Is Facebook Jealous Of China's WeChat?

Facebook Inc FB's daily active user base dwarfs those of Twitter Inc TWTR and Snapchat combined.

As of the first quarter of 2016, Facebook boasts 1.65 billion users who log on to the platform at least once a month. With statistics like this, Facebook is clearly the king of social media and the envy of its peers.

Or is it?

Wait, What's WeChat?

According to Bloomberg Businessweek's Dune Lawrence, China-based Tencent's social media platform called WeChat is the "envy of Silicon Valley."

WeChat is the number one messaging app in China, although this may be an easier to ask to accomplish since access to both Facebook and Twitter are banned in mainland China.

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Lawrence explained that WeChat is "very sticky" in the sense that users never have to leave the app. WeChat has the ability to hail a taxi, transfer money and order food, among many other functions.

"Imagine if Tinder, PayPal, Apple Pay, Groupon, Yelp, Facebook, Amazon and Uber were all rolled into one app," Lawrence said. "That would be WeChat."

She added that WeChat has successfully showed how a social network could be transformed into a vast network for other services.

And this is the strategy that Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants for the company's Messenger app.

"Facebook and other Silicon Valley companies are going to be doing their best to make their app the stickiest — the one that we go to," she concluded. "And WeChat has shown that it is possible."

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Posted In: Emerging MarketsMarketsTechMediaTrading IdeasGeneralAmazonAppleApple PayBloombergBloomberg BusinessweekBusinessWeekChinaDune LawrenceGrouponPayPalSnapChatTencentTinderUberWeChatyelp
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