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On the face of it, pengyou (meaning 'friend' in Chinese) looks similar to renren.com and kaixin001.com (who's look and feel were inspired by Facebook). Importantly in China, pengyou.com is a real-name social platform.

A couple of years ago, all the talk by Renren was about how Kaixin001 might overtake it and what they needed to do to stay as leader. There were differences in audience focus - Kaixin001 attracted a white collar audience where Renren had moved from its traditional on-campus origins (like Facebook) into the T2 and T3 cities. It was clear that over the past year that Renren has since left the slower Kaixin001 in the dust and we have agreement in the social media marketing community that Kaixin001 has a real problem in reversing the declining trend. But as you can see by comparing the daily unique visitors to these 3 sites, it is not just Kaixin001 on a downward trend.

So where has this website come from and how can it capture so many daily visitors? Well, the easy answer is that this is the social network platform from Tencent. The Chinese Internet powerhouse that owns the QQ IM messaging platform, so with this user asset to draw on it is no wonder it has managed to capture significant mind share in such a short timeframe. 

Below is a great chart (by Kai Lukoff) that provides an interesting comparison of the platforms. The statistical data is a little out of date but nevertheless the information on the user profile still is representative of the overall user demographics.

So what do I see when looking into the social media crystal ball? I see renren and kaixn001 being relinquished to smaller, niche social communities in their current geographic presence where pengyou.com will dominate and grow broadly across T1-T3 cities and penetrate in blue/white collar workers. They won't get a free walk, as they need to also be looking over their shoulder at what is happening at rival Chinese Internet powerhouse, Sina. Sina's has a highly popular micro-blog platform (weibo.com) that has evolved over this past year from a micro blog to including features that are familiar within social networks. This has already had a direct impact on the traffic numbers from Kainxin001′s and Renren so it is no wonder Tencent has started to counter with their own micro blogging platform.

Interesting times and the point of this post is to remind Western marketers to stop living in the past and rather than continuing to rattle off the 'old order' of Chinese social media sites like renren, kaixin at their strategy and planning sessions they need a quick update... review pengyou.com and watch this space.