Sola

June
Click here for Japanese version.

こんにちは！

In Japanese, it is pronounced as “Kon’nichiwa” and means “Hello!”. Let’s talk about Japan this week. Japanese community has always been a massive part of Sola as its second largest audience. The thing is that until you know Japanese language, this part will be unseen for you, effectively isolated by Sola's language auto-detection mechanism.

Hint for non-Japanese users: choose Japanese in Sola's settings to explore a whole new world of great looking food. Don’t be lazy to use built-in translate functionality for cards and comments. From our experience, Japanese-English auto-translation by Google is good enough to understand each other.
What makes it so interesting is that Japanese users show at least two times higher engagement and retention rate when compared to the rest of the audience. In an attempt to find out the reason, we conducted dozens of interviews, and discovered that in Japan, Sola is often used to find new people through the content instead of the content itself, which is quite ironic because since the early days Sola ( Plague/Plag back then) was positioned as an information network where it doesn’t matter who shared the information.

Another significant difference is that absolute majority of content, both text, and photos, is produced by users and not taken from reaches of the Internet. Also it’s worth to mention that we haven’t seen offline meetups of this frequency anywhere else as in Japan.

Based on this, our marketing team led by a new marketing director prepared a number of tests and hypothesis that could help to position Sola better and get a greater traction in the Japanese market which we see as the most important local market.

Product development
Dev team continues to work on a new web app and new creation/consumption experience for mobile applications. We covered it in detail in previous digests, so please check the archive if you want to refresh the idea. Development is going according to plan and both should be released until the end of the month.

Community
We hope cards authors won’t mind if we let the rest of community to take a sneak peek of one of meetups that took place this weekend. Wish we were here!

solaオフ会ありがとうございました！ このネームシールすごく気に入ってます...！

By Miyako for Sola: People’s Media
sola.ai
初夏のsola会。会場の入り口です。

By yo_shinori for Sola: People’s Media
sola.ai
And we couldn’t miss these super-cute badges made by Miyako for one of the previous meetups.

https://alis.to/Miyako/articles/2vAERmy0OVl9
Development
Continuous development of a new compose and consume experience for iOS and Android apps
Continuous development of a new Sola web app
Wallet is brought back to iOS app due to the changes in Apple App Guidelines
Incorrect displaying of received votes in profile fixed
GDPR compliance improvements
Fixed cards meta data
Improved copyright complaint workflow
Improved inner stats for better evaluation of marketing activities
Removed obsolete events from activity feeds
Write us with any of your collaboration. We are always happy to hear from you.

Join this week’s Reddit discussion and AMA at Sola subreddit and follow Sola on all of our channels:

Telegram News channel and Telegram Chat, Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit.

Thanks to Shounak Katyayan.
Social MediaJapanSolaMediaMarketing
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Ilya Zudin
Medium member since May 2018
Founder of https://medium.com/solaplatform. Thinking about the future of social networks, psychology of communications and attention economy.

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Sola is a hybrid of media and social network governed by AI altogether with users. Use Sola on iOS, Android and Web - http://sola.ai

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