Yizhou Chen, CEO of China's SNS community Renren, shouted "one war, three battles". We do not know now how the battle progresses. Currently Renren's net market value is $1.3 billion where 900 million of them are in cash, it means the market values Renren 400 million US dollars only which is far lower than Facebook. Why cannot Renren be China's Facebook? This is a very interesting topic, many users share their opinions, Some of the main points are summarized as follows:
Facebook pay more attention to the social
Facebook was founded purely for social needs, and now active users on Facebook are still keen to share their lives. In comparison, users on Renren are more interested in sharing others news, not their own. Facebook can retain users and attract new users with its social concept, the user has strong viscous. While the social concept on Renren is relative weaker, it relies on games, entertainment and other factors to attract users.
Renren is too "heavy"
Renren, Nuomi, Jingwei and Renren game are four services provided by Renren, they are mapped to Facebook, Groupon, Linkedin and Zynga. Renren goes the route of merging many SNS elements all by itself to build a large business with the cost of investing less in the social. Facebook focus on the social platform, and leave the group purchase and game business to others, and their platform is open to third parties.
The narrowness of target user groups
Although changing its name from Xiaonei to Renren,, major active users on Renren are still university or college students. Compared to Facebook, this position seems a little narrow. Of course, Renren does not position themselves in college students, they also like to attract business users (such as launch Jingwei business cards). But many college students turn to other platforms after graduation. Facebook's user base will are much wider.
Facing the challenges of the WeChat, Weibo and QQ
China's SNS industry inevitably encounter this problem-- competition among different platforms, even the Sina Weibo feels the challenge of WeChat. Although in abroad there is a Twitter, Facebook and Twitter belong to different types of social networks, both to meet different user needs. In China, it's stressful to face Tencent's challenge already, there is also Sina Weibo.
Here is another question, if Facebook enters China, is it able to beat Renren?
In fact, it's not much comparable between Facebook and Renren
We can imagine that, if Facebook enters China, is it able to beat Renren? Not necessary, although Renren is called "China's Facebook", Renren indeed is very different from Facebook, such as the user groups. Just like Twitter and Sina Weibo, although the nature of both are social networks, in terms of content or format, there is a big difference. Recently there was an article on the Wall Street Journal, affirmed the achievements of Tencent WeChat. The Wall Street Journal pointed out that although many Internet products in China borrow some ideas from abroad products, the Chinese version has more interactive and interesting new features.
Also we need to know one fact, it's in China, an environment which is quite different from abroad. Facebook needs to follow censorship policies of China if they want to get into Chinese market. This is usually not acceptable for foreign companies. One example is Google in China.
Source : http://www.36kr.com/p/173966.html
