Renren was hailed as China's answer to Facebook, gaining over 100 million users at its peak. There is a precedent for college-based social networking in China: Renren, which started in 2005 as one of the country’s first social networks under the name Xiaonei. Experts believe Gen Zers are ready to break ties with WeChat in favor of a platform that can offer a more private experience and allow them to express themselves and post what they want, away from the watchful eyes of older family members. China’s college campuses have witnessed the passing of the generational torch this year, with undergraduate classes now composed exclusively of Gen-Z students. It’s no accident that many of the new social platforms are targeting college students. WeChat users spent 32.4 hours on the platform in June 2019, compared to 35.4 hours in December 2018 - a drop of 8.6 percent. Research by QuestMobile shows a decline in WeChat usage, suggesting that users are looking for alternatives. This is mostly due to growing disillusionment with WeChat’s ubiquity, prying family members and friends, and overbearing, influencer-driven commercial content. These new platforms are battling it out to emulate WeChat’s success, but they should each offer a distinctly different user experience from Tencent’s all-conquering app. Young people with a college education want something that belongs to themselves that is also different from WeChat or Alibaba. The platform promises that its users can “share and discover real people, real things, and real feelings.” Users can scan friends’ faces to add them to their network, use a celebrity face-match feature, and use an array of filters and stickers. The app is targeting a perceived yearning for authenticity, as that idea is often associated with Gen Z consumers. The e-commerce giant began beta testing the app in September, but an earlier version was also tested under the name Lanlan in several Zhejiang colleges towards the end of 2018. In comparison, the entire seven-year period between 20 saw the launch of 153 new social media apps.Īlibaba’s new student-focused platform, Ruwo (also known by its English name, “Real Like Me”) is attracting particular interest. In 2018 alone, 159 new platforms appeared in Chinese app stores, with another 53 apps debuting during the first two months of 2019. That arena has become particularly crowded over the past two years, with the number of Chinese social media platforms vying for market share growing exponentially. In a bid to break WeChat’s dominance, Alibaba, Jingdong, and ByteDance are all developing new social platforms that target students, turning the college campus into a crucial battleground for the future of Chinese social media. That means consumers are starting to spend less time on WeChat and Weibo, and luxury brands need to plan for ways to reach these users in their new online homes. These days, China’s social media landscape is fragmenting along multiple fault lines.
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