Video SMS: Explore The New Online Social Media under the 5G Era
In the unusual year of 2020 when social distancing has become a norm, the increasing demand for online social interaction cannot be ignored. The use of video messaging as an entry point to the online social media battlefield is undoubtedly the new blood among various IM (instant messaging) products. A start-up called POP(画音) has just launched a Video SMS product, which quickly caught my eye. How did video SMS rise? How does it meet the needs? And what are the possible application? We will explore all these questions together in this article.
Highlights:
· Video SMS provides new ideas for the exploration of social networking products
· The pre-existence of social relationships is a prerequisite for the success of social networking products. Compared to expanding and establishing new connections and networks, POP pays more attention to deepening the relationship of pre-existing acquaintances.
· The successful launch of POP’s video SMS product is due to its accurate positioning, identification of the newly emerged application scenario and its great efforts for delivering good product.
| From WeChat to POP
The team behind POP has a long story to tell. CEO & Co-founder Genie Lin is the former product director of WeChat, who witness the growth of WeChat from zero to one, as well as the process of becoming a successful product with now more than one billion users. CPO Remy Ho and CTO Roy were responsible for the development of new products and mobile terminals in the WeChat team. All these experience seems to give POP more chance to win the game, but the journey of exploration was still full of ups and downs.
The first two versions of the POP product didn’t work out.
- POP1.0: Instagram for specifically Videos.
- POP2.0: A video editing tool that focuses on designing and beautifying.
The pain point of the first two products is that as an online social media software, the key is the connection between people. Whether it is sharing life or editing videos, the purpose is to promote communication, which needs to be backed by the pre-established social network. Are users willing to interact and share if there are no friends and audiences to watch the content they’re posting?
Therefore, POP 3.0 focuses on ‘communication’. With the friend invitation mechanism, users bring in their social network of acquaintances at the beginning of use. With a stable communication channel + the cultivation of user habits in a longer period, POP would easily win 50% of the game.
Video SMS also benefits from the foundation laid by the first two products. The combination of acquaintance interaction and high efficient video editing function makes it a communication tool of the new era.
| Emergence of Video SMS
If the takeoff of WeChat and Facebook stems from the era of “smartphones + 3G”, what kind of drastic changes will 5G bring to us? The rising of live streaming and Vlog have already given us the answer. High-quality cameras and 5G networks provide new equipment and new channels for video sharing, gradually becoming part of people’s daily lives. As video becomes a medium of information that is as simple and convenient as texting, that is when it has become a new language of communication, allowing people to keep in touch despite the barrier of time and space, which is also the intention of POP to launch video SMS at the first place.
| What Video SMS requires
The demand for fragmented social determines several points that video SMS must pay attention to.
- Form a closed loop of receiving, sending, reading, and writing. From a vertical perspective, the recording, editing, sending, and browsing of video messages should be realized in the same product. For example, if the user shoot videos with a mobile phone camera, edit the video with iMovie, and send it with Messenger, then this discontinuous process is not video messaging; rather, it is a process of sending a video file. From a horizontal point of view, the product should be an integration of texting, Voice messages, and video information to form ideal user experience.
- Information needs to be sent and received efficiently. For video SMS to work, it must solve the problem of the high requirement for video shooting, editing, and transmission. The efficient playback of the video also needs to be improved.
- Information transmission is complete and accurate. Video messages need to be smooth and clear. At the same time, situations where important information is obscured due to excessive special effects also have to be avoided.
| POP’s solution
POP has three major sections: “Chat”, “Camera” and “Stories”. “Chat” intends to satisfy the need for fragmented communication between friends; “Camera” is used to shoot and record, and “Stories” is used to share beautiful life moment, designed to create an embracing online social platform. Now let’s take a look at the two most prominent sections: “Chat” and “stories”.
- “Chats” perfectly meets the requirement for Video SMS mentioned above:
— Multimedia content is superimposed to integrate texting, voice SMS and video SMS to form a closed loop of receiving, sending, reading, and writing. While chatting with friends, the video content will be played as a chatting background. The user can read the text information while watching the video, which therefore greatly improves the density and efficiency of the information received per unit time.
— Automatic shooting when you speak. The camera captures information, and the microphone automatically recognizes and records. The process of video generation is greatly simplified.
— Voice is converted to subtitles by AI; stickers and emojis are automatically added according to the tone and words of the speaker. Visual expression is greatly strengthened with the use of AI to assist video editing, further reduce the barrier and cost of video generation。
Besides, POP’s ‘24-hour burn after reading’ mechanism and ‘screenshot alert’ function also demonstrates its efforts on decreasing social pressure and promoting privacy protection.
Different from Facebook, where posts are shared in a sequence of time, ‘Stories’ manage user’s collection of posts in person unit. In other words, when you want to view a friend’s story, it’s like opening an album or a journal of your friend. Unlike other social media platforms, POP gives the user the initiative to browse the information, instead of passively receive the information. This effectively avoids the pressure and trouble caused by large flow of information in an info-flooded modern society.
| Better or Different?
With social media giants dominating the online social industry, this battlefield has become fiercely competitive, but the appeal never dies: Facebook launched ‘Messenger’, Tencent developed ‘WeChat’, Telegram, Snapchat, and TikTok are also growing rapidly… It would be so hard to stand out in such a crowded room. How does POP have so much confidence that it will survive and even shine with dashing light? Before answering this question, let’s look at some of POP’s potential competitors.
The most frequently made comparison is between POP and TikTok. In fact, they have different purposes, emphasis, and means. The purpose of TikTok is to share, it focuses on video content by using live streaming: the sharer speaks, the viewer listens, and the relationship between sharer and audience is not equal, since the transmitting of information is merely unilateral. The purpose of the POP is to communicate, it focuses on the exchange of information, in a way of sending and receiving information. People interact and respond, the relationship between friends is equal.
POP and Facebook (Messenger) are in a complementary relationship. In addition to family and friends, it is also used for business purposes and contacting strangers, which is more like a pan-acquaintance social platform, but without customized functions that satisfy the different needs of different social scenarios. However, POP is aimed specifically at acquaintances social between family members and close friends, avoiding the pressure that users have when showing their faces to people they’re not familiar with. At the same time, video SMS is used to improve the convenience, intimacy, and fun of communication between acquaintances. Unlike video calls, video messaging gives users the freedom of chatting at any time, not having to reserve an appropriate time in advance, further improve the convenience. According to recent user feedback, the acceptance of POP by the elderly and children is quite impressive, showing that the need for face-to-face communication with their families is better met. By focusing on this specific new scenario that wasn’t covered by its potential competitors, POP is on its way to fast growth.
Therefore, accurate positioning is the key to POP’s success. After noticing this newly emerged demand, POP quickly seizes the opportunity, then firmly takes its own path of making a good product to satisfy the needs. Better be different than better. It is not better than Tiktok, nor does it stronger than Facebook, but it knows who it is, what to do, and what it can do. Being down-to-earth is also a powerful means of survival for an enterprise.
| Write at the end
As a new generation of products, the idea of POP is attractive and exciting, but its success is still to be verified. How to further enhance the convenience of asynchronous communication, how to upgrade real-time communication, experience, and efficiency of information transmission, more trails and exploration needs to be done. But in any case, POP’s emerging is a reminder to all companies that want to play the game, that the mindset for doing business need to be upgraded.
*Note: POP has successfully raised hundreds of dollars of Series A investment from BAI (Betasman Asia Investment Fund)
Critical thinking
- Is it possible for social media giants such as Facebook to have video messaging function added to its pre-existing platform?
- Instead of expanding and establishing new social relationships, POP focuses on deepening the relationship of pre-existing acquaintances, where user’s relationship network is relatively fixed. Will it increase the difficulty of increasing user flow and attracting customers?
Share your thoughts with me and let’s discuss!
