Soul and Tantan product analysis

With the continuous development of the Internet era, mobile social software has become an indispensable part of people's lives. However, social networking among acquaintances can no longer fully meet young people's social needs and needs for venting, so stranger dating platforms have quietly emerged among Generation Z.

1. Market Analysis

1. Market Overview

With the development of Internet information technology, mobile social apps have become an indispensable part of people's lives for communication, and strong and weak relationships are increasingly suitable for explaining user relationships under mobile social media.

The traditional mobile social apps we currently use are mainly for social networking among acquaintances. Communication takes place in a relatively closed and solid circle, connecting relatively stable and deep social relationships.

In comparison, weak-tie connections are a more flexible and broad social relationship, which means that the two connected parties have different living and working circles and more diverse information. App users based on weak-tie connections have relatively low stickiness, but users are also often more willing to share their inner thoughts and reveal their true selves in such an environment.

In the domestic environment, WeChat represents the top traffic in social networking among acquaintances, Weibo represents the top traffic in public opinion expression platforms, and Momo represents the top traffic in social networking among strangers, especially after Momo acquired Tantan for US$750 million in 2018, which became the largest merger and acquisition case in the field of stranger social networking. Momo has thus become the uncrowned king in stranger social networking. This article mainly studies the product field of stranger social networking.

The rise of stranger social networking is strongly correlated with the social characteristics of the Generation Z online group. Generation Z refers to people born between 1995 and 2009. They are greatly influenced by technological products such as the Internet and social media, and are the main force on online social platforms.

With the continuous development of material and cultural living standards, in addition to basic social needs, more and more young people hope to meet higher-level spiritual needs such as expanding relationships, relaxing and relieving stress, and having different outlooks on life. From this point of view, it is this kind of market demand that has given rise to the birth and rise of a new generation of social platforms such as Soul that cater to Generation Z.

Soul was launched in 2015. Different from Tantan's social networking based on appearance, Soul entered the market with spiritual social networking and attracted a large number of new-age young people in 2018. Since March 2018, it has remained in the top 10 of the App Store's social app rankings, occupying a certain market share.

From the popularity of Soul, we can see that there is still a large gap in the market for stranger dating apps that meet spiritual needs, and stranger social products are gradually beginning to develop from homogeneous competition to differentiated competition.

2. Market size

Figure: Scale and forecast of stranger social networking users in China from 2015 to 2020

(Source: iMedia Polaris Internet Product Analysis System)

According to the Chinese stranger social user data from 2015 to 2020 provided by iMedia Consulting, it can be seen that the number of Chinese stranger social users showed an overall slowing upward trend from 2015 to 2019, and reached a peak in 2019. The user scale of 600 to 700 million seems to have reached the ceiling of the industry.

At the same time, "Wumi", which was launched in 2014 and is famous for its anonymity, Soul, which was launched in 2015 and uses algorithms to match users based on personality tests, and "Yi Can", which was launched in 2018 and has a gameplay similar to WeChat's drifting bottle, all reveal that virtual interactions between strangers characterized by companionship and anonymity have gradually become a new way of socializing in the mobile Internet era.

Although this type of new product that meets the spiritual needs of young people for making friends has been developed for a long time, it has not yet formed a monopoly product. Even Soul, which seems to be very popular at present, with the continuous expansion of product business and the increasing diversification of service functions, Soul has also begun to face problems such as gradually blurred product positioning, deviation of development direction from the original intention, and falling into homogeneous development.

For early stranger social products, they not only face the challenge of retaining their own users, but will also face the impact of emerging products. For new products, there is still a lot of room for development in the direction of stranger friendship that focuses on satisfying spiritual needs. Creating products with staggered competition and clear positioning is a feasible development direction.

3. Policies and Laws

Source: iiMedia Research

2018 was a big year for social networking, which also made stranger social networking a hot topic. The main manifestation of this was the fierce competition among stranger social networking products due to the massive influx of capital. About twenty social apps received financing of varying amounts. Bullet SMS, which was launched only seven days ago, received an investment of 150 million yuan, while Maimai, a real-name commercial social software, received a US$200 million Series D financing.

However, risks and opportunities coexist. Due to the inevitable hormone matching strategies and imperfect review mechanisms of stranger dating apps, it is easy for users to engage in bad behaviors such as skirting the rules and spreading pornography on the platform. In the first quarter of 2019, under the national policy of combating pornography and illegal publications, a number of stranger social platforms were successively ordered to shut down by distribution channels and national regulatory authorities, and Soul, which is positioned as a "soul social" app, is no exception.

Especially for a series of products that focus on hormone matching, such as Tantan and Momo, the gray area they touch overlaps with their product positioning, which will be their long-term pain point and one of the reasons why Momo developed other business models such as live streaming e-commerce.

2. User Profile

1. Distribution

Figure: Gender distribution of stranger social apps in China in Q1 2019 (Source: iiMedia Research)

Judging from the user portraits of the five well-known stranger social apps, namely “Momo”, “Soul”, “Baobao”, “Yuanjian” and “Dianmi”, male users account for the majority of the market. From this point of view, gaining more female users is a major competitive advantage of stranger social products.

Figure: Age distribution of stranger social networking users (Source: Mob Research Institute)

According to the age distribution of stranger social users in 2019 released by Mob Research Institute, in terms of user activity, the main users of stranger social apps are people under 35 years old. Taking "Momo", a weak-relationship social product with a relatively high market share, as a reference, the target user age group is mainly between 18 and 44 years old, and the core users are mainly concentrated between 18 and 34 years old.

These top users already have a certain degree of financial independence, and their social circles are relatively fixed; their lifestyles are stable, and their free time is relatively fragmented. The top users of the emerging stranger social networking apps “Soul”, “Baobao” and “Yujian” are concentrated between 18 and 24 years old. Most of these users are students, who have a lot of free time and concentrated free time, have niche interests and hobbies, and have weak spending power.

Figure: Geographical distribution of users of major stranger social applications (Source: Mob Research Institute)

From a geographical perspective: second-tier cities are where the demand for making friends with strangers is the strongest. This is because there are a large number of second-tier cities in my country as a whole, and they also have the living pressure of big cities. In addition, compared with spiritual social interaction, appearance-based social interaction has more advantages in the sinking market.

From the perspective of consumption characteristics, the absolute value of income in the sinking market is quite different from that in first- and second-tier cities. They are more selective and sensitive to prices and brands. At the same time, the brand loyalty in first- and second-tier cities is much higher than that in low-tier cities. Therefore, it is crucial to grasp the product positioning and balance the market.

Figure 2.1.2 Distribution of usage time periods of six types of applications (Source: China Telecom)

According to the 44th Statistical Report on the Development of China's Internet, the usage time of social app users is relatively evenly distributed between 9 am and 11 pm, and they mainly use the products in fragmented free time.

2. User needs

Figure: User demands of stranger dating apps (Source: Jiguang Research)

According to the Aurora survey data, the target users use stranger dating apps more to find people to chat and confide in and expand their own social circles. The purposeful attempts to meet the opposite sex and develop deeper short-term or long-term relationships are not as high as expected.

Figure: Statistics on the number of friends met offline (Source: Jiguang Research)

The above picture better proves this point. Contemporary young people, especially those drifting in big cities, are under multiple oppressions in social work, economy, and status, and spiritual support is also a major demand.

It can be seen from this that many target users often only occasionally hope to find a "tree hole" online to relieve loneliness in specific life scenarios or fragmented time, and use this as an outlet to vent their feelings that they dare not or are not convenient to express in social interactions with acquaintances.

The anonymous environment of stranger social apps, far away from real life, can give users a sense of long-distance security. A large proportion of users of stranger social apps will not try or hardly try to introduce the weak relationship chains in stranger social apps into their real lives.

There are many products related to stranger dating in the app store, but there are still some shortcomings. The author randomly surveyed some users around him, and the vast majority of users believe that many current apps have many sections that they will not use.

Of course, as an app matures, it will develop many new functional modules for business expansion or commercial cooperation. However, the complexity of the functions will make users feel at a loss as to where to start, and may even cause a certain degree of congestion or restriction on the use of the main module.

Especially for new users of the app, such problems can easily cause them trouble, leading to increased app learning costs and giving up, resulting in user loss. For stranger social apps, especially newly developed social products, it is particularly important to identify user needs, build necessary sections, and stick to the positioning.

3. Product Analysis

1. Tantan product analysis

1) Product positioning

A stranger dating platform based on geographic location, dedicated to creating a social product based on appearance to solve the target users' needs of "breaking the single status".

2) User analysis

Tantan has a large user base, with the majority being male. According to data provided by iResearch Index, males account for 57.91% of Tantan users, and the top users are mainly between the ages of 18 and 35. From this we can see that in addition to students and newcomers to the workplace, Tantan’s core user group also includes some people in society who already have certain social experience, and its target users are mainly the white-collar market.

Its users cover a wide range of activities and have a certain level of spending power. The target users have busy lives and want to make friends in a simple and efficient way. Tantan’s card-swiping interaction design satisfies this need of its user groups very well.

Secondly, from the perspective of geographical distribution, in addition to the target users in first- and second-tier cities, Tantan still has a relatively high acceptance in the sinking market.

Figure: Gender distribution of Tantan users (Source: iResearch Index)

Figure: Age distribution of Tantan users (Source: iResearch Index)

3) Product features

The core function of Tantan is that users decide their intention to like each other by swiping their cards based on the personal photos uploaded to the platform. Only people who like each other can become friends, which is the prerequisite for all subsequent interactive operations such as viewing Moments and chatting.

From this perspective, Tantan protects the privacy of users relatively well. Only when both users swipe right on their likes can they become friends. The updates of nearby users are not disclosed based on geographic location, and other users will not be notified when they swipe right on their likes, which effectively helps users filter out disturbing information.

Although the main gameplay is simple, mainly filtering friends by swiping cards, the simple and fast interactive design provides a good experience for users. In terms of the functional layout of the product, in order to expand functions, Tantan uses the bottom tab format to carry more functions.

Its product homepage mainly has a card swiping function, which is a prerequisite for subsequent interaction; the message page displays friends and chat information, and supports search. The newly added flash chat function matches online users based on distance. Users can only unlock the avatars of both parties and become friends after chatting with the matched users for a certain amount of time; the discovery page has an entrance to the circle of friends and an entrance to anonymous secret crush; my page mainly displays the user's personal profile, personal rights and interests and other information.

4) Pros and cons analysis

advantage:

1. Tantan's efficient and easy-to-learn card-swiping interaction is very successful. It has low learning costs and is quick to get started, making it very suitable for users to use the product in their spare time.
2. Other users will not be notified of a user's right swipe like, thus preventing the user from being disturbed by invalid information.
3. From the perspective of users' psychology when using this social software, users may not want people nearby to directly see their personal homepage and dynamic information. Therefore, Tantan does not directly allow users to view the dynamic information of nearby users, but only makes it public after both parties have selected each other.
4. As the product focuses on stranger social networking and single-finding functions, users do not want the opposite sex they are chatting with to see the intimate interactions between themselves and other opposite sex users. Therefore, comments and likes in Tantan’s Moments are private and not public, which can well protect the user’s privacy.

insufficient:

1. Since Tantan focuses on social networking based on appearance, it has no advantages for most users who are not good-looking. In addition to attracting users with good appearance, how to improve the user experience and retain users is a more important issue.
2. The product's newly launched flash chat function requires users to chat a certain number of times before unlocking the avatars of both parties. Although this adds a sense of mystery, it is contrary to the original positioning of the product and also discounts the simple and efficient features of the product itself. This may result in low-quality chats and little interest between users. It is also a question of whether the product itself is truly attractive to its target users who want to engage in "social networking based on appearance."

2. Soul Product Analysis

1) Product positioning

A stranger dating platform based on big data matching algorithm, dedicated to creating soul-centered and thought-based social products.

2) User analysis

As a dark horse in the stranger social market, Soul attracted a large number of female users in the early stage by placing advertisements on apps with more female users such as Douban, Douyin, and Weibo, and because of its product positioning of "spiritual social networking".

Compared with men, women are more emotional and pursue deeper and more delicate ways of communication in the social process. They also have lower requirements for appearance than men. Therefore, when Soul first entered the market, the gender ratio of female users was higher than that of male users for a long time, forming an abnormal situation of more people than porridge. As shown in Figure 2.2.1, this is the gender ratio of Soul users in July 2018 provided by iResearch data.

Figure: Gender ratio of users (Source: iResearch Index)

As the product gradually matured, Soul's marketing strategy became more and more diversified. In addition to the advantage of more female users, more men also flocked in.

As shown in Figure 2.2.2, this is the gender ratio of the applicable population of Soul in February 2021 provided by iResearch data. It can be seen that the gender ratio of product users is gradually becoming balanced, with slightly more males than females, which is in line with the general distribution of usage by contemporary Internet users.

Figure: Gender ratio of users (Source: iResearch Index)

From the perspective of age distribution, Soul's top users are also mainly concentrated between the ages of 18 and 35. It can be seen that this group has a more urgent need to make friends, but compared to Tantan, Soul's user group is younger, mainly college students and young people who are just entering the society.

Young users are generally more receptive to new things and pay more attention to fresh ways of playing with products. Therefore, in addition to launching algorithm-based soul matching, Soul has also successively launched new ways of playing such as voice matching, face-blocking video matching, nearby "love bell" matching, group chat parties, etc.

Figure: Age ratio of users (Source: iResearch Index)

From the perspective of geographical distribution, Soul's users are mainly concentrated in first- and second-tier cities, and it lacks stamina in the sinking market.

3) Product features

Soul's main functions include chatting, posting updates, dynamic squares and personal profiles. The homepage randomly exposes users in the form of planets and uses card-style navigation to display entrances to various matching gameplay.

The square displays the updates of followed users and recommendations, and a new discovery page section has been added based on thematic classification. Momentary publishing supports multiple forms such as audio, pictures, text, voting, etc. to guide users to publish content and maintain the active status of the community.

The chat page is divided into two columns: address book and chat page, which display all historical chat users and followers. It supports search function, and users can search for historical chat users or chat records. In addition, users can also choose whether they want to chat at the moment by setting their mood and online status. The personal homepage displays the user's personal information, past updates, number of followers and number of followers, etc.

4) Pros and cons analysis

advantage:

1. Since most of the top users are young people, Soul's matching methods are very diverse, and at the same time meet the needs of users with different characteristics. For example, emotional users can choose soul matching, sound-controlled users can choose voice matching, and users who want to fall in love can ring the love bell, etc.
2. Soul's positioning of spiritual dating and reasonable advertising have attracted a large number of female users. In the early stage, it continued to attract male users by using advertising marketing with more female users than male users. The marketing strategy is very clever. In addition, as material living standards continue to improve, the slogan "Follow your soul to find you" not only captures the hearts of female users, but also brings in many lonely young users who have certain spiritual needs and are working alone.
3. When users are chatting, the chat page will display the chat popularity between chat friends, attracting users to continue chatting by lighting up hearts, and improving user stickiness by completing small goals.

insufficient:

1. The matching algorithm is still imperfect, and it is not possible to accurately profile the user through simple tests, which leads to the low accuracy of the product's main feature of soul matching.
2. Users do not have enough autonomy in choosing matching friends, and the system mainly relies on random matching by algorithms. User participation is not high, and the matching results may not meet user expectations.
3. The matching threshold is low, and many people’s greeting messages will suddenly appear in the user’s chat list, causing disturbance to the user.
4. The product had a lot of advertising and attracted a large number of users in a short period of time, but the management of the product itself did not keep up, resulting in a decline in the quality of the dynamic square and many users posting selfies, which deviated from the original intention of the product.
5. The product has too many new features and sections, and the spatial layout is not very reasonable, which blurs the focus of the product and increases the user's learning cost.

IV. Summary and Suggestions

Stranger social software provides users with a platform for expanding social circles and emotional exchanges. The main user groups are mostly concentrated in the age group of 18 to 35, and they have an urgent need to make friends. From a geographical perspective, the majority of them are distributed in second-tier cities, because there are many second-tier cities in my country as a whole, and at the same time there is the life pressure of first-tier cities.

At present, my country's stranger social market is mainly led by "Momo" and "Tantan", which focus on appearance-based social networking. Later, they developed live streaming and other businesses, and the transformation was relatively successful. Soul, as a rising star in the stranger social market, is positioned as spiritual social networking, has seized a certain market share, and has become the leader in spiritual social apps.

However, as management cannot keep up with publicity, the quality of community content in current products has declined and the positioning has become vague. It seems a bit hasty and there is a trend of shifting from differentiated competition to homogeneous competition.

Looking at the stranger social markets at home and abroad, generally speaking, the positioning of domestic and foreign social products is different. Domestic social products often want to take into account the different needs of different target users, and thus develop many functional modules, committed to creating a large and comprehensive product.

Foreign products are more vertically segmented, often focusing on creating only one feature to serve groups with specific needs. These two product development methods have their own advantages and disadvantages.

For the domestic market, developing a large and comprehensive product is naturally to attract more users and meet the needs of different users. However, if one blindly pursues large and comprehensive products, it may instead cause problems such as high user learning costs and gradually blurred product positioning.

In this regard, WeChat can be said to have set an example. Although WeChat has launched many new features in the continuous version iterations, these are often not reflected on the user's home page. Users need to drag and drop on the chat interface for the mini-program to appear, and need to see other expanded cooperation projects such as financial management, life services, transportation, etc. on the payment home page, and can manage the discovery page in the settings.

This approach not only consolidates conservative users who only need basic social functions, but also attracts more young people who are willing to learn and explore new functions to become deep users. The author believes that this method is not only applicable in WeChat, but is also a good reference in stranger social apps.

Author: Xiao Xun

Source: Xiao Xun