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Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp is rightly seen by many as a move to boost its presence around the world, particularly in markets where the chat app is more popular than Facebook itself.
Despite 450 million active users with a strong presence in Europe, Africa and Latin America, Asia is a challenge for the company, as we explained this week. WhatsApp sits behind dominant local players in China, Japan and Korea, but its experiences in Southeast Asia — where its popularity is varied — provides important lessons for Facebook if it wants to keep its sparkling new acquisition in vogue among a sea of competing, and well-funded messaging rivals.
In particular, WhatsApp is coming under pressure from a new breed of ‘platform’ messaging apps that go beyond replacing SMS to provide a range of connected services, like games, virtual content, video/voice calling, e-commerce and more.
One such service — Line, an app from Japan with 350 million registered users — has shown that WhatsApp can be defeated.
WhatsApp Lost Thailand
The example of Thailand — my adopted homeland, with a population of nearly 70 million — shows how trends and tastes can shift so quickly when it comes to apps.
WhatsApp literally went from being the must-have thing to passé in the space of a year.
Here’s a potted timeline of mobile messaging in Thailand — note that this is strictly anecdotal due to a lack of data and statistics:
- Around 2009-2011 — when a BlackBerry smartphone was the thing to have (!) — BBM was the messaging app to be on. It was used be celebs, brands, small shops, clubs, bars and essentially anyone who thought they were anyone.
- Come 2011-2012, the iPhone (and Android phones) replaced BlackBerry as the fashionable device, and WhatsApp took off. Suddenly BBM was embarrassing and WhatsApp was, more than cool, a social expectation.
- Sometime in 2013 that changed for the masses, and Line took over.
Essentially, BlackBerry created the initial demand for messaging apps, WhatsApp made it cross-platform, and Line has turned it into a more social and content-based experience.
Line says it has 30 million registered users in Thailand. There’s probably a lot of doubling up for multi-device registrations among that figure, so let’s call it 20 million.
Facebook claims 26 million registered users in Thailand, which indicates just how entrenched Line is right now. Line was able to overtake WhatsApp, but it isn’t clear how (or indeed if) Facebook can put WhatsApp back on top again.
How did Line win?
Line’s strategy for Thailand is pretty much its blueprint for new market expansions.
It began by raising awareness with a traditional media campaign. That was advertisements on billboards, decking out metro trains in its branding, newspaper ads, interactive video boards, TV ad spots, and other high-profile brand opportunities.
With some level of awareness and installs under its belt, Line shifted to stage two, wherein it went hard on the local angle: using celebrities, launch events, more media, and customized stickers for Thai users.
In addition to cutting deals with mobile operators — most of which already offered all-you-can-eat packages for WhatsApp and Facebook — this strategy was enough for Line to take charge and become the dominant player in the Thai market.
Today, there is even a pop-up store in a mall in Bangkok where users can buy plush toys and other physical goods (over in Taiwan Line has a ‘theme park’.)
Exploiting a weakness
The WhatsApp story is incredible. Without spending a dollar on marketing, it has 450 million active users — but therein also lies its biggest weakness.
In the case of Thailand, WhatsApp grew the market for cross-platform messaging, only to be beaten by a company that localized better than it could. Once Line began clicking with Thai people, WhatsApp didn’t stand a chance.
WhatsApp barely has 50 staff in Silicon Valley, and no country-specific reps anywhere. While CEO Jan Koum has an admirable belief that marketing is a distraction from product, that leaves the WhatsApp empire in far flung places like Thailand unguarded.
That opportunity let in Line which, unlike WhatsApp, is very corporate and is pouring millions into promoting its service via a country-specific focus and local teams.
WhatsApp vulnerable in other markets
The story is much the same in Taiwan, where Line claims 20 million registered users and has also dethroned WhatsApp.
Line is in its second stage in a number of other countries in Southeast Asia, as well as India, Spain, Mexico, Italy and other markets where WhatsApp is currently dominant.
It may be that Line doesn’t find the right combination to appeal to locals in these places, doesn’t overtake WhatsApp outright, and it simply takes longer – either way, the threat is very real.
Anyone thinking that the appeal of cute characters and stickers is limited would do well to recall how Rovio has built a global empire out of Angry Birds, which at the most basic level is just a game. Then consider how much greater the influence of a mobile messaging app is on a phone owner’s daily activity…and how easily network effects can spring into action and change user behavior.
Likewise, the idea that Snapchat could become a serious consumer product in the US might have been seen as unlikely a few years ago, so it’s not a big jump to imagine that people want to do more collaborative activities with their friends via their phone, such as playing games.
Line is upping its focus on Europe and Latin America, but it is taking its time before expanding into the US, as its executive in charge of global markets told us recently.
Facebook to the rescue?
It’s unlikely that this is a primary reason WhatsApp has sold to Facebook, but the union is sure to add some steel to its marketing.
WhatsApp has used word-of-mouth with great success, but that has its limitations and it stands to reason that Facebook won’t rely solely on organic growth for its new $19 billion business. That would be insane.
There is talk of WhatsApp becoming a central part of Facebook’s Internet.org initiative. That isn’t confirmed and other details remain unclear, but some brand building activities are certainly needed in order to maintain and grow the app’s its position worldwide.
At this point, WhatsApp is the top messaging dog in Europe, Africa and much of Latin America, but its ambitious rivals are gunning to take over and they’ve already shown that they can.
Headline image via STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images
![whatsapp1 520x245 WhatsApp is down due to server issues [Update: Now working after 4 hour outage]](http://cdn2.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2014/02/whatsapp1-520x245.jpg "whatsapp1 520x245 photo")
WhatsApp, the messaging app that you probably heard got bought by Facebook this week, is in the midst of a 90-minute four-hour outage right now. This is the first significant period of downtime that the service has experienced since the acquisition deal was announced.
Update: WhatsApp is working for us once again having been down for four hours. The company has now confirmed that the issue is fixed.
Perhaps due to a rush of new users following its media coverage, we here at TNW are currently unable to send messages across the service. That’s something that the company has acknowledged and confirmed that it is working to fix:
sorry we currently experiencing server issues. we hope to be back up and recovered shortly.
— WhatsApp Status (@wa_status) February 22, 2014
Breaking News reports that the downtime began around 11:00 PST (14:00 EST). That timing seems to add up since the first wave of users noticing problems began to surface on Twitter around then.
WhatsApp is down..damn you Facebook #Outrage
— Prem Mohanty (@philipbkk) February 22, 2014
And so, WhatsApp goes down ! #Facebook
— Karthik K (@ImKarthikK) February 22, 2014
Many Twitter users have linked the downtime to the Facebook announcement — that’s a reaction that you might expect although we can chalk this down to a rush in usage during US weekend time, or just the fact that outages happen from time to time.
If you’re one of the many WhatsApp addicts that hasn’t fled for another service — like Telegram Messenger — then we recommend keeping your eyes on the company’s status account on Twitter: @wa_status. We will, of course, keep you posted too.
Update: Interestingly, it looks like Telegram is being slammed by new registrations, perhaps as a direct result of this outage:
This is crazy. We’are getting 100 new registrations every second. Trying hard to prevent connection issues in Europe.
— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) February 22, 2014
The SMS gateways we use to send registration codes are overloaded and slow — 100 SMS per second is too much. Trying to find a solution.
— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) February 22, 2014
Image via LIONEL BONAVENTURE/AFP/Getty Images
Leaked image suggests Samsung will launch two new versions of its Galaxy Gear smartwatch
Feb22
on February 22, 2014
at 6:57 pm
Mobile World Congress is next week, but there’s still time for one more teasing leak before the world’s biggest mobile industry event kicks off. The ever-active @Evleaks has shown what are claimed to be two new Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch models.
While we fully expect a new Gear to be announced at MWC, this leak suggests there are two versions in the pipeline. Interestingly, @Evleaks also suggests that the new models will no longer be branded ‘Galaxy Gear’, with Samsung instead opting for the ‘Gear Neo’ product name.
There’s been talk that the Korean electronics giant’s second stab at a smartwatch will not be based on Android, using the Linux-based Tizen platform instead, and the subtle branding change could reflect that. Two different models may also hint that Samsung will respond to claims that the original Gear was over-priced by introducing a more affordable version.
That’s enough conjecture for now. We’ll know more in a matter of days since Samsung’s big press conference takes place on February 24.
Piqued your interest? What to watch out for at MWC 2014: A shortlist
User-hostile vs. user-friendly email signup tactics: Which works best?
Feb22
on February 22, 2014
at 5:00 pm
Javier Sanz is a marketer at Woorank.
After going viral with one of my personals posts, a growing community of Web designers pointed fingers at my site because I was using an aggressive pop-up to grab emails. It’s a similar method used by sites like NYTimes, Forbes or Quora.
Here are some of my findings based on the data collected from 21,000 unique visits.
From the beginning…
Earlier this year, one of my posts about my experience working on remote +1200 hours in 2012 got featured in Wired, BuzzFeed, Jezebel, and HackerNews. In other words, this meant a huge traffic increase.
If you are a data freak and want me to be more specific:
- 14 hours in HN front page
- 11 minutes server downtime
- 21,062 unique visitors
- 1 mom that still is trying to understand what is a “news aggregator”
When I wrote the post, I conceived it as a way of engrossing a list of people interested in my experience working on remote. Having an audience interested in a certain topic, makes it way easier to write content about it:
You know the audience > You know what you can write about & what they want to read > You just need to give it shape.
Nothing new under the sun, right? Patrick McKenzie and Nathan Barry – among others – have talked widely about the benefits on growing up an email list that can help to target your audience.
For that purpose, I implemented several email signup forms through the text in order to give the opportunity to the readers to receive more selected and detailed info via email. Signup forms between paragraphs, non-interrupting the reading flow… if you want a descriptive term for them, lest say ‘user-friendly signup forms’.
The plugin I used for it was a simple one created by an indie developer to grab emails from WordPress blogs by using the Mailchimp API.
As soon as I saw the post started to rank in HN, I decided to implement a side-product we are working on, in order to give it some promotion and try to have feedback about it and gain some traction.
First complaints: I was being “intrusive”
Among all the comments received in the HN thread, there was one topic flourishing faster than others. It was not something treated in the post, but about the layout that helped me collect some emails of readers interested in further info about what I was writing about.
Some even took to Twitter with a direct allusion to this post where its author stands for avoiding the use of this new ‘wave of second pop-up war’ because they don’t contribute to the user experience, but obstruct it.
The tool that most people referred as user-hostile is the one my colleagues Gary and Alex are working on. It has a feature that allows you to expand a layout once a visitor access to your site, encouraging them to share their email in exchange of something (a .pdf, a discount, whatever).
It’s not setup by default, and it’s up to you if you want to use it. If you don’t decide to use this feature, you will see just a top bar with a layout that you can hide by clicking wherever in the page.
On one side, I’m conscious about how annoying can it be to have these kind of layouts in every website you visit. If you work with a laptop and Internet, I’m sure you are experiencing them as much as I am.
On the other hand, I also know that it is increasingly difficult to grab the attention of an Internet user. The Web is so overwhelming that you need to make sure that he person behind the computer (no matter if it is just a visitor, recurring reader or user) is aware of what’s your final goal.
Mine, as I have expressed above these lines, was growing an audience.
Numbers don’t lie
The difference between user-friendly and user-hostile signups speaks for itself. In the first four hours, there were only user-friendly signups forms – email signups forms between paragraphs.
But in the first hour of having both kind of forms, the ‘user-hostile signup’ provided almost three times the signups in respect to the other.
Perhaps this isn’t a huge figure of signups. That’s not what matter for me in this case. I’m more concerned with how many visitors didn’t sign up cause they were annoyed because of the aggressive layout.
Was it dissuasive? Did the visitors understand that there was content behind the layout?
Hostile vs. friendly
In order to find an answer, I installed a heatmap tracking tool. For those unfamiliar with heatmapping, let’s say it tells you how your visitors (users, readers, whatever) interact within your website: where they click, where they hover their mouses, etc.
I’m sure the picture will be more illustrative than my explanations:
The image above illustrates how 500 of the visitors clicked within the post and its layout. A 500-visit sampling heatmap above the fold, the visible part of your website if you don’t scroll.
The results are somewhat like a forecast map: Areas highlighted in blue represent clicks, and if there were many clicks in one specific area, it will be coloured yellow, passing by a green-gradient.
As you can see two spots in the top right corner stand out from the rest of the clicks. Essentially both spots match up where the close buttons are located.
Around 80 percent of the clicks were made wherever above the fold, the button that deactivates the layout for the current visit and any future visits you make to the site.
After being ”hostile” to 21,000 readers and seen these data, my question is: Is this the best way of grabbing your future attention if it’s done to create useful content for an audience pre-interested in it?
As content marketers and consumers, I’d love to hear your thoughts.