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- WhatsApp, Line, WeChat and Facebook Messenger have become the new platforms for business communication in Asia in a way that email and phone calls could not.
- These apps were initially conceived to be sticky to consumers. Now their creators are making them sticky to businesses as well
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Like any smartphone junky, the moment my plane touched down in Jakarta, Indonesia, I immediately turned on my phone to get to work.
I skipped my inbox completely; Gmail tends to eat a lot of data when it syncs, and besides, nothing there was really time-sensitive or important. Whatever was there could wait.
Instead, I went straight to my Line chat app to coordinate my upcoming meeting in downtown Jakarta. Traffic was definitely going to be a pain. As I began to walk towards immigration, I turned to WeChat to follow up on a burning question about a planned business trip to China. As I walked towards the Blue Bird taxi stand, I previewed some new Facebook friend requests from business colleagues I had just met in Tokyo, including a polite message from another Japanese investor discussing the status of a company he had referred to me earlier. And as I finally settled into my taxi, I busily ran through about a dozen open WhatsApp conversations, including a Golden Gate Ventures’ group chat about upcoming investments, another on co-investment opportunities with a local Indonesian fund, and at least three conversations with founders from our portfolio.
So, I guess it’s more accurate to say: like any smartphone junky, the moment my plane landed I immediately turned on my messaging apps to get to work.
Asia loves chatting.
This is largely due to the prevalence of social media. And when we look at Southeast Asia specifically, mass internet adoption has only only been a recent trend, which means the desktop was completely skipped over for mobile.Why does that matter? Because two of the top three social apps in every one of these countries are messaging-first platforms, like WeChat, LINE, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. Unlike other regions, such as Europe or the United States, where chat and in-app messaging are often seen as a natural extension to social networks, in Asia, the reverse is more common: messaging apps are the utilities whence social networks emerge from. Snapchat is the first to buck this trend in the U.S.
As a result, Asian consumers tend to “live” on their messaging…
The post LINE, WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook: Where Most Of Asia’s Business Deals Are Being Done appeared first on FeedBox.