[LINK] Christopher Reynolds of the Toronto Star on the problems of WeChat

[rfmcdonald]

In "The biggest social media app you’re not using", Christopher Reynolds notes the failure of WeChat to take off in North America.

This does surprise me a bit. I had noticed a trend earlier towards the decline of local alternatives to Facebook and thought it a harbinger of globalization, i.e. the shift to a few major social networks worldwide. Will WeChat continue to resist? Might it yet push overseas, and if so, how?

WeChat, the mobile messenger app that’s been downloaded to more than a billion smartphones in China, is struggling to break into the North American market in the face of entrenched Western players and cultural differences.

About 650 million active users message each other, buy products, book travel and read news daily via the online social network that is perhaps more aptly described as an ecosystem.

Despite exponential gains in East Asia and a promotional campaign launched with high hopes in the U.S. in 2014, WeChat — owned by Shenzhen-based Internet giant Tencent — opted to cut off advertising overseas in 2015 as user growth plateaued.

User acquisition in the West “has sort of come to an end,” Tencent president Martin Lau Chi-ping told reporters in March.

Ning Nan, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business, highlighted Tencent’s lack of customer base or local networks in the U.S. as a key barrier to competing against instant messaging heavyweights like Facebook.