiaonei imitates the idea of campus-oriented and real-name registration from Facebook, while Kaixin001 imitates game applications from Facebook. None of them imitate the whole thing. So actually if you want to be successful, you don’t have to be a lot better than Facebook, you only need to excel in one area to achieve success. Some Chinese Social Network Sites did some imitation and localization, and achieved some success as well. However, if they still want to beat the competitors and be more successful, they need to find their own path. Some large Chinese Social Network Sites have started to launch open API platforms one after another, I think it’s a good start.
Tags: API, Facebook, Kaixin001, Social Network Site, Xiaonei