One of the big misteries of social networking is why some local players are not being beaten by Facebook. Orkut is losing strength in India and Brazil, but Korea, China and Japan keep their own social networks and Vkontakte, whose owners are among the main shareholders of Facebook, is also on top in some Eastern European countries and Russia. Figures look really bad for Facebook so far: it has 1,2 million members in Russia, for Vkontakte’s 75 million. Why?
Katya Trubilova (cited by Chris Morrison) explains it in a post titled “Why Facebook won’t beat Russia’s Vkontakte?”. She explains that Facebook is much more convenient to use and more secure than Vkontakte, but it lacks a very special feature for Russians: pirated copies of movies translated into Russian, which you can view on Vkontakte.
“Indeed, Facebook may offer a broader range of features and the possibility to interact with an international crowd. However, this may not entirely be significant enough for the ordinary user. Yet, professionals and companies may favour Facebook’s features to use as a social networking utility for business purposes”, Katya adds.
Who is Katya Trubilova?
She can’t say for all the Russians. I’m sure that most of us like vkontakte coz it has more functions:
– music base
– video base
– easy to use groups and events
– profiles of our famous ppl
– payments systems,
etc.
Russia is on the priority list of countries where Facebook is planning to ехpand in the nearest future. According to the article in Financial Times Mark Zuckerberg is planning to make Facebook the leading social networking utility on the Runet. The ultimate goal of Zucherberg is to reach 1 billion users by 2012. He admitted that organic growth is not enough to turn such an ambitious plan into reality. Currently Facebook team are seeking different ways of penetrating to non- English language online audiences.
I am very curious to see what kind of strategies Facebook is going to implement cissp to win the audience of the main Russian social networking players such as Vkontake and Odnoklassniki . Vkontakte is the most popular social network utility in Russia. The amount of Facebook users in Russia is 1 244 280 while Vkontake has 75 604 275 members . There are many online conversations on the Runet about Facebook to invade the Russian cyberspace. I’ve observed that majority of Russian bloggers are quite sceptical about Facebook’s plans to conquer Russia.