The story of Chinese social media platforms is different from the rest of the world. When we talk about social media platforms, the first thing that generally comes to our mind is international platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. But what about China? The fact is that the Chinese government has BANNED all these apps in China! It’s impossible to penetrate the Chinese market without using these social media platforms in today’s time.

Nevertheless, this restriction has helped evolve indigenous Chinese social media platforms with a vast user base. Although social media platforms in China provide all the features similar to the international platforms, they also bring many additional features.

China is the second-largest global economy with a strong growth rate of 8% in 2021. It has one of the fastest-growing GDPs in the world. It has the largest online community globally, with an internet population of around 1 billion at the end of 2021, and it is expected to cross 1.29 billion by 2026.

With such a huge online community, global brands have tremendous potential to reach out to the local Chinese consumer base. They have to use Chinese social media sites and apps as an integral part of their marketing strategies. Let’s explore all the top social media platforms of China.

Top 10 Chinese Social Media Platforms To Know About

Each social media platform is unique and serves a different purpose. Brands can decide which platform best suits their requirements. Here are the top 10 Chinese social media apps/sites you can explore for your business.

Chinese Social Media #1 – WeChat

User Statistics:

1. Over 1.26 billion monthly active users (MAU) as of Q3-2021 – Source
2. 73.2% of internet users accessing the platform frequently as of Q3-2021 – Source
3. Accounts for 34% of China’s total data traffic. – Source
4. Users send 45 billion messages daily.- Source

What Is WeChat?

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose app developed by Tencent. It serves the purpose of instant messaging, social media posts, and mobile payment. This Chinese ‘super app’ has versatile functionality that includes an extensive range of additional functions like text, voice, and broadcast messaging, moments, video conferencing, games, photos, videos, location sharing, banking, online shopping, paying bills, investment, flight, bus,  restaurant booking, and recharging. Also, It has millions of third-party apps called mini-programs. WeChat alone provides features more than many of the international apps offer together. Chinese people use this app for almost everything, making it one of the most popular Chinese social media apps.

Who Uses WeChat?

It is used by most of the Chinese population, with 42.8% of users being female and 57.2% male. – Source

Why Is WeChat Important For Businesses?

Businesses use WeChat to spread their reach to the customers for brand awareness, product/services promotion, feedback, and many other marketing activities. WeChat has reached the status of being the biggest social media platform in China with more than 1 billion monthly active users and 70 minutes of average use each day by Chinese users. That makes it an excellent choice for aspiring and existing businesses. The provision of creating an official account on WeChat by companies and celebrities helps them promote themselves with targeted content. Not only this, companies can utilize the great functionality of the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool on their official WeChat account, enabling them to manage and track their contacts seamlessly. Provision of direct interaction with the users through messaging helps the brand build a personal connection with its followers. Companies provide better customer service through their WeChat account that is quick and personalized. All these factors make WeChat a critical part of the business ecosystem in China.

Advertising / Marketing on WeChat

The best thing about WeChat is that it has evolved tremendously as per the needs of its users and businesses. Earlier, the prime focus of WeChat was to build a solid user base, and hence they didn’t allow advertisement on the app. But lately, when they have grown to such a large scale, they introduced WeChat Advertising. Here they brought various advertising tools for the brands that can be used for targeted promotion of their product and services. These tools are banner ads, KOL (Key Opinion Leader) advertisements, Moments ads, Mini Program Advertising, and Live Streaming. With an engagement rate of 800 million users, WeChat moments are the most effective advertisement on WeChat. A Moment ad appears in the feed section of users’ Moments and effectively increases engagement. Currently, WeChat is the most preferred choice for companies to enter and grow in the Chinese market.

Read – How to Register Wechat Official Account Outside China [2022 Guide]

Chinese Social Media #2 – Sina Weibo

User Statistics:

1. 573 million monthly active users (MAU) as of Q3-2021 – Source
2. 248 million daily active users (DAU) as of Q3-2021 – Source
3. 30% of users in China were below 20 years old, whereas 4% of users aged over 50 years in 2020 – Source
4. 42.3% of China’s internet users used Sina Weibo in 2018 – Source
5. In 2017, over 21% of the Chinese population used Sina Weibo. It was forecasted to reach 30% by the end of 2021. – Source

What Is Sina Weibo?

Sina Weibo is the second most popular microblogging platform in China. Today it stands with a massive figure of MAUs crossing 573 million in 2021. The character limit on messages makes it quite similar to Twitter. It is another most influential platform for social media marketing in China. Users can do multiple activities like posting images, videos, and gifs, sending personal messages using the chat function, following and unfollowing people, reading their posts, sharing someone else’s posts, posting their stories, and using emojis to react to any post, and view trending topics. The most popular use of Weibo in China is discussing hot topics, breaking news, and cultural events. On Weibo, users can network with friends, follow celebrities and influencers, keep updated with the news and events, and research products and exciting brands. Apart from this, Weibo also has a game center, music, charities, payment, other financial services, health and exercise tracking, and even lotteries.

Who Uses Sina Weibo?

Sina Weibo is incredibly popular among Chinese internet users, especially Generation Z, for getting updated insights about the trends in vogue and the latest promotions from their favorite Key Opinion Leaders (KOL). Weibo’s popularity is unparalleled among the white-collar workers and urban online population with mobile phones. In 2020, more than 30% of the Weibo users in China were below 20 years old. The older generation also uses Weibo extensively to get breaking news, participate in discussions, and follow their favorite leaders and celebrities.

Why Is Sina Weibo Important For Businesses?

Sina Weibo is a leader among the social media platforms in China when it comes to its popularity among microblogging sites. Brands, Celebrities, and many journalists find it the perfect platform for their effective promotions, interaction, and other marketing activities among their followers. In 2019, Weibo generated more than 70% of the total 2.16 billion US dollars revenue from its advertising and marketing on the platform. With more than 516 million mobile monthly active users, Weibo generated around 87 percent of its advertising and marketing revenue by mobile advertising. – Source

They make a huge market for businesses to focus upon. Weibo makes it very important for the brands to launch their marketing activities because of its intense popularity. More than 94 percent of Weibo’s users access this app on their mobile phones, making it a perfect choice for the brands to remain in touch with their customer base almost all the time. Weibo is full of information and trending content, making it very attractive for users. Unlike WeChat, there is no limit on Sina Weibo on posting, and hence KOLs have an advantage here for multiple promotions a day.

Advertising / Marketing on Sina Weibo

On Weibo, brands, companies, and celebrities can create a verified business account and manage a page that provides a platform to interact with the customers, hold discussions on various topics, communicate with a large pool of users through hashtags and paid advertising. Weibo now allows companies to sell their products and services directly through its platform, making it a perfect channel for social media marketing in China.

Read – What Is Weibo & How To Use It To Promote Your Brand In China?

Chinese Social Media #3 – Tencent QQ

User Statistics:

595 million monthly active smart device users as of the end of the year 2020 – Source

What Is Tencent QQ?

Tencent QQ is an app instant messaging app developed by the leading Chinese technology company named Tencent. This multifunctional app provides online games, music streaming, online shopping or e-commerce, microblogging, movies, voice chat, and group chat.

Before WeChat, Tencent QQ was the most popular chatting app in China. What makes QQ different from other social media apps is that it has a desktop version that is very rich in features. Also, QQ is quite user-friendly as it doesn’t require any phone number for registration. Each user is provided with a unique numerical ID on registration on this platform.

Tencent even upgraded interactive technologies for QQ to provide an improved video experience to its users. It introduced Augmented Reality (AR) creation tools customized for various festivals, events, and landmarks to promote user-generated video creation and sharing. Also, it added cross-screen interactive AR effects for enriching the video call experience for its users.

QQ’s popularity jumped during 2020 because of the lockdown situation due to coronavirus. QQ enabled the schools to stream the virtual class live and share the screen in QQ group chats. Students could access the classes through mobile, laptop, or PC and submit their assignments through QQ’s file-sharing feature.

Who Uses Tencent QQ?

Tencent QQ is very popular with the professionals for corporate communication among them. The user base of QQ is relatively younger than on other platforms.

Why Is Tencent QQ Important For Businesses?

Tencent QQ is a targeted advertisement platform in the social media world that helps the brands reach out to many users across China. When it comes to providing support to their business partners, their FinTech and business services help them meticulously grow and assist their digital upgrade.

Advertising / Marketing on Tencent QQ

With 595 million monthly active smart device users in China, Tencent QQ provides a big market for brands and businesses to advertise themselves using social media marketing in China. It is a top-rated advertising channel in China. Companies can open their QZone account on Tencent QQ exclusively crafted for the organization accounts. Not only this, businesses can opt for the paid marketing programs on QQ where you pay Tencent, and they create exclusive content for your brand and publish it in different areas of QQ like QZone games, pop-up windows, and banners.

An important point to be noted here is that QQ is more prevalent in 3rd and 4th tier cities and has a younger user base with limited spending power. So, despite being a robust social media marketing tool, QQ is not suitable for advertising luxury products.

Read – The Complete Guide to Tencent Advertising in China

Chinese Social Media #4 – Douyin

User Statistics:

1. Six hundred million daily active users as of August 2020. – Source
2. Around 48.7% of users aged below 30 years in China in December 2020. – Source
3. 57% of the users in China were mobile internet users as of 2019. – Source
4. ​​More than 22 million content creators earned more than 41.7 billion yuan on the platform over the past year in 2020. – Source
5. Users spent approximately 88 minutes per day on the app as of March 2020. – Source

What Is Douyin?

Douyin is a short video app that is extremely popular in China with more than 600 million MAUs. It is one Chinese social media platform that has gained unprecedented popularity worldwide with its international version named Tik Tok. Douyin lets its users accept the challenges posted on the app and create videos in response to it. It has brought a new trend all over the world. Apart from social interaction like sharing videos, comments, and live streams, Douyin is used for research, payment services, e-commerce or online shopping, ticket and bookings of hotels, tours, and restaurants, long videos, making an official account for the brand. Douyin’s popularity has resulted in many Chinese celebrities using it extensively for fun or as an influencer.

Who Uses Douyin?

Douyin has gained immense popularity among young users, especially females aged 25 to 30 from Tier-3 and Tier-4 cities. Its user base is young yet slightly old enough and likes vlogs, lifestyle content, business advice, and videos from local authorities.

Why Is Douyin Important For Businesses?

Businesses are using the Douyin platform to promote their products and services through advertisements and creating short videos with the help of KOLs. It has become one of China’s most popular social media marketing platforms.

Advertising / Marketing on Douyin

Douyin is one of the most effective KOL platforms to engage with a young and targeted consumer easily. Businesses can register themselves on Douyin for an official account and start their business promotion through multiple cost-effective options. They can also provide outstanding results in lead generation and e-commerce conversions. Brands can advertise and use their marketing on Douyin in many ways like Splash ads, Newsfeed ads, Targeted ads in posts, advertising via Bytedance, Collaborating with influencers, Creating trending stickers, and branded hashtag challenges. This unique co-creation opportunity converts users into your unofficial brand ambassadors by authentically engaging them.

Read – What Is Douyin & How To Advertise On Douyin App?

Chinese Social Media #5 – Zhihu

User Statistics:

1. 5.5 million average monthly paying users as of Q3-2021 – Source
2. 101.2 million average monthly active users (MAUs) as of Q3-2021 – Source
3. Accumulated 315.3 million questions and answers contributed by 43.1 million content creators as of December 2020 – Source
4. About 1,000 content creators earning over 10,000 yuan per month – Source

What Is Zhihu?

Zhihu is China’s most prominent online question and answers-based social media platform. It lets its users create, answer, and organize questions with deep insights, knowledge, and experience in the respective domain. China’s version of Quora has the most trustworthy and highest quality content community. Zhihu in classical Chinese means ‘Do you know?’.

Zhihu is a great online community where users engage and contribute to the highly intellectual questions and answers with their expertise, sincerity, and mutual respect. They respect cultural diversity and values,  differences in opinions, and display a sense of constructiveness.

Zhihu has a highly engaged user base that posts long content covering specific questions. It is usual for Zhihu users to include graphics, charts, images, and videos in their answers to make their point and thus improve the content quality. There are many new features Zhihu has introduced recently, like columns for top Zhihu answerers, tipping the excellent content writers, recorded answers by the experts, and Zhihu Live.

Who Uses Zhihu?

It is pretty popular among highly educated people, with 80% of its users having bachelor’s degrees or above and 20% of users having education in foreign universities. Also, 76% of users belong to the high-income group with high consumption power. These factors make these users discuss highly intellectual, technical, and complex topics. Thus Zhihu is an ideal platform for promoting products and services to the educated and wealthy users belonging to tier 1 and tier 2 cities.

Why Is Zhihu Important For Businesses?

Zhihu is a reliable and trustworthy platform for targeted advertising for its highly educated and well-off user base. Businesses can get genuine feedback and essential insights about the users’ experiences that provide high-quality content on Zhihu. This social media platform plays a vital role in the Chinese business ecosystem because of its highly trustworthy user base. On Zhihu, there are multiple ways a brand can connect with the consumer, like ebook sales, podcasts, VIP programs, short videos. Zhihu has an excellent trust ranking on Baidu, the Chinese search engine, and its search results show the results from Zhihu. In this way, if you provide excellent information or create a meaningful discussion on Zhihu about your brand, your ranking on Baidu will improve significantly.

Zhihu has a large user base. Its algorithm makes sure that advertisements and suitable content reach the specific target audience through their personalized feed based on the user’s profile, questions, answers, followings, likes, and search history. This process makes it an essential social media platform for brands to reach the right consumer.

Advertising / Marketing on Zhihu

The best way for any brand to advertise on Zhihu is by providing the users with valuable and high-quality content. Brands can answer questions related to their products or services and provide the link of their website or product in the answers. You can also collaborate with top contributors on Zhihu having a massive following to build trust among the users and reach the target audience. For B2B businesses with highly complex products that provide detailed information to their customers, Zhihu is the ideal platform.

Zhihu has also launched its advertisement program to publish sponsored content through ads for games, social media applications, and e-commerce. Such advertisements include app open ads, content feed on the recommendation page, and banners on the question and answer pages.

Read – Your Guide To Marketing On Zhihu

Chinese Social Media #6 – Douban

User Statistics:

1. 400 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) by the end of 2019 – Source
2. 200 million registered users by the end of 2019 – Source
3. 4 minutes 46 seconds average visit duration as of December 2021 – Source

What Is Douban?

Douban is a Chinese social networking platform for sharing and recommending books, movies, and music. It has expanded itself completely around urban life. Today, Douban is an easy platform for users to listen to their favorite music, book tickets for movies and concerts, and download ebooks. Users can network with other users if their specific interests match each other. You can compare Douban with Reddit.

Who Uses Douban?

This social media platform is the king among the users of Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities who are intellectuals and pop culture junkies, explicitly interested in movies, music, books, and arts. They are highly educated, have a high income, and pursue high quality. They are influential in their circle and possess the right to speak. The users can create in-depth content from stories to scripts and illustrations to music.

Why Is Douban Important For Businesses?

Douban is a fantastic social media platform for promoting more sophisticated and culturally oriented products, mostly related to arts. It’s a high-quality and original interest-based online platform. Douban offers an excellent opportunity for brands to promote and connect with targeted users through word-of-mouth marketing and reviews, ratings, and discussions. Brands have a perfect opportunity to change and improve their brand or product’s perception/opinion/outlook through this platform. They can create events for like-minded users with similar interests for a discussion, for some rich interactions, and to gather feedback. The most crucial point to be noted by brands is to become a part of the community before getting any attention from the users.

Advertising / Marketing on Douban

Douban offers marketing solutions like advertisements during app startup, native advertisements in images, texts, videos, drop-down ads, and banner ads on the home page. It allows brands to create a ‘brand station’ that is a separate page where they can post everything about their brand and advertise on Douban FM with audio ads.

Chinese Social Media #7 – Jinri Toutiao

User Statistics:

1. About 279 million monthly active users (MAU) as of December 2020. – Source
2. 290.1 million average daily active users (DAU) as of May 2019 – Source
3. 55.5% market penetration of news information as of December 2018 – Source

What Is Jinri Toutiao

Jinri Toutiao is a Chinese social media platform that efficiently and accurately connects people to high-quality and rich information that creates value. This search engine service provides accurate, professional, and fast results. Apart from the default comprehensive search, it can do specific searches like videos, information, pictures, and music. Toutiao uses very complex algorithms with artificial intelligence, analyzes each user for their location, clicks, and browsing history, and then recommends the best-fitted articles and videos that provide the highest value to the user.

Who Uses Jinri Toutiao

Most of the users of Toutiao are a young generation of 18 to 30 years old who are freelancers, self-employed, or owners of private companies, living in the first or second-tier cities. These users are primarily tech-savvy millennials with relatively high purchasing power and hold a bachelor’s degree or above.

Why Is Jinri Toutiao Important For Businesses?

With a large user base, Toutiao is a vast social media platform for businesses to promote themselves to the targeted users who are highly educated and affluent. Businesses can open their publisher account, Toutiao Hao on Jinri Toutiao, distributed to relevant users using the Toutiao algorithm.

Advertising / Marketing on Jinri Toutiao

Jinri Toutiao is a fantastic platform that covers more than 100 content fields. Advertising on Toutiao can significantly improve the brand awareness of businesses willing to put their feet in China. With the official account of Toutiao Hao, companies can continuously and efficiently increase followers through regular updates and interactions on Toutiao. Advertisement options like open screen ads, ads on the news feed, search ads, and text ads can provide high-intensity promotion to increase the brand awareness, new product promotion, and engagement of the customers.

Read – The Beginner’s Guide to Toutiao Advertising in China

Chinese Social Media #8 – Baidu Tieba

User Statistics:

1. 544 million monthly active users (MAU) as of December 2020 – Source
2. 202 million daily active users (DAU) as of December 2020 – Source
3. 43.67 million monthly active app users as of September 2021 – Source
4. Approximately 94.4% of visits from China on Baidu Tieba website in three months before August 2021 – Source
5. Around 23,254,173 communities as of June 2021. – Source

What Is Baidu Tieba?

Baidu Tieba is the leading online discussion forum in China provided by the search engine giant Baidu. It is totally content-oriented and highly interactive. It allows users to search through keywords and enter the discussion forum on any topic or interest of their choice. Users can add a topic by creating individual ‘Tiebas’ or bars for each topic. And then, users can start the discussion on it through a large active user base. Users can follow the topic of their interest to get the updates in their feed. Smart Mini Programs and Managed Page helps users access a vast range of information and services on this platform.

Who Uses Baidu Tieba?

Baidu Tieba has a user base of a very young age group with a relatively low education level, primarily students. These netizens are interested mostly in celebrities, TV programs and films, gaming, books, and short stories.

Why Is Baidu Tieba Important For Businesses?

Baidu Tieba is one of the most popular platforms for social media marketing in China. Brands can target the exact customer they are looking for using forums on Tieba, thanks to its artificial intelligence-based algorithm and deep user insights. Businesses can create specific content and target niche groups through this platform. They can start discussing the targeted topic and utilize this platform to engage with users. If brands can successfully harness the power of Baidu Tieba through interesting and valuable content, they can quickly grow their organic presence in China without going for paid advertising. Businesses can utilize the strength of forums to collect feedback from users.

Advertising / Marketing on Baidu Tieba

The top search engine of China, Baidu, supports Tieba, making much difference. Baidu Tieba is one platform in China that you can harness without investing much money by simply creating original content. On Tieba, if you know how to engage with the users organically, you are already on your way to creating a loyal user base. There are options for paid advertising that look like organic posts, but users are smart enough and do not generally click into those paid advertisements. On Baidu Tieba, you don’t need to be or use an influential KOL to attract users. All you need is such an exciting post that triggers the hot discussion. Question and answer posts and live streaming serial stories are two categories that create a lasting impact on Baidu Tieba.

Chinese Social Media #9 – Youku

User Statistics:

1. 381 million monthly active users (MAU) on the mobile app as of June 2020 – Source
2. Monthly retention rate 45.1% in March 2021 – Source

What Is Youku?

Youku is one of the most popular video-sharing platforms in China. More than 1500 license holders that upload media content include TV stations, film and TV production companies, and distributors. Youku is often used to stream and download movies and TV shows. It is different from its international rival, YouTube, because it has mostly professionally created content rather than self-created content by the users.

Who Uses Youku?

The majority of the Youku user base is under 30-35 years of age looking for entertaining, educational, and informative videos.

Why Is Youku Important For Businesses?

Youku provides analytical tools that track users’ viewing data with lots of information like demographics, location, browsing technology, language, and viewing time. The platform uses this data for targeted marketing for businesses. With many active users and daily views on Youku, it is an excellent platform for targeting customers using video content.

Advertising / Marketing on Youku

Like YouTube, Youku also provides various marketing solutions to the brands, including paid advertisements such as static and animated banner ads, text links, in-stream advertisements, buttons, branded viral videos, and pause ads. These tools are popular for social media marketing through this platform.

Chinese Social Media #10 – Meituan Dianping

User Statistics:

1. Around 62 million monthly active users (MAU) as of September 2021 – Source
2. 667.5 million Annual Transacting Users as of September 2021.- Source
3. 8.3 million Annual Active Merchants as of September 2021. – Source
4. The daily average number of food delivery transactions increased by 24.9% year-over-year to 43.6 million in Q3-2021 – Source
5. Operates in over 2,800 cities and counties in China as of September 2021 – Source

What Is Meituan Dianping?

Meituan Dianping is the one-stop solution platform for daily life services in China. It offers a large platter of services like food delivery, restaurant reviews, travel booking, bike-sharing, buying promotional offers, booking movie tickets, booking beauty salons, and finding hotel deals. They currently offer around 200 different services on their online platforms making it China’s leading e-commerce platform. Users can review various services provided by other companies and enjoy their offers. The services on Meituan Dianping have gained so much popularity that the daily average number of food delivery transactions crossed 43.6 million in 2021.

Who Uses Meituan Dianping?

Meituan Dianping is popular almost in all tiers of cities of China. It is mainly used by office-going and urban populations with disposable income and those who expect quality service.

Why Is Meituan Dianping Important For Businesses?

Meituan Dianping allows businesses to post promotional offers and interact with customers. It has got so popular that it has become the most prominent service review platform in China, focusing mainly on restaurants. It has a great user-friendly platform for its customers, and hence it is one great channel for social media marketing by interesting brands. Advertising and promotions by businesses get the advantage of powerful location-based targeting. This information can be used to promote the nearby local users.

Advertising / Marketing on Dianping

With substantial user data such as demographics, location, consuming patterns, and preferences of their target customers, Meituan Dianping offers an incredible platform for brands to advertise in a pinpoint way to their targeted users. It will help them increase customer loyalty and brand awareness manifolds. Brands can utilize SEO, image, URL promotion, and website ads to grow.

How To Get Started With Chinese Social Media?

Now, as we know all about the most popular Chinese social media apps and sites in China, let’s see how to start with it. To choose the right social media platform according to your needs, you need to consider the following aspects:

Understand the audience

It is crucial for a marketeer to first research, understand, and decide the audience he will target on social media. Many factors are essential when it comes to Chinese consumers.

• They love brands but are not that brand loyal and always prefer to get the best price.
• The average annual salary in China is around 97,400 yuan making the purchasing power reasonably good.
• The older user group prefers price over quality, whereas younger ones are ok with paying premiums for high-end products.
• The older generation is still traditional in spending habits, the middle generation hangs between traditional and new trends, and the younger generation is inclined towards the latest trends.
• The young generation is seeing a rise in their wealth and Westernized lifestyle, creating huge opportunities for foreign brands.

Focus on Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities as well

It is imperative to understand the preferences and choices of the local consumer according to his region to grow a business in China successfully. To make it easier to understand, businesses in China use city-tier classification. The tier system is widely used to formulate marketing strategies to understand consumer behavior, income level, politics, and local trends.

Tier 1 and 2 cities in China like Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin are oversaturated with business marketing because of the social media and commerce platforms. At the same time, Tier 3 and 4 cities like Chengdu and Guangzhou are excellent opportunities for international businesses because of low competition yet a large consumer base. Tier 3 and 4 consumers can spend more on shopping, lifestyle, and entertainment. They have a less stressful working schedule with limited entertainment opportunities. Hence they look forward to online shopping, gaming, entertainment, and socialization.

Create content that appeals to the Chinese consumers

Brands must provide highly customized content to the Chinese consumers keeping in mind their choices, behavior, likes, dislikes, local trends, culture, and aspirations. Whatever content you serve to the Chinese users on social media platforms, make sure you dash it with the local color of China without taking away the foreign appeal. It is of utmost importance to create high-quality content that appeals to the Chinese consumer with its usability, significance, and value to turn into your regular and loyal customers quickly. Your authentic, honest, and transparent content will make a place in the heart of the Chinese consumer. Personalized and creative content attracts users and results in conversions.

Adapt the content to the platform you choose

There are so many types of social media platforms available, and as a marketeer, it is easy to get tempted and use the same content on all the platforms. But beware, as this is easy but the sure-shot way of killing your engagement and losing the followers.

So, it is vital to adapt your content for each social media platform you choose. Each platform has its distinct personality and purpose, and your customization of the content will decide how engaging it will be and will reach your potential customer or not.

Adapting the content to the platform of your choice can be done by taking care of a few things like:

• Use a catchy headline or caption to trigger the interest of your target audience to stop, read, and share your content.
• Optimize your content for the respective social media platform to fit there seamlessly by using the correct vocabulary, hashtags, tagging suitable accounts, using the right media with the correct dimensions. It will boost your brand visibility.
• Research and check if the content you want to post is suitable for that platform or not in terms of character counts, vocabulary, and type of media. You only share the right content on the right platform.
• Schedule your posts on different platforms at optimum time-interval and post them at the most effective day and time of the week to get maximum engagement.

So, in a nutshell, each social media platform is different, and you need to adapt your content differently for each of them so that your customers love your content and like and share it, resulting in your business growth.

Top Chinese Social Media Trends To Know About

Live Streaming

At present, live streaming is one of the hot trends in the Chinese social media space. It can be anything like daily life updates, tutorials, playing games, singing, dancing, and any other form of entertainment. Interestingly, more than half of the internet users in China use live-streaming apps. It results in real-time interaction and engagement with the content provider. In China, influencers play a significant role in consumers’ decision-making, and live streaming by these influencers is like a perfect match. China’s tech giants like Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu invest heavily in live streaming to boost their business.

KOL and KOC Marketing

KOL or Key Opinion Leader, also known as an influencer in simple words. KOL can be a spokesperson, a brand ambassador, or a thought leader. They have more importance and relevance than mass media because they better connect and relate to their audience. The KOL engages with their followers by developing a bond and making themselves relatable with their audience. They successfully make anything go in trend, which a brand utilizes in collaboration with them.

On the other hand, KOC or Key Opinion Consumer are regular consumers who put forth their original reviews online for products and services. They don’t have an extensive fan base, but consumers take them seriously because of their genuine feedback. Consumers relate with them better and trust their authentic and reliable content.

Social Shopping

Social shopping is a new trend in vogue in China that encourages group shopping. In Social Shopping, also known as Social Commerce, users are provided with a personalized feed of products and a promise of discounts through their social media platforms in case they build a team of customers on their social media who buy the same product. Social commerce in China is booming quickly as the number of users crossed 780 million in the year 2020, and its market size surpassed 2.3 trillion yuan. The increase in mobile usage and strong social media connections have popularized social shopping in China, also known as social e-commerce.

Xiachen Marketing

Xiachen means ‘to sink’ or ‘to submerge.’ In marketing terms, Xiachen marketing means sinking into the lower tier markets with marketing activities. Tier 3 and 4 cities in China are still not saturated like Tier 1 and 2, and marketing activities here will result in significant opportunities because of their large user base. The Tier 3 and 4 regions have become highly competitive for brands and influencers and provide huge potential for the growth of e-commerce and services.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is simply a machine imitating human intelligence. This technology is currently in its evolution phase and gaining a massive response worldwide. It helps the user by providing personalized recommendations, data-driven in-store experiences, image and speech recognition, and chatbots. The future of AI with facial recognition, delivery drones, self-driving vehicles, smart cities, fintech, and online medical diagnoses has already started. It is gaining importance on social media platforms too. 

In China, where technology plays a significant role, all the Chinese social media platforms strive hard to bring unique features, new content, and ultimately the best experience to their customers. Social media has a great future in this digital world. Still, a long way to go.