Japanese Users Ready for Branded Mixi Pages [SURVEY]

There were rumors that Mixi, Japan’s largest online social network with a massive user base of over 23 million, was going to start branded pages this August. Currently, brands are not allowed to start and manage their own pages on Mixi which is similar to how Facebook treated fan pages before brand pages took off.

I conducted a survey here in Japan asking what people would do if Mixi started branded pages. As the graph below shows, 73 percent of the respondents showed interest in joining these groups. This ratio is quite encouraging, considering the fact that users are already receiving messages from brands on various platforms such as Twitter, emails and so on.

Question: If your favorite brands were allowed to have their own pages on Mixi, where they can provide brand information and coupons, how likely are you to join their Mixi groups?



What is more, when we correlated the intentions to join branded pages with a) Mixi usage frequency b) number of Mixi friends, we found that there were positive correlations, .19 and .22 respectively. What this means is, heavy Mixi users are more likely to participate in branded pages which is good for both brands and Mixi.

In the same study we also asked what people thought about Mixi’s recent move to remove ‘footprints’ on user profiles. For those who are not familiar with the issue, footprint is the note that shows who checked out one’s profile on Mixi. About 2 weeks ago, Mixi stopped showing this information to its users for some reason and we asked about the reactions. Unfortunately the majority of the users (64 percent) were against this policy.

Question: What do you think about Mixi’s recent removal of foot print policy?

We also looked at the gender distribution and it seemed like there was no difference among the genders in this negative attitude. Whether Mixi was aiming for more page views or not, this new policy sure did not resonate with its audience.

Methodology: A total of 121 college students in Southern Japan participated in the study in exchange for a class credit. Among the 121, 88 who indicated using Mixi were included in the analysis. The data was collected online via a password secured survey site. The study is still under way and Mixi questions are not directly related with the major purpose of the study.