UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL MEDIA OF CHINA
Apr 11, 2018 By NetFin
During November 2017 Tencent became the first giant Chinese technological in being valued in more than US$500 thousand millions. This put the company, owner of the popular messaging service WeChat, on top of Facebook. The new status of Tencent means that now it is the fifth company of technology with more value in the World, behind Apple, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft and Amazon.
As the creative agency We Are Social has shown, China is home to some of the biggest social media and messenger services in the World. However, outside this region, very little is known about these platforms.
The social media and the messenger apps in China are centers of innovation that offer a big variety of video. News, e-commerce services among others. Following are some important facts you should know about the digital panorama in China:
THREE IMPORTANT MEDIA TO TAKE IN ACCOUNT
In China the most popular social platforms are WeChat, QQ and Weibo.
1. WeChat is a messaging app that has almost 500 million active users in China.” Half of the users of mobile phones in the country will access the
application in 2017”, informed eMarketer. Worldwide, the use of this app is estimated between 730 million active users of social media, according to Huileng Tan of CNBC, and 846 million according to Hootsuite and We Are Social. Whichever the number is, the platform of Wechat marketing is too big to ignore it.
2. QQ was launched 18 years ago and during a long time it was the biggest social application in China, only outcomed by WeChat last winter. Recently, QQ changed its name to focus more in the entertainment and the young subcultures of China. To understand better what is QQ we can say it has similar characteristics to Snapchat.
3. Weibo marketing is known as the Twitter of China. However in terms of pure numbers, the net seems to have outcomed Twitter with 340 million active users (Twitter has 328 million). One key reason for this growth has been the evolution of the service towards a platform of multimedia blogs, with functions similar to the ones found in Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr combined, explains Yue Wand in Forbes. The result has been an increase in the use of the app in young people, according to the report 2017 of Kantar about the social media in China.
Social media in China is growing very fast and if you are planning to enter the Chinese market or moving to China it is very important that you understand how the work and the importance they have in everyday life.