Social media landscape in China – key insights

This is an excerpt from Red Ant’s in-depth report ‘China Digital Insights – How to Leverage the World’s Largest Internet Market’

China is the world’s biggest internet market. There are over 221 million blogs, 181 million bloggers, 117 million bulletin board systems (BBS) and 235 million social network users. The social media landscape is complex, vast and ever changing. It is also progressively becoming a crucial part of the lives of Chinese people, as it allows them to gain entry to social circles and information that would not be otherwise accessible because of distance, governmental control or other restrictions.

Red Ant’s fact-finding visit to China was in turn fascinating, educational and revealing – the future of social media will, in no small part, be shaped by the Far East.

Unlike Western networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, Chinese networks make the majority of their revenue through brands investing in their profiles/pages, having a presence in online games and selling virtual goods as opposed to advertising. However, even without advertising, activation on social networks in China requires resource for the brand from a personnel perspective, as well as a financial perspective. It’s far from cheap, and, due to the tendency among networks to ‘over report’ their numbers, accurate data on users and their engagement online can be hard to come by.

The platforms

RenRen is the leading Chinese social networking site. Its history as a student social network has helped it to develop a presence across the whole of China, though RenRen is aggressively trying to maintain market share by moving out to an older, white collar demographic.

 Douban is more of a cross between Facebook, IMDB and Amazon, with a bit of Tumblr added in for good measure. It’s the largest Chinese website devoted to movies, books, music and general creativity, and its objective is to ‘connect people based on shared interests’. The audience tends to be a highly engaged, creative group of people.

Kaixin001 has typically appealed more to Chinese white collar workers. It invests a great deal of time and resource into creating in-network games, including Kaixin City.

Tencent has similarities to AOL, circa 1998. Its walled garden is the internet for many Chinese, particularly outside the larger cities.

 Sina Weibo is the largest microblogging site in China, and growing rapidly. Its users are white collar workers, aged between 20-30 years old, and 48% of users access the microblog on their phones.

Social media for brands

As many foreign products are often unavailable outside the major cities and official information about them is limited or only available in foreign languages, these social networks have become the privileged forum for Chinese consumers to find news about brands and products and share experiences about their shopping habits.

Not long ago, it was unusual for even internationally reputed brands to have a Chinese language version of their website. Today, most major retailers such as KFC and Coca-Cola have a branded page on a platform like Kaixin or Renren, from which they broadcast tailored messages for their Chinese audiences.

Social media engagement in China has already proven to be effective for a number of western brands, with campaigns yielding high levels of ROI, increasing brand awareness, and leaving favourable impressions among the target audience. Social media campaigns are expensive, but not in comparison to TV, print, and radio advertising in China, and at the moment, the government is not regulating social media as they are other channels, so brands get to truly engage their target audience where they are when they consume media.

This blog post was written by Elisa Harca and Gemma Mahoney.

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