It’s not Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. It’s a company that most people in the West don’t know. That, however, is set to change, with the explosive growth of China’s Tencent and its mobile messaging app WeChat…Last week, Facebook, the current king of social networks, admitted that it’s losing teen users and that the overall growth in its monthly active users has slowed to 18% year-on-year. This isn’t helped by the fact that it and other Western social networks are banned in China. By contrast, Tencent recently announced that WeChat’s users have almost tripled from the 85 million of the year before. And Tencent’s reach unlike local Twitter-equivalent Sina Weibo and Facebook-equivalent RenRen is not just restricted to China. In just four months between May and September 2013, its overseas users have doubled from 50m to 100m. Tencent has managed to differentiate its product with some killer features that keep users coming back for more. WeChat has neatly fused together the open approach of social networks such as Twitter, where anyone can follow anybody, and more closed networks such as Facebook which rely on mutual friend connections. With a $101bn US market cap, Tencent joins Yahoo!, eBay and Amazon among the world’s most valuable internet companies. It is looking like Tencent will overtake Facebook, although partly because China’s population is bigger and partly because it has an unfair advantage over Western competitors blocked out of the Chinese market. This needs to change. Predictions for the next few years are that Tencent will build a significant global business of great value: with products and brands we’ll increasingly come to know, interact with – and maybe even love. That’s our ten cent’s worth!