Which one will die first under marketing, QQ Space or Moments?

Since Redmi used QQ Space as a sales platform, mobile phone manufacturers such as HTC and Coolpad have followed suit. After a series of attempts, QQ Space became a recognized marketing platform. Following WeChat Moments , QQ Space has become another new battlefield for social marketing.

Perhaps many people think that QQ Space is an excellent sales platform. Take the pre-order sale of HTC Desire 820s on QQ Zone at the end of November as an example. The number of reservations continued for 6 days and reached nearly 1.3 million. 50,000 HTC Desire 820s were sold out in just 17 minutes. On the surface, this is an impressive performance. The fact is just the opposite. The conversion rate of QQ Space, which is labeled as a social marketing platform by industry insiders, is still very low.

Tencent’s third-quarter financial report contains the following data about QQ Space: QQ Space performed well in the third quarter, with the number of monthly active accounts reaching 629 million; the number of monthly active accounts on mobile terminals reached 506 million, an increase of 26% over the same period last year.

Even if calculated based on the number of reservations of nearly 1.3 million, the conversion rate of QQ Space in the HTC mobile phone pre-sales case was only 0.002%. Compared with the average conversion rate of 3-5% of traditional e-commerce channels, QQ Space is an extremely failed social marketing platform.

In comparison, the pre-order sales situation of Dasheng F2 on QQ Zone is more optimistic than that of HTC, with the number of pre-orders reaching 3.78 million. Even so, the conversion rate of QQ Space is still less than 1%, which makes it difficult to bear the burden of marketing. Why has QQ Space, with such a huge user base, become a platform that is difficult to monetize in social marketing? In my opinion, there are two reasons.

One is determined by the attributes of QQ space. As we all know, QQ Space is a social platform based on the huge QQ user base. It is somewhat similar to the blog platform, but has stronger social attributes. Whether it is content or relationship chain, QQ space has very strong social attributes, and failure in marketing is inevitable.

Another reason why QQ Space is difficult to monetize is that it is restricted by a young user base. According to QQ Space data statistics, nearly half of the active users of QQ Space are born after 1990, and they are the most active in space operations such as posting comments and uploading pictures. Those born in the 1990s, especially those born in the 1995s, have surpassed other generations and become the backbone of QQ space. In terms of consumption, those born after 1995 are still students, and their consumption level still has a certain gap with high-income white-collar workers.

Since its birth, QQ Space has been positioned as a social space. Functional modules such as chat, photo album, and log are all for social services. Of course, it is an indisputable fact that QQ Space, with more than 600 million active users, is a platform with huge traffic, but this does not mean that QQ Space will become a new marketing front. When some QQ users posted advertisements on QQ space, it caused dissatisfaction among many QQ friends.

Obviously, the label of QQ Space as a so-called social marketing platform is a bit hype. Once a large number of marketing advertisements appear on QQ space, it is not uncommon for people to block each other and break the relationship chain. As of now, QQ Space’s ability to withstand marketing is stronger than WeChat Moments, because there are many strangers in the QQ relationship chain, while Moments is a more private social relationship chain.

Since WeChat Moments' tolerance for marketing ads is much lower than QQ Space, why has Moments become overwhelmed by marketing? Strictly speaking, the difference in the marketing status of QQ Space and Moments by Tencent has caused the rampant marketing to have immeasurable destructive power on Moments.

The relationships in the circle of friends are mostly social relationship chains formed based on the phone book. Since its establishment, QQ Space has been suppressing advertising in an obvious way. Under this high-pressure policy, the number of people using QQ Space for marketing has not grown to a large scale. Let’s take a look at WeChat Moments. As a mobile Internet product that Tencent tried out, its marketing was poorly regulated for quite a long time. In addition, as WeChat has invested heavily in the concept of Weidian, it is not difficult to understand why WeChat allows marketing to prevail in the circle of friends.

Right now, marketing in the circle of friends is out of control. Tencent is also aware of this and has introduced a series of policies to manage the increasingly rampant marketing situation in Moments. From limiting the number of WeChat friends to no more than 5,000 to strengthening the user reporting mechanism, WeChat is taking drastic measures against marketing.

It has to be said that Tencent’s crackdown on WeChat Moments’ marketing efforts is very strong. However, after WeChat Moments marketing has become a trend and tied to Tencent's e-commerce monetization, Tencent's suppression of WeChat Moments marketing has become an embarrassing situation where it wants to kill the enemy but is unable to reverse the situation. Therefore, Moments will definitely be the first to die under the excessive marketing, but QQ Space, which is under the layers of protection of Tencent, will not, because the marketing of QQ Space is still under the control of Tencent.