Chinese social media platforms are totally different from the western social media. While Facebook, Youtube, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter continue to dominate the western world, China has seen the emergence of many innovative new social platforms, such as Wechat, QQ, Weibo, Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, etc. These Chinese social websites have hundreds of million users.
In China, the 5G mobile network and the popularization of smart phones are rapidly developed. There is almost one billion smart phone users in China. Chinese people on average spend more than 5 hours on the internet per day. They spend an average of more than 2 hours on social media platforms. Additionally, a study shows that more than 40% of Chinese use 3-5 social media applications per day.
According to the related report, the Chinese internet population was around 989 million in 2020 and 160 million 5G mobile users, 89% of world 5G users. And mobile phone user accounts are over than 1.6 billion in 2020. As the world’s largest online community continues to grow, Chinese social media platforms have become popular marketplaces to reach Chinese consumers. With the diversification of China’s social media ecosystem, various social media applications have brought a deeper impact to Chinese consumers’ lives. More and more brands have also been using social media as a major marketing method for brand advertising activities.
For brand marketing, understanding the various Chinese social media platforms is crucial to engage with Chinese customers. The social media usage with hundreds of million active users on Weibo and WeChat in China is huge. The business value of Chinese social media for brand marketing and ROI is significant.
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Social media-buying on Weibo and WeChat
Analysis and reporting in Chinese or English
WeChat is the must-have social media platform in China, with over 1.2 billion monthly active users. Almost every Chinese smart phone user has installed the WeChat app. Chinese users spend an average of over 70 minutes a day within WeChat. All this amazing data makes WeChat become one of the most popular choices for brands to get started with social media marketing in China.
WeChat is integrated with a lot functions and features, such as text chat, audio/video call, group chat, sending files, mobile payment, friend post sharing, travel booking, shopping, living services. In WeChat, brand operators can create official accounts to share content improve brand marketing, launch Mini-Programs for deeper engagement with consumers, and directly communicate with consumers through private traffic pools to enhance consumer’s loyalty.
The mini-program is the key feature of WeChat, which it allows companies or merchants to provide a various of services and interactions with consumers. In the future, WeChat mini-programs will still be one of the channels that brands cannot ignore for developing online business and continue to play a greater business value.
WeChat social media ecosystem is still the platform with the closest relationship with users and the highest monetization value. The average daily active users of WeChat Mini Programs are over 450 million in 2021 and people used Mini Programs 32% more often each day. In 2021, the number of active mini programs soared 41% compared to 2020. Transactions generated in the catering, tourism and retail industries, sectors hit hard by the pandemic, managed to jump by more than 100% year-on-year.
WeChat is a potential platform to reach Chinese users. Compared with Tiotok/Douyin, the recommendation mechanism of WeChat Channels can fully tap the value of the user’s acquaintance relationship chain and network resources to help brands expand private traffic and influence.
Both of QQ and WeChat are created by Tencent company. As China’s first hugely popular messaging service, QQ shaped the development of both China’s web and mobile web. Despite being launched all the way back in 1999 (5 years before Facebook), QQ has survived the trials of time.
Today, QQ still has some 850 million active monthly users – more than double the number Twitter claims. QQ was the first product released by Tencent, which is now one of the largest internet companies in the world. QQ hit one million users in its first year and 50 million in its second. By its tenth year, in 2008, the startup had 856 million total users, a record of 45.3 million simultaneous online users, and more quarterly income than the next two largest Chinese internet companies (Alibaba and Baidu – you may have heard of them) put together.
As the mobile computing era got under way, Tencent worried that desktop-native QQ would not make a successful transition. Instead, the company came up with what we now know as WeChat.
QQ was once an indispensable part of Chinese people’s lives, but the smartphone and WeChat have eclipsed it. Nonetheless, QQ remains today a huge platform with one of the world’s largest active user communities in Chinese social media. It is beginning to successfully reinvent itself for the younger consumer, and by association, the marketers who want to reach them.
Weibo is one of the most popular social media in China and is often considered to be Twitter. Like WeChat, Weibo is another platform brands commonly used for social media marketing in China. As of November 2020, Weibo has had over 520 million monthly active users and 230 million daily active users. Weibo is a suitable platform for content to go viral and for KOLs or influencers to build their online communities.
Weibo has abundant KOL and celebrity resources in Chinese social media. Brands can use Weibo for IP marketing to help enhance brand influence. This is an important and effective solution for brands via Weibo IP marketing. It increases brand influence and user engagement at a lower marketing cost.
Brands can link e-commerce stores and products in their Weibo official account posts. With many users already having Alipay linked to their Weibo accounts, they can purchase featured products with just one click. Therefore, Weibo can be very effective in driving online sales.
Douyin is the Chinese edition of Tiktok. As of August 2020, Douyin’s daily active users exceeded 600 million, and the average number of daily video searches exceeded 400 million. Douyin marketing in China can offer wide opportunities for brands on the market.
China’s social media Douyin customized marketing campaigns connect brands and users. For example, brands use specific topics as an interactive way to attract users to create videos. This can not only reach a wider range of ordinary users, but also help the brand to make a wide range of communication and exposure when new products are launched or when creating a key product.
E-commerce links: In addition to Douyin’s native e-commerce platform, videos can link directly to e-commerce platforms such as Taobao, JD.com, and more.
Kuaishou is currently the second-largest short video platform in China, with more than 300 million daily active users. It is rapidly becoming popular in cities below the second tier in China.
While most social media is dominated by celebrities and influencers, Kuaishou amplifies the voice of ordinary people and their lives. Kuaishou users are mainly young people who come from second and third-tier cities, but also from villages and rural areas of China.
Kuaishou actively collaborates with all the other major players in Chinese ecommerce retail. It is possible to connect to platforms such as Taobao, Pinduoduo, and JD.com. Kuaishou is also a cross-industry platform but suffers from a lower purchasing power than Douyin (its audience is younger and living in smaller cities). It is a good platform to promote commoditized or low-priced products
Little Red Book (Red, Chinese named Xiaohongshu 小红书) was founded in 2013, Little Red Book (Red) was built to be a platform primarily focused on User Generated Content, where users could share reviews and their experiences to help others with their purchasing decisions.
Little Red Book is a community-based e-commerce platform with over 450 million registered users mainly residing in first-tier cities.
According to the information publicized by Red, the platform has over 100 million monthly active users, 450,000 new posts generated daily, and exposure to over 10 billion pieces of content daily. It is prevalent among Generation Z users born in the internet era who rely on social media as their primary source of information. It has around 83% users of 18 to 34 year old and 90% users are female.
Perfect platform to improve brand awareness. Compared to “traditional” advertisements, content on Red appears more trustworthy for Chinese millennials. It is an ideal place to create word of mouth and increase brand awareness, especially for smaller or less well-known brands. Brand can use Red as a part of a marketing plan, instead of just leveraging it as a cross-border e-commerce platform, for example to detecting the latest interests from young consumers in China.
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