RCGI Column | Application of Overseas Social Market Research

RCGI (RongCloud Global Insight) is an analysis and insight column specially launched by RongCloud Industry Research Institute. Follow [Rongyun Global Internet Communication Cloud] to learn more

In the previous column, we used the "region" as the label to sort out the overview of the major regions in the world, as well as the key information of social marketing such as the characteristics of social markets in developed and developing regions.

This article will focus on "applications", from two aspects of world-renowned comprehensive social applications and special social applications that impress users with a certain feature and open up the market, to explore the success factors of social applications that are worthy of reference for overseas developers.

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Featured Player

Realize The Little Prince Kakao Talk

Kakao Talk is a social chat software from South Korea, serving more than 100 million users worldwide. It is currently used in more than 200 countries and supports 12 languages.

In addition to text messages, pictures, audio and video, Kakao also supports multi-person chat, free phone calls, voice changing and other functions. When users are not online, they can notify users in the form of text messages.

Kakao manages friends with actual phone numbers , and can automatically match friends through the phone address book.

E-commerce, paid emoji, Plus Friend ads and gaming platforms together constitute Kakao's unique temperament and its main profit model.

e-commerce

In December 2010, KaKao launched a Gift service for users in South Korea. Users can purchase coupons for small commodities such as coffee or chocolate in the app and send them to friends, and friends can use these coupons to redeem in offline physical stores.

Although the unit price of these commodities is not high, they provide a new channel for enhancing feelings between friends. This feature is used on 7,700 items from about 320 brands. It is understood that on Valentine's Day, the monthly revenue of this feature can reach 2 billion won (about 10.4 million yuan).

Paid emoji

In the emoji store, in addition to free emojis, there are also related product emojis made by the company itself, developers or other enterprises. Users need to pay for these richer emojis. Data for July showed that paid emojis earned an average of about 100 million won (520,000 yuan) a day.

Plus Friend Ads

The Plus Friend function is similar to the official account, including accounts such as entertainment stars and brand merchants.

After users choose to follow these accounts, they will receive advertisements and other information sent by them. At this time, the enterprise needs to pay a certain fee to KaKao. The number of advertisers in KaKao Plus Friend has reached 200, attracting the attention of 66 million users.

gaming platform

The game platform was launched in July 2014, and Korean users of KaKao can see many game applications on the platform.

Through KaKao's user relationship chain, users can see the ranking of KaKao friends when playing games, and can also share their achievements with each other. The most important thing is that the props function has been added to the game. The game can continue to be played only when there are props. Users can spend money to buy them, or they can give them to friends.

The Video Conferencing Myth, Zoom

Zoom is an undoubted beneficiary stock of the epidemic. As a cloud video conferencing software, it has achieved a hundredfold growth myth under the outbreak of the epidemic remote office demand.

After entering the post-epidemic era, its high growth is no longer, but it has also achieved large-scale user education and penetration.

Zoom is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android systems. Users can conduct business communication such as multi-person video and voice calls, screen sharing, and meeting reservation management with their work partners through mobile phones, tablets, and PCs.

Zoom supports finding Zoom numbers to add common contacts; the mobile version of Zoom supports viewing and importing mobile phone contacts, and you can add friends with one click. In the free model, Zoom allows up to 100 concurrent participants with a 40-minute time limit, and users can choose to upgrade by subscribing to a paid plan. In paid mode, Zoom supports up to 1,000 video participants or 10,000 viewers.

Picture Wall Awards Pinterest

Pinterest is an interest-based social network. It publishes pictures through the picture wall Pinboard and displays pictures through waterfalls. It is one of the most popular social applications abroad.

Pinterest allows users to constantly discover new pictures , which is not only easy for users to get started with, but also "addictive" for users.

Pinterest allows users to create and manage collections of pictures on topics such as events, interests and hobbies , and allows users to store pictures by category.

Currently, the top categories on Pinterest are travel, cars, food, movies, humor, home design, sports, fashion and art, encouraging users to make friends through interests and hobbies.

Dating King Tinder

Data shows that Tinder has made 30 billion matches and is the top free dating app.

Tinder focuses on dating strangers, and users can see a list of potential matches based on Ta-specified criteria (age, gender, distance) after users sign up.

The advantage of socializing with strangers is that users have more connections than acquaintances , and users are highly motivated, and some charging functions can be added.

Tinder is the founder of the "swipe to match" game, a social product for strangers. The software recommends four objects within a certain distance every day. Users swipe left and right to express their interest, and they can match and chat if they like each other.

With this gameplay, Tinder has established a wide user base around the world, and developed paid projects based on it, and its ability to attract money has dominated the list for a long time.

Tinder connects to Facebook, and gives a score according to the number of common friends, common interests and relationships of the user on Facebook. The recommended object with the highest score will be displayed first. The user's profile on this application can be directly bound to Facebook to create a one-click creation .

Vietnamese users love Zalo

Zalo is the social software with the most users in Vietnam.

Zalo integrates acquaintances and strangers to socialize . It is similar to WeChat but has no payment function. It has search methods such as drift bottles and nearby people.

Support voice, video, text, image and other communication methods, the text can be translated in real time, suitable for people who do not understand the language. The paid model also offers translation of voice or video. Data shows that in the first quarter of 2021, Zalo surpassed Facebook and Youtube to become GenZ's popular social sector, with a utilization rate of 94%.

First Tuenti in Spain

Tuenti is called the "Facebook of Spain", not only because the app started in Spain, but also because it is a social app that uses Spanish as the main language of communication and has the number one Internet traffic in Spain.

Tuenti is very popular in South America where Spanish is prevalent. Tuenti offers paid advertising capabilities and is an important location for marketing to South America.

Tuenti's background algorithm supports promotion according to customer gender, age, and province; Tuenti can make full use of the community for precision marketing; Tuenti can carry out various modes of advertising promotion according to customer needs.

Live Community Discord

In the beginning, Discord mainly focused on gamers, taking the game connection to the microphone as the entry point to support users' online communication.

With the development of time, more and more animation, education, investment communities and fans use this platform to communicate. Discord's positioning has shifted from gaming chat software to a comprehensive social community.

There are 19 million servers on the platform, and the label system is becoming more and more abundant, including mechanical keyboards, sneaker equipment, origami, fan animation, virtual idols, etc. Currently, Discord has about 300 million users and 150 million monthly active users.

The Discord community consists of servers, channels, chat areas and member areas . The server is equivalent to a super group, and users can set up channels in the server to communicate.

Discord was originally designed to meet the temporary communication of gamers. Through an invitation link, you can quickly enter a room without adding friends and other actions first.

In terms of function, Discord can not only provide users with a platform for communication, but also provide organizational capabilities. It also has certain tool attributes , which is equivalent to the collection of three different categories of products in the domestic YY + forum + WeChat / QQ group.

In terms of gameplay, Discord gives users the greatest autonomy. For this reason, many common social gameplays are also abandoned. There is no "fan count" and no algorithmic recommendation .

In addition, Discord can also dock with Steam, Facebook and Twitch, and friends from several platforms are automatically imported, eliminating the trouble of re-adding.

Say something secret Telegram

Telegram is a well-encrypted instant messaging software with a wide range of users around the world.

The biggest feature of Telegram is that it can ensure that users' chat information will not be intercepted or cracked . With the blessing of this feature, the software has more than 200 million users worldwide.

In terms of function settings, Telegram does not require login, is ad-free and free, and has a better user experience; it supports embedding YouTube or Vimeo videos, as well as Twitter messages and local pictures.

Users can also create groups on the software, which currently supports groups of up to 200,000 members. In terms of file transfer, Telegram supports sending any type of file, and can also sync chat history across all of the user's devices. Most uniquely, Telegram messages are highly encrypted and can self-destruct, as well as visit web pages in "do not track mode".

This kind of design is very free, but it also has risks. It may promote black production and has also attracted criticism from governments and network experts from many countries.

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Comprehensive boss

Global Champion Facebook

Facebook is the undisputed champion of the global social media platform.

With 2.74 billion active users, Facebook is powerful in games, videos, music, and more.

Facebook pays attention to acquaintances and social interaction . It requires the verification and consent of friends to chat, and see their real avatars, names, contact information, hobbies, work conditions, etc.

According to public data, India is the country with the most active Facebook users (290 million), the United States second (190 million), and Indonesia third (140 million). Among the 530 million Internet users in Africa, 210 million Facebook users have been generated, with a penetration rate of 16%, occupying a dominant position in African social software .

According to a survey, 73% of Facebook users in the US log in every day; 93% use Facebook weekly; and 98% log in at least once a month.

US users spend an average of 38 minutes a day on Facebook.

Overseas Fetion WhatsApp

WhatsApp is similar to China's Fetion, which can be transferred from sending mobile text messages to the app for free, so that you can instantly receive messages, pictures, audio files and video files from friends, family and colleagues.

WhatsApp is registered based on the mobile phone number. When registering , the user needs to enter the mobile phone number and obtain the verification code. Then WhatsApp will search the user's mobile phone address book and automatically add it to the user's mobile phone contact list.

According to relevant statistics, WhatsApp has more than 2 billion users, which means that it accounts for 1/3 of the global market share, and its user groups are mainly from Russia, Europe, Africa and the Americas.

Highlights of the core features of WhatsApp are as follows:

✅ Free, including international communications.
✅Support multimedia files in different formats such as text messages, audio, pictures, videos, etc., to help users communicate more diversely.
✅Convenient login method: The software is used in conjunction with the phone number, which can be perfectly integrated with the mobile phone address book, making it more convenient for users to use.
✅No need to add friends: Supports synchronizing the user's mobile phone address book, and automatically connects contacts who have installed the software.
✅Offline information: Even if the user's mobile phone is turned off or the push notification is turned off, the software will save the corresponding information received when offline, so that the user can view the information when logging in again.

Overseas Weibo Twitter

Twitter is one of the most visited websites in the world, with around 230 million daily active users in 2021.

Twitter's product functions are similar to China's Sina Weibo. The biggest social feature is simplicity and openness, efficient interaction, and convenient dissemination.

Conciseness and openness are mainly reflected in the way of publishing content: the “tweets” published by users are mainly short text, messages of no more than 140 characters; users publish “means” in a variety of ways, including web, client and mobile phones.

Efficient interaction is mainly reflected in the website structure that can be released quickly: the main interaction mode of the website is "focus broadcast", which is simple and mainly on the home page; the website interaction method is mainly instant response; the website itself is an open platform, which is convenient for a large number of third parties Application implantation.

Twitter information and opinion dissemination is very convenient , users can click the retweet (Retweet) button to retweet and add comments.

Net Red Base Instagram

Instagram is a free online photo sharing social application owned by Meta, with 1.2 billion daily active users, which allows users to take photos and add different filters to share them.

Focusing on sharing photos, stories and videos with friends, Instagram is by far the most photo-intensive social app in the world. Instagram's "ins culture" is very popular, and the emphasis on the non-daily side of photography is relatively strong .

The US and India each have 140 million users, representing the demographics of the platform's two largest countries. Brazil (99 million) came second and Indonesia (88 million) came third. In terms of age structure, Instagram primarily appeals to users under the age of 35, with 71% of the app's user base falling into this category.

Meanwhile, Instagram is also a very popular B2C marketing platform, with over 70% of US businesses actively using it as a marketing channel.

In Africa, the social commerce model is becoming more and more important, and the most frequently used online shopping platforms by consumers include Facebook and Instagram, which are even ahead of many e-commerce platforms.

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There are many social applications. RCGI only selects the most representative applications to share briefly, in order to open up our horizons with everyone and see a bigger world ~ what kind of gameplay are you interested in in what market, welcome to interact in the message area, we Will also refer to research 😉