A guide to the complex social media landscape of China

China’s social media landscape is renowned for its complexity. As each social media platform looks to monetise faster and further than its competitors, brands are dealing with a constantly moving environment, and nailing a strategy across this can be extremely complicated.

Within this nebulous environment, brands have to learn to navigate and make use of the market size in the most efficient manner – setting quality over quantity. To help cut through the noise and complex social media structure in China, we have selected some key channels that are an essential starting place.

Weibo

What is Weibo?

The common name for Sina Weibo, the largest microblogging site in China. Sina Weibo focuses on sharing news, views and opinions on celebrities, key opinion leaders and current affairs.

How big is it?

– Approaching 400 million users, posting more than 100 million times a day
– Around 60% access Sina Weibo on their mobile phones

What does it offer brands?

Similar to Facebook, Weibo allows brands and companies to customise their public pages, integrating video, voting, gamification and other advertising functions. The pages have more advanced display settings, accurate data analysis services and back-end management systems compared to other platforms.

Did you know?

– Weibo is Mandarin for ‘microblog’
– Sina means ‘new wave’, and is the name of the online media corporation that owns Weibo
– Sina Weibo has one cost driver that Twitter doesn’t have: censorship. Chinese authorities implement the same monitoring and censorship as all other media in China

TMall

What is TMall?

Taobao, China’s number one eCommerce sales platform (similar to EBay), has grown by providing effective ways to buy and sell products online without geographical restrictions. In 2008, Taobao created TMall; a B2C sales platform solely dedicated to official brand stores, allowing them to sell their goods to the entire Greater China region.

How big is it?

– TMall currently has over 70,000 brands in more than 50,000 online stores
– 41.5% share of the B2C market

What does it offer brands?

TMall not only has a vast user base but is also a familiar, trusted source for consumers. It’s the first port of call for people across China when researching and purchasing products.

WeChat

What is WeChat?

Just one year ago, WeChat was only used for private messages, but today it’s the world’s biggest group mobile messaging app and a multi-platform tool for private and public use – similar to Facebook (although not as successful).

It centres around QR codes, which are readable within the app. Anyone using Wechat can easily create their own codes.

How big is it?

– 200 million users – predominantly white-collar workers in their 20s

What does it offer brands?

– It is possible to categorise people into different groups according to their location and gender, using the back-end management system
– WeChat is concerned with giving each client a personalised service tailored to individual needs
There’s a potential for brands in the future to give out discount coupons to loyal and engaged customers

Renren

What is Renren?

One of China’s pioneer social networking sites. With a developed presence throughout China, it is aggressively trying to maintain market share by moving out to an older, white-collar demographic. Members post profiles, update statuses and share content.

How big is it?

– 160 million users
– 60% access it on their mobile phones

What does it offer brands?

– Renren is open to third party integration so its evolution is extremely rapid
– Business pages available for brands to create (similar to Facebook)

Did you know?

Renren only accepts a restricted number of applications from brands and has an official censorship policy which states that brands can only create pages within specified categories. For example street dance, photography etc. – however larger brand names have more flexibility

Jiepang

What is Jiepang?

It’s the oldest, most influential location-based app in China. Jiepang is a local social mobile app that helps people share and discover based on location – like Foursquare.

How big is it?

– 3.6 million users
– Most active user base in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Hong Kong

What does it offer brands?

– Helps brands interact with consumers in creative ways, including customised badges and photo filters to support campaigns
– Strategic partners with other social networks enable cross-screen campaign activity

The opportunities for brands are clear – but, in the world’s biggest and most rapidly-evolving digital landscape, it’s more important than ever to apply global intelligence coupled with local insight in order to ensure that the value exchange between consumers is balanced, relevant and, above all, genuine.