Facebook

Social network analysis

  • explaining video
  • should consider individuals
  • also consider the connection among individuals

Activation of social groups compared to phone P2P pairs

  • Reed's law: the green line
    • the value of large networks, particularly social networks, grows exponentially with the size of the network (\(2^n\))
    • reason
      • the number of possible sub-groups of network participants grows much more rapidly than either the number of participants
      • 'N' (Sarnoff's law), or the number of possible pair connections (Metcalfe's law) (N squared)

Business model

Facebook vs WeChat & Linkedin

WeChat

  • is a super app
    • super apps vs traditional apps
  • has mini-programs
  • started with mobile payment
  • filled a government service gap
  • others
    • China moved quickly to social commerce and on-demand food delivery
    • social media & commerce was helped by widespread use of QR codes

Linkedin

  • using several key brokers/hubs of the social graph and degrees of separation
  • business model
    • relationship managers — 90% stay within first degree contacts, get free services, pay for Inmail
    • networkers — 5% are super-brokers
      • TopLinked.com shows one networker with 33,540 contacts and the 50th most linked user has 8,100
      • they are hubs, connectors, mavens, referrals
    • contacters — 5% are focused searchers, such as recruiters, business development, salespeople
      • these nodes are in the business of looking for and creating leapfrog links
      • they are experts at getting to the right person fast & monetizing
    • average revenue per user is $200/mth, implying some $2000/mth users support 100 others
  • future monetization & revenue streams
    • today, its graph is based on social interactions between professionals -> professional graph
    • tomorrow, it could allow transactional interactions and augment the graph -> business graph
  • summary
    • Facebook and Linkedin monetize the social graph in different ways
    • Linkedin uses leapfrog links for professional networking and recruiting
    • Linkedin uses a freemium business model in a multi-sided platform
    • Linkedin’s enterprise recruiting platform is a SaaS Software-as-a-Service that replaces highly paid commissioned headhunters with a monthly software subscription service for company HR groups

ByteDance and Consumer AI

AI technology behind TikTok

  • automatically curates and shows users what they are interested in (pets, food, scenery, music)
  • app encourages user generated content, enabling them to shoot their own videos, edit them and add special effects
  • trend towards social media as entertainment rather than sharing of personal info
  • encourages viral spread by having followers create individual variations on celebrity songs, videos, dances, etc and quickly publishes and distributes these 15 second videos

Features and examples

  • help creators grow
    • spend 300m on creators to get 1000 influencers to 1m+ followers
    • “prime the pump” with early adopters — do a talent search in art & music schools and support good looking young artists
    • example
      • 22 year old college girl with great smile and dancing
      • Dai Gu La K has 52.7m hearts and 14.7m fans
  • unleash the creativity of ordinary people in lifehacks — ways to manage one’s time, life and daily activities in a more efficient way
    • example
      • Hai Di Lao hot pot restaurant Douyin dish—raw egg and shrimp paste in a tofu ball
  • topic marketing — give people something to make videos about
    • hashtag trending topics
    • example
      • #Seaweed Dance became as popula as Gangnam Style
  • make content creation frictionless and easy
    • Toolkit for 15 second video that could go viral
  • turn the comment section into a social hub for discussion and chat where influencers and creators interact with their followers
    • Douyin allows users to view a video and read its comments at the same time
  • personalized recommendations
    • ByteDance as thousands of engineers and its own AI lab
    • its core competency is making use of machine learning and algorihms to determine what kind of content would appeal to particular users based on their past viewing behavior
    • unlike instagram where you see content posted by people you follow, on Duyin, you’re shown content by creators you mostly have never seen before, allowing costant new discoveries
  • where there is content, there is commerce
    • Douyin allows creators to embed product links into their videos
    • so an influencer Ye Shi Xiao Ge who films himself finding and eating food from the wilderness has created his own line of food products
    • when watching his video, a shopping cart icon appears to show the products mentioned on the video so you can purchase with one click
  • take it global
    • aggressive growth strategy
      • one year after launching in China, the English version TikTok was launched in Thailand, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea
    • user-generated content localizes the short videos since local music and culture is integrated organically
    • the #iamyourvalentine earned South Korean superstar Lee Jong Suk 680k likes on TikTok within a week with thousands recording their own rendition

Additional Reading