How to operate products well in social overseas expansion?

Problem Overview

Part 1 Rethinking Social Networking/Community

• Define the difference between “social” and “community”?
• What different characteristics do the different modes of “social” and “community” form?
• What are the similarities and differences between socializing with strangers and socializing with acquaintances?
• What are the types and characteristics of stranger social interaction?
• What are the core elements of stranger social growth?
• How to find the entry point and key elements of a social product from a user and systemic perspective?

Part 2 Social Outbound

• What is the dividend of the Internet?
• How to rank the regions with the bonus period for going overseas?
• In which region can overseas social networking bring obvious benefits based on user demand?

Part 3 Overseas social product operations : cold start/activation and retention/monetization/user life cycle

• How to cold-start an overseas social product from 0 to 1?
• What are the main modes for activating social products and improving retention?
• What are the main ways to monetize social products?
• What are the growth focuses of social products at different life cycles?

Part 4: Case analysis of overseas social networking in different markets

• How is the performance of voice and video social networking in the Middle East market?
• What is the most pressing problem that needs to be solved in stranger social networking? How to solve it? (Take the North American market as an example)

Introduction: Social/community is the most fascinating and also the most difficult business model in the Internet industry. For this reason, social overseas expansion is an imaginative track. Therefore, this Q&A session will conduct in-depth discussions and organize the following questions: [How to do a good job in product operation when going global with social media? 】Related content, I hope it will be of some reference value to nascent overseas entrepreneurs.

Rethinking social interaction and community

1. Define the difference between “social” and “community”?

1) Different core users: There will be overlapping parts on both sides. For example, there is content dissemination in WeChat, and Zhihu also has social channels.

Social: The goal is to "find people".

Community: The goal is to "find content".

2) Different closed loops: How to build and maintain relationships efficiently and comfortably is the ultimate proposition of social products.

Social closed loop: people

Community closed loop: content

3) Different links

Social: Connecting people (through content)

Community: Connecting People and Content

4) Different characteristics

Social: Tool-based, pursuing "volume" and "efficiency";

Community: Platformization, pursuit of "level" and "consumption".

2. What are the different characteristics of the different modes of “social” and “community”?

1) Social networking among acquaintances VS social networking among strangers

*Acquaintance social market: strong social + strong tools;

According to research in the social field in North America. Early growth was achieved through the combination of strong social networking and strong tools. Strong social networking is because the essence of acquaintance social networking is to substitute the user's address book or offline relationships. Strong tools are because North American developers have always pursued "technical means" to drive growth and control of the social ecosystem through product interaction and product strategy. The reason behind this is that North America does not have the non-technical user operation or content operation system that we are accustomed to in China.

*Stranger social market: strong tools + weak social interaction;

2) Strong community + weak social product

* Reddit: Known as the "front page of the Internet", it has a large number of posts every day and has formed a unique community culture.

* Steemit: Blockchain community, blockchain social networking that has emerged as a social model.

* Video or news platforms such as Youtube and Newsbreak cannot be considered social software in the strict sense, but they do have some social functions or attributes, and their future development is imaginative.

3) Strong tools + weak social products

* Venmo: Focuses on wallet and money transfer, and enters the social field.

* Pinterest: Enter the social world with trendy products, photos, etc.

*Instagram: In the early days, it was driven by the demand for photo-editing, so strictly speaking, it also belongs to this model.

3. What are the similarities and differences between socializing with strangers and socializing with acquaintances?

Strictly speaking, there are only two types of social networking, according to A16Z’s classification:

Network

Stranger social (marketplace)

1) The logic and essence of growth are completely different

Social networking among acquaintances: information distribution network based on relationship chain

This is one of the infrastructures of the modern Internet industry, including IM, SNS, social media and other forms; it pursues the density and strength of the relationship chain.

Stranger social networking: a social matching market based on certain needs (strangers)

For example, stranger social networking for dating purposes, professional social networking for recruitment purposes; pursuing transaction/matching efficiency.

2) Different landing points

The focus of acquaintance social networking: on the “relationship chain”

The extremely efficient exchange and distribution of information through relationship chains is an area that all major Internet giants covet, because it is a huge information distribution network;

The focus of stranger social networking: "finding people"

That is, the matching of people.

4. What are the types and characteristics of stranger social interaction?

Analysis of stranger social networking models: The two best-developed models at present are "dating" and "professional social networking".

1) "Professional social networking": professional social networking represented by LinkedIn

Professional social networking is a typical "jack of all trades and master of none". From the perspective of product logic, it is more like the classification of "dating", similar to the segmentation of Facebook in professional scenarios. It generates traffic by building connections between acquaintances and semi-acquaintances in professional scenarios. However, taking LinkedIn as an example, typical monetization is achieved through efficient matching of recruitment and job hunting. Therefore, in terms of business model, it is a typical transaction market logic, where the wool comes from the pig.

2) “Dating” social networking: various stranger social products

Many people in China are accustomed to calling the stranger social interaction of the "dating" type the "hormone economy." The more famous players at home and abroad include MatchGroup under IAC in the United States

There are more than 20 apps including (Tinder, OKCupid, Coffeemeetsbagel), Magic Lab in the United States (Chappy, Bumble, Badoo, etc.), Chinese dating sites (Baihe.com, Zhenai.com, etc.), Momo (Momo, Tantan), Soul (becoming more and more weird), Jimu in China, unicorn product Blued in the vertical field (gay), Grindr in the United States, and products for various other vertical groups (middle-aged and elderly, sex toys, etc.).

5. What are the core elements of stranger social growth?

The core indicator of the growth logic of dating social networks: the number of matches generated. Since they are both marketplaces, we can use Uber’s growth logic to understand it by analogy.

Growth logic comparison

Dating social networking VS Uber's growth logic

6. How to find the entry point and key elements of a social product from a user and system perspective?

1. User perspective:

1) Finding the entry point for social products: The key is to identify user value and manage user expectations.

* Clarify user value: Let users immediately understand what the product can provide.

* Manage user expectations: Allow users to be patient and continue to provide stimulation. This is especially true for dating and marriage social networking, because the battle line is very long, and users need to have a "prospect" before they are willing to open it.

2) Find the three key elements of social products: user traffic × social efficiency × authenticity

* User traffic: scale and retention

*Social efficiency: Improve matching efficiency

*Authenticity: Ensure social authenticity

2. Systematic perspective:

1) Find the entry point for social products: The key lies in user groups, scenarios and relationship chains.

*User group: Target group positioning

*Scene: Physical - same city/same school, physiological, mental

*Relationship chain: hormonal/non-hormonal, acquaintance/stranger, one-to-one/one-to-many

2) Find the three key elements of social products: connection/matching efficiency, effective ice-breaking efficiency, and relationship continuity and stability

Social Outbound

1. What are the dividends of the Internet?

Generally speaking, we have three main perspectives on the dividends of the Internet industry:

1) Including the user market blue ocean

2) Blue Ocean of Developer Market

3) Third-party open platform

User Blue Ocean: The user market blue ocean is almost non-existent at present. The bonus opportunities that may emerge in the future will be affected by three common factors, namely global network upgrades, continuous hardware improvements and AI.

Developer market blue ocean: It is a relatively important bonus, which is mainly reflected in whether the main products in the target market are local developers or overseas developers; the core reason for the bonus is localization, including the localization of user experience and product ecology.

Third-party open platform: In the early stages of their establishment, the open platforms of giant products will have many favorable features or loopholes that help third-party products grow, and these growth cases are constantly emerging.

2. How to rank the regions with the bonus period for going overseas?

The bonus area must have a commercial basis, that is, the target market must have both population and cash flow.

There is no clear definition of specific bonus areas, because the combination of product form and target market is the basis for the existence of bonuses. Thinking from this perspective, combined with personal cognition, the ranking is:

North America>Japan, South Korea, Taiwan>Middle East=Latin America=India=Southeast Asia

Why is North America ranked first? Here are a few prerequisites:

First, the core growth model of the product is set as natural additions;

Second, product design tends to be innovative or vertical.

Don’t set your goal to be the first or second in a field where there are already giants. North American users have a good habit of exploring new products, and North America has the most complete natural growth system, both online and offline. North America has cultural influence on other English-speaking countries or European countries, and can easily bring about natural growth in the mainstream market.

3. Based on user demand, in which region will the benefits of overseas social networking be most obvious?

There are different opinions from different perspectives. If we start from the user needs at the micro level, India can also be regarded as a region:

1) Because India lacks products suitable for India that can connect strangers and make new friends.

2) The gender ratio of the Internet in India is unbalanced, so it is extremely important for women to have a comfortable experience.

3) Existing products such as Tinder and Tantan are too direct, and social culture has a low tolerance for them, which can easily cause pressure on female users.

So, what are the qualities that a social product should have to be suitable for the Indian market?

First, we need a product like Soul that can balance making friends, expressing ourselves, and communicating well.

Second, the team needs the founder to be an excellent product manager and have the patience to work hard.

The Indian market has huge social demands, and Indians are relatively reserved, so they need a clever product to break the ice.

Overseas social product operations

1. How to cold start an overseas social product from 0 to 1?

The cold start of overseas social products from 0 to 1 is a process of rapid trial and error and verification of the feasibility of the project, including the three basic elements of product, user and operation. In order to create a low-cost MVP, the methodology is continuously iterated to finally determine a project model that can run smoothly in the market. It includes the following three parts:

1) Find the target seed users

2) Growth of relationship chain

3) Product self-propagation

1) Find the target seed users

Traffic dividend in the existing market: The services provided by the mobile Internet are essentially meeting the needs of users in traditional offline industries or PC terminals. Take Tinder and HOLLA as examples. Tinder has moved offline speeddating services and bar chatting behaviors to mobile devices, while taking over the traffic of online dating on the PC side. HOLLA has directly taken over the user traffic of random video chats on the PC side. Its main PC products include Omegle and Chatroulatte. These seed users tend to be highly homogeneous and have already been educated by similar PC products.

Therefore, when a mobile product with higher efficiency and better experience appears, the demand will shift quickly, and the retention of these seed users in the APP will be relatively higher. These are the seed users that we need to find ways to acquire.

High-density homogeneous population: Tinder's cold start was from American universities, and in American universities they selected a group of people who loved parties and were the most open as seed users. These people were fraternities and sororities. The brand of a social product is determined by the users. Coupled with the influence of campus KOLs, people have the impression that all the cool people go to Tinder, and many students have the idea that they will definitely be matched with beautiful girls and handsome guys on Tinder.

The circle effect directly leads to the acquisition of more new users. Therefore, it is important to find a high-density homogeneous group of people to target.

2) Growth of relationship chain

The growth of social products is often driven by relationship chains. Word of mouth is the key to the rapid growth of a social product. Especially for Gen Z users, recommendations from friends and influencers are the key to whether they accept a new product and service. Take Snapchat as an example. It chose American high school students as its seed users for breakthrough. The high frequency of offline word-of-mouth conversion directly led to APP downloads. If you want to send snaps to your classmates, they must have snaps on their phones first.

3) Product self-propagation

Spot is a social product based on map acquaintances. In the early stage of product design, a series of activity functions that can stimulate the desire to share were designed, such as music emoticons and emoticon bombing, which are functions with magical and dissemination properties. Hotmail's growth manager added a sentence "PS: I love you. Get your free e-mail at Hotmail" at the end of each email, aiming to convert all recipients into his own users. This product detail directly helped Hotmail double its user base within five weeks.

2. What are the main modes for activating social products and improving retention?

Activation method: The activation of social products is mainly undertaken by the market. If the promotion strategy is in line with the product tone, it can smoothly guide users to register and complete the activation.

Improve retention: One manifestation of good retention of social products is the ability to grab more user usage time and occupy the user's mind on such social products.

1) Relationship chain precipitation

The core of social networking is people, and the expansion of relationship chains is the key to enhancing user stickiness. Therefore, the sedimentation and accumulation of relationship chains are the elements that products need to maintain most.

There are many ways to remind users to use the app. The most common one is push recall. Push is the most basic tool. It creates activation scenarios with effective content based on product functions and cultivates push clicks into product usage scenarios. For example, Tinder is a standard push app. "Someone has sent you a new message", "Someone is waiting for your reply", "Someone just liked your post". When users feel that they can gain more social value from the product and establish deeper social relationships, they will naturally become dependent on the product.

2) The deeper level is the cultivation of user habits

For apps whose core product interaction is daily behavior, such as short video, IM, content community, live broadcast and other apps, the content tone and quality determine whether users can transfer their daily habits to our products. For non-daily behavior apps, such as HOLLA (random video chat), the general approach is to create interactive scenarios that combine user living habits in the usage scenarios, and control the matching efficiency and quality. Cultivating user habits is indeed a relatively long process.

3) Ultimately it becomes a lifestyle

Instagram has made it possible for everyone to become a social media blogger. The emergence of the word "Instagramable" is the best embodiment of the integration of products into life scenes. Whether you are traveling, eating, attending classes or working, any beautiful, interesting and fun thing is worth recording and uploading.

Tinder's popularity as a national product is mainly due to the series of personalities it has created for itself on social media. All Tinder-related jokes point to hookup culture. Whether you hate it, agree with it, or are making fun of it, Tinder has been deeply embedded in daily life as a form of social popular culture.

All successful social products have created a new lifestyle. Take Monkey as an example. The short video feature of Moment helps people show their true selves in life. Ordinary people can also find the joy of being noticed. It captures people’s desire for attention and curiosity, and encourages them to create and consume popular videos on the platform. This is why so many young users on YouTube and TikTok like to use monkey to record celebrity videos. Many people have become famous by using monkey, and other people also want it. The FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) for the product is a manifestation of the spread of monkey as a popular culture.

3. What are the main monetization methods for social products?

1) Membership subscription payment

2) Privileged function payment (payment points for restricted scenarios, payment points for value-added scenarios)

3) Virtual Currency

4) Advertising monetization

4. What are the growth focuses of social products at different stages of their life cycle?

1) Cold start phase

Because all matching involves the supply-demand problem of a two-sided market, early operations and quality control on the side with scarce quantity are particularly important during the cold start phase. In dating products, high-quality users (opposite-sex products mean young women) determine the future of this platform.

2) User growth stage

Follow the user's main path to make conversions step by step: user exposure - profile page click - message sending behavior (or liking behavior) - reply behavior (or matching behavior) - reply time. The efficiency of this closed loop basically determines the user's life cycle.

There is no need to worry about loss of users after matching, so we must keep trying to retain users. For core users (who use the platform to improve dating efficiency and save time), loss of users after matching is a manifestation of "platform success". Just like Didi will never prevent passengers from getting off the car in order to retain customers, Taobao will not prevent buyers from receiving goods in order to retain customers.

Finally, the life cycle of platform users naturally depends on whether the user needs met by the platform itself are high frequency (frequency: "yp artifact" > dating and making friends > serious dating > blind dating). There is no so-called "high frequency beats low frequency" business logic here, because the frequency difference here naturally subdivides the needs and users. The same person will naturally choose different products when meeting his or her needs at different levels.

The frequency will ultimately be reflected in the different scales of active users when the number of registered users is the same. For example, no matter how well Tantan does, it will be difficult for it to surpass Momo in terms of the scale of active users (the efficiency of swiping left and right is lower than the grid list display). As the world's leading dating product, Tinder's MAU should only be around 30 million (guess numbers, please correct me if I'm wrong).

3) Commercialization stage

For the realization of LTV, the key contradiction lies in whether the business model can be the same as other marketplaces, converting the efficiency given to this behavior by the platform into revenue before the single behavior is completed (such as the commission per order of Didi and Taobao).

Taking the more extreme "blind date" model as an example, it doesn't make much sense to look at DAU or LT, because if the efficiency reaches the extreme, unless something unexpected happens, a user will only use it once in his life. At this time, the efficiency charging for achieving matching behavior is very important. The ARPU value determines the LTV and whether the cash flow can be positive. Therefore, the routine of all dating websites is to block the personal information of the matching objects, and require gradual payment to obtain the information, or directly send a "matchmaker" offline to help the two people match up and charge according to the order.

Back to the current mainstream "stranger social" scenario, there are two main strategies: value-added services (VAS) to help users improve social efficiency, and rationalize the "order commission" behavior (otherwise there will be legal risks).

Value-added services (VAS) are easy to understand and are the most mainstream monetization method globally. Almost all social products use VAS as the most mainstream monetization method (or one of them). By improving the social efficiency experience of paying users (such as letting Didi drivers pay high prices to call a taxi), efficiency can be converted into income. Functions such as Super Like, Increase Exposure, and Filter are all developed based on this idea. Just like e-commerce and other trading platforms care more about the number of active sellers/buyers and not DAU or MAU (although they will contribute to advertising revenue), dating products such as Tinder also began to focus only on the number of subscribers/paying users early on, because this is a reflection and symbol of the platform's efficiency.

The most typical example of rationalizing the behavior of "commission on orders" is live streaming. The live streaming of social products has a strong social attribute. The act of rewarding can be roughly understood as "an order", and the platform's commission is the commission. In this way, the matching behavior is turned into a big cash cow. Social customer acquisition, live streaming monetization, and the MC reduction caused by the scale effect can make the ROI very high.

Advertising is a basic configuration for traffic monetization, but it is difficult to become the main method. The other monetization models mentioned above are both commercial products and user products. There is no such thing as monetization harming users. Instead, they are positive incentives and can be considered from day one.

A brief analysis of overseas social networking cases in different markets

1. How is the performance of voice and video social networking in the Middle East market?

1) Middle East: Voice social (audio and video chat) [representative product Yalla]

Current situation: Yalla gives people the feeling that it is similar to the domestic voice room shows, but there are actually differences.

Voice shows are mainly about creating social scenes and selling social status, or selling social services. The core purpose and business logic is sales.

Voice social products at home and abroad have similar product forms, but the difference is that Yalla's ecosystem really contains a large proportion of social interaction, that is, social interaction that is not aimed at sales results. This results in low professionalism among anchors, frequent mutual brushing, few cash withdrawals, and a low threshold for new users. This is also related to the fact that social scenes are still scarce in the Middle East.

Prediction: In the long run, the situation will most likely change. Guilds and anchors that aim to make profits will undoubtedly have stronger social motivations than those who rely on social media, and will enter the platform in large numbers to expel the self-hosted anchors.

2. What is the most pressing problem that needs to be solved in stranger social networking? How to solve it? (Take the North American market as an example)

2) North America: Stranger Social Networking [Representative product Holla]

An important point in stranger social networking is to solve the efficiency and frequency of stranger social matching, that is, how users can most efficiently match as many high-quality users as possible through new social paths. There are two points in this:

First, there are many

Second, it is well matched

In fact, users of different genders have different emphasis on these two points.

For boys, being able to satisfy their matching frequency is key, and they place more emphasis on breadth in the entire matching process;

For girls, it is a little different. The quality of the match is the key, and they prefer the depth of intersection in the matching process. 1,000 good-looking profiles are not as good as 10 high-quality conversations

Of course, this is just a focus on gender. For everyone, places with lots of beautiful fish are where users most want to stay.

How to achieve more and better allocation?

1. Crowd limitation

Stranger social networking is actually about targeting a certain type of user based on social needs or subculture, creating a sense of belonging for them, satisfying their urgent need to find similar people, and creating a place for them to find each other in this relatively lonely world. Therefore, limiting the population is the key to improving matchmaking efficiency.

From the perspective of market strategy, HOLLA uses top opinion leaders to acquire a community group. In the early days, HOLLA cooperated with many influencers who had made Omegle videos to produce popular YouTube videos. These people themselves had the need to make friends on the PC. They have the same sense of humour and the same growth environment. Whether it is from the length of matching time or the subsequent messages, the volume is better than that from other channels.

From the perspective of product strategy, many social products classify users according to their interests and hobbies. Azar sets up an interest tag in the profile, and HOLLA also has a tag chat pool based on interests.

In a relatively fragile relationship chain, whether filtering users by special hobbies, social needs, or homogeneous groups, the effect of limiting the crowd and improving the matching experience can be achieved.

2. Product Guidance

1) More and better reach

For Tinder, this kind of reach is the profile. It uses Facebook's real-name system, forces users to upload photos, and launches the looping video function in 2018, all of which are aimed at optimizing the reach based on appearance and face.

2) More and better conversations

Breaking the ice has always been a pain point for social products, and is often referred to as a false proposition. How to start a conversation more naturally in a social product may be the direction of future social product research. For example, Tantan has targeted offline drinking games and set up a truth or dare function.

3) Better expression environment

In the scenario of stranger social interaction, we hope that users will not only come to the square to watch people, but also hope that everyone can speak in the square. A good community environment and community culture guidance can conform to human nature and help products create a sense of belonging. After all, users like to make friends in an environment where they feel safe and comfortable.

3. Algorithm Learning

Tinder's matching is also supported by a scoring algorithm. Your score is determined by your matching success rate, the scores of people who swipe right on you, and many other data. People with different scores will be diverted to different pools for matching, so as to optimize everyone's experience. Even if your score is not high enough, you can still pay to save you. The same is true for HOLLA and monkey. They both need to find the magic point and continuously improve the user pairing experience by iterating product experience and operational details.

Author: Overseas Operations

Source: Overseas Operations (ID: chuhaiyunying)