As Facebook announces its IPO it clearly has the upper hand in the social network war. Facebook is the dominant social network in most countries around the world. The only problem this brings a network like Facebook, which has become famous for, as much as anything else, its relentless growth, is where it is going to get new users from. As this article explains, the growth in the western world has largely dried up for Facebook. Almost everyone who is going to get on Facebook has already made the decision to join. Those that haven’t joined are increasingly unlikely to ever join.
However, a majority of the world’s internet users are not on Facebook. So the question is, “Where are they?” And the answer is in Asia, and the largest chunk and most problematic for Facebook is China.
The Great Firewall of China is the name given to the Chinese governments censoring of the internet, which includes among others, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. The response within China has been to create copies of each of these sites. Where the rest of the world watches videos on Youtube, China watches them on Youku. Where the rest of the world interacts on Facebook and Twitter, China’s hundreds of millions of internet users do so on QQ, Renren, and Weibo.
There are still ways to use these sites in China. Many people use VPN, and the Kindle Keyboard 3G manages to sneak under the radar of the Great Firewall.
Unfortunately, the Great Firewall means that global social media gospel campaigns are unlikely to reach many in China, at least for now. But there is a huge opportunity if there are people who are willing to take the principles and strategies that work in social media for the rest of the world and apply them in the context of these China-specific social networks.
