WARC, 20 March 2014
BEIJING: Renren, the Chinese social networking site, has
undergone a restructuring in order to focus its communication services on
college students and younger people, according to its CEO.
Speaking on a quarterly earnings call, Joe Chen explained
that the business faced "formidable" competition and that Renren was
looking for ways to differentiate itself and to carve out its own share of
social space.
"Our response to the latest challenges has been to
combine the core strength of social networking and social messaging features
and to build on our strong brand equity on college campuses," he said.
This approach would entail "a lot more innovation and
selective marketing" to strengthen its presence with this 100m-strong
demographic.
While declining to give specific details, he said
applications designed just for college students could include such things as
enabling them to check their examination source, change their registration in
the class, or just find out what was available in the cafeteria.
Chief operating officer James Liu offered a succinct
summation of where the business was headed: "Our goal is to reposition
Renren as a young generation social hub, the best place to observe and
understand the thoughts and behaviours of China's new generation".
Chen added that repositioning Renren as a "real-name
mobile social network" had proved challenging as far as advertising
revenues were concerned. Mobile currently accounted for just 8% of total brand
advertising revenue despite taking up 80% of Renren's media time.
He noted that there were few players proactively educating
and selling mobile solutions to brand advertisers, and expected that it would
take a couple of years to build a more substantial mobile advertising business.
The FMCG sector was currently the top advertiser on Renren,
while certain IT products and apparel also featured strongly.
Data sourced from Seeking Alpha; additional content by Warc
staff
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