We Are Social Asia Tuesday Tuneup #149

Tuneup
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India’s prime minister joins Instagram
Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, the first Indian head of state joined Instagram yesterday. His first post was a photograph of the ASEAN Summit venue in Nay Pyi Taw, Myanmar, and he had 94,621 followers on Instagram within less than 24 hours. Since the president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo won the election this year by strategically reaching out to more tech-savvy youth for support, social media has increasingly started to play a significant role among politicians. Compared to his Instagram followers, currently Modi is the most-followed politician in India, with 7.82 million followers on Twitter. On the other hand, Modi’s Facebook page has 24,598,120 likes, and he has 250,384 followers on LinkedIn.

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WeChat reaches 468 million monthly active users
Tencent who recently published its latest data for WeChat, the largest chat app giant in Asia, now has 468.1million active users in Q3 2014. In comparison with its 438 million MAUs in Q2, it seems like WeChat has slowed down its growth this year with only 6.8% quarterly growth from Q2 to Q3 2014. Its Q3 report again did not indicate the actual number of active users outside of China, unlike WeChat which is now widely used in countries like India, Indonesia, Philippine and across Latin America.

Here are a few other highlights from Tencent’s Q3 earnings report:

  •  Smart device MAU of QQ was 542 million, an increase of 36% YoY.
  •  Combined MAU of Weixin and WeChat were 468 million, an increase of 39% YoY.
  •  MAU of Qzone was 629 million, an increase of 1% YoY.
  •  Smart device MAU of Qzone was 506 million, an increase of 26% YoY.

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Promotional posts to lose organic Facebook reach
Uh oh, organic reach on Facebook is about to drop again. The network has announced that any “overly promotional” posts will suffer – that’s those which push people to buy a product, install an app or enter a competition, among others. Our very own Robin Grant spoke to Marketing Week about the changes:

Brands are producing more content than ever, but News Feeds only have limited inventory – the obvious solution for Facebook is to sell eyeballs to the highest bidder. That doesn’t mean that producing quality content is no longer a priority, as engaging content will get the lion’s share of the little organic reach available, but more importantly drive media efficiency, maximising the effectiveness of Facebook spend.

Digiday was quick to point out that organic reach isn’t dead yet. Brands can still reach 25% of their audience per month, especially if they’re producing high quality content. The importance of that last point is highlighted in the below graph.

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Facebook adds Yelp-like ‘Places’ feature
Facebook has added a feature called ‘Places’, which collates and showcases ratings and locations of local businesses. Now, we don’t want to start any rumours, but it’s pretty Yelp-y. Looks like there’s a new pair of rivals in town.

Facebook creating ‘enterprise social network’
If there’s one problem with Facebook, it’s too many friends and not enough colleagues. Thankfully, Facebook is working on a new network, ‘Facebook at Work’, which will allow everything from internal messaging to document collaboration. Hopefully it won’t be another outlet for your boss’s baby photos.

Twitter responds to stock price fall
What do you do when your stock price plummets? Well, if you’re Twitter, a whole host of things. First things first, the network has pointed out the value of its “logged out” audience, which it numbers at 500 million unique visitors every month.

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CEO Dick Costolo also announced a number of updates to the way the platform works. First of all is something called ‘Instant Timeline’, which will make it easier for new users to find and follow the accounts relevant to them. There are also going to be better video capabilities in the main app, tweaks to celeb pages and users will be shown the most popular messages they missed from their network when not logged in. Finally, direct messages are going to change – you’ll be able to share tweets within them.

YouTube plans premium music service
YouTube is launching a paid music subscription service, through which users can stream high-quality, ad-free music and music videos. It’s also adding a new way to discover full albums, with discographies listed on artist pages.

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Pinterest plans to position itself as pre-search engine
Pinterest has a vision. It’s hoping to become a resource for people who have the faintest hint of an idea, long before they’d use a search engine. This was made clear in a presentation by head of engineering, Michael Lopp, using slides like the below.

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Updates to Instagram
Instagram has made a couple of changes. First of all, you can now go back and edit captions on posts, particularly useful for typos/failed jokes. It’s also added a new ‘People’ tab to the Explore section, where users can see any accounts that may be of interest to them.

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Oily bum ‘breaks the internet’
A famous woman showed people her bum and everyone wanted to get involved. Brands especially.

 

Banana Republic joins the We Are Social club
We Are Social has partnered with Banana Republic in the US on social media strategy, activations and community management. So far, work has included #thenewBR, a campaign to promote the autumn range through influencers and contests, as well as #ShareHappy, through which users could tweet @BananaRepublic to get cupcakes and balloons sent to someone in NYC.