Japanese Mobile Social Media – Find your best match

Motoko — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 22:38:15 +0000

It seems that Social Media market is still growing in Japan as both Gree and Mixi posted great Q2 results in October. In this quarter, Gree’s sales went up 94.3% from Q1, and Mixi adjusted their Q4 forecast upward by 3.3%. Since both are doing well, and attracting more advertisers, you may think that you should be at both places to get the most exposures. But, when the average advertising budget shrinking in US, you may not have a luxury of advertising everywhere you want to be. Even if you have, are these and other popular social media sites all good match to your services and the target market? When it comes to mobile sites, the user market seems to have clearer differences than web sites.

(Top: Male, Bottom: Female, Blue: Gree, Red: MobagaTown, Yellow: Mixi – 2009?C?UPDATE inc. MMD Labo. )

I just saw Mobile Marketing Data Labo’s latest report on Mobile Social Sites User Trend. The report focuses on 3 large mobile social sites in Japan, Gree, Mixi and MobagaTown. According to the report, only 10% of the members are on all 3 social sites. Here’s a list of interesting findings in the report:

Gree is popular with teens and users older than 30s, but not in 20s.
Mixi is very strong with users in 20s.
MobagaTown is popular among male in all age groups, but with female, the user size gets smaller as users get older.
Many Gree users also use MobagaTown.
80% of male Mixi users also use Gree, and 60% also use MobagaTown.

Japanese bookmark it differently

Motoko — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:02:38 +0000

I just downloaded a tool bar for new Japanese bookmarking site called “Imakore” (beta). (I don’t like adding tool bars to my browser, but it’s the only way to use the service…) There are many bookmarking services out there already in Japan (popular services include “Hatena”, Livedoor’s “Clip!”, Yahoo’s “MyBookmark” and “fc2bookmark”, why did I decide to try this service?

What makes Imakore different from other bookmarking services is the function lets users to write and to read the comments right on the bookmarked page. With the tool bar, you can see how many Imakore users are on the same page at the same time, and read other users comments as well as leave the comments on the “particular area of the page” where you want to comment. It’s like a bookmarking version of Pop-up video. It’s definitely a fun way to bookmark pages and to socialize with other users.

Many people use the social bookmarking services in both US and Japan, but I sometimes wonder what percentage of bookmarked sites are actually shared with other users. I mean, it seems that most of the users bookmark their favorite sites but don’t care to see the sites bookmarked by others. There are only a few bookmarking sites appear in the search results. I think that Imakore found a way to make it easier to share the bookmarks.

Sure, there’s a concern about what people may comment. You don’t want to see bunch of “Woo, this is funny!” or “OMG, it’s crazy” kind of comments over and over. But when you come across with a site with some clever comments that make you laugh or go “hmmmmm”, it’d show the value and I can see that people may be hooked on this type of service.

By the way, what made me laugh when I first landed this website was their demo on the top page. It shows someone searching “Yahoo” in Google to go to Yahoo site. LOL!

Motoko's weblog » Japan Social Media

Japanese Mobile Social Media – Find your best match

Japanese bookmark it differently