Editor’s note: This article was first published in October 2010. It is an opinion piece in which Tuenti leads Spain’s social network market, plans to expand abroad and has just launched its share button. Tuenti later dropped its social network, so the button no longer exists.
The social network Tuenti wants to expand beyond Spain, where it leads the social networking market. It has been improving its system for some time to match the services of Twitter and Facebook, and it recently launched its own “share” button, so that with just two clicks you can share an article from a website with your friends on social networks. Even so, not everyone expects it to be as successful as Twitter and Facebook, because of doubts about the average Tuenti user.
I’ve gone round collecting opinions from various bloggers, and a large majority agree on one thing: the average Tuenti user is more into sharing jokes or funny videos than sharing an article on a more serious topic.
In a way, that majority is quite right, because in its early days Tuenti focused on teenagers, and it neither valued nor promoted the benefits a social network can bring to a business.
But that’s in the past, and what’s done is done. The problem is that Tuenti doesn’t seem to learn from its past mistakes. We discussed this in a previous article, when we suggested some guidelines for succeeding with an online business.
Tuenti has assumed that everyone who has a blog is an advanced computer user, and that’s a serious mistake. If Tuenti’s “share” button is missing from most blogs, it isn’t because bloggers don’t want to try it, but because they find it hard to add.
With Facebook and Twitter, all you have to do is add some HTML code to your page template; with Tuenti, you have to upload the image to your own server and enter your website by hand, so the process is more complicated from the outset than on the other social networks.
I don’t mean this as an attack on the social network; I’d rather they took it as constructive criticism.
If Tuenti wants a “slice of the pie” of social networking outside Spain, it should stop relying only on its programming expertise, which seems to be the only thing that matters to companies of this kind, and show a bit more commercial vision.
That’s my opinion, and I repeat that it is only constructive criticism, which I hope they take note of. Tuenti was the first social network I joined, but in the end I switched to Facebook and Twitter, as I imagine many people may do if it doesn’t improve its services, convenience and ease of use.
Those of you who want to add Tuenti’s share button just need to follow the instructions on Tuenti’s developer page.
If you’ve already added buttons from other social networks, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Further reading
Featured image: David Martín :: Suki_ ::, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
