MySpace And Facebook Yet To Succeed In Japan
5th August 2008
The two largest social networks, MySpace and Facebook, which have become a steady part of youth culture in the West, are yet to make waves in Japan.
In fact, according to a post on TechCrunch, a local social network, Mixi.jp, has beaten both of them, and is currently the 6th most popular site in Japan, while MySpace is way behind at number 95 and Facebook does not even figure in the top 100 list.
It is not as if the Japanese are not inclined towards social networks, but it is essential for these sites to adapt to the social and cultural customs of the region.
If these networks think that whatever is appreciated in Western society will be accepted all over the world they are wrong!
In Japan, for instance, far more importance is given to the community as a whole, than to an individual, and security concerns are very important. Facebook for instance, advocates the use of real names and photographs in their profile, which is not a very welcome idea in Japan.
Also Facebook’s translations leave a lot to be desired and most of the third-party apps on Facebook are useless to the Japanese who are not fluent in English. Another major issue could be the absence of blogs on Facebook, which are a big draw in Japan.
Mixi, on the other hand, has been able to meet the demands of the Japanese culture and hence it is doing very well.
MySpace and Facebook opened up to the Japanese market 3-4 years after their respective launches in the U.S. In the meanwhile, Mixi has had plenty of time to established itself and has now turned into a $1 billion company, unhindered by competition from these international giants.
The absence of mobile optimised versions of Facebook and MySpace on Japanese handsets could also have been yet another cause for their failure, as Japanese consumers use the mobile Web far more than consumers in the US, UK or Europe.
It so happens that Japan has one of the largest online advertising markets in the world, which is incentive enough for these social networks to go out of their way to establish themselves there.
Tags: facebook, japan, myspace, social-network
3 Responses to “MySpace And Facebook Yet To Succeed In Japan”
Follow comments on this post through the RSS 2.0 Feed
Discussion on social networks & blogs
-
Facebook Largest Social Network And Fastest Growing | AccuraCast Search Daily News : 15 August 2008 at 2:45 pm
[...] Even now, there is still a lot of scope for further improvement. As mentioned last week, Facebook and MySpace are not doing too well in Japan, in spite of the former’s 458% growth in the Asia Pacific region. [...]
Add Your Comments
Please Note: We do not use nofollow, but we moderate all comments. Your comment will go live once it has been moderated. You do not need to resubmit it.
Avatars are displayed for users logged in via Facebook or can be created on Gravatar.com, and will appear whenever you leave a comment on a Gravatar-enabled blog.
Trackbacks
Trackback URL. (Right-click the link to copy shortcut / link location.)
RSS
Twitter
Facebook
Adaptation is not only needed for social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. It is required for most businesses who are wishing to expand in this time of economic slowdown into international markets. Business must expand the language options of their websites in order to cater to a larger customer base. The trick is so get an inexpensive CMS (Content Management System) like Bitrix Site Manager 7.0 that provides UTF-8 coding in order to accommodate multilingual content needs. This might be something interesting to write about.
Yes, mobile capabilities are essential for these sites, as a high percentage of Japanese do the majority of their web browsing through their cell phones.
Another feature of Mixi that caters to the Japanese emphasis on relationships is that in order to open a Mixi account, you have to be invited by (or in other words have a relationship with)someone.