Facing a plateau in growing regular customers? Look around for a vast potential market in the Chinese community—and reach them by promoting your brand on Chinese social media platforms.
In this post, you will learn about the Chinese social media landscape and find the right platform for your brand. If you have already launched an account on a certain platform, we can boost your performance with our services, and reach your audience through Chinese marketing.
A Vast Market on Chinese Social Media
In 2021, around a billion citizens of China use the internet regularly. Due to censorship laws nicknamed “the Wall”, these users lie beyond the reach of Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, and TikTok.
Even when moving and living abroad, Chinese people still stick with mainstream Chinese social media platforms. This is because they are so used to it, and all their connections are on those platforms. Due to such habits of Chinese-background netizens, English-speaking marketing campaigns have limited effectiveness in reaching those audiences, which are a huge potential market.
As such, to present your content to this massive audience, you need to launch an account on a Chinese social media platform. Intimidated by the intricate Chinese social media landscape? Fear not, for we will guide you through it.
Chinese Social Media Landscape
Based on their main features, we categorize Chinese social media as follows:
Blogging and Microblogging
Aside from its primary function of instant messaging, Wechat also provides means for both blogging and microblogging. You can publish articles on a WeChat Official Account for your subscribers to read, or post shorter content on Moments, which is exclusive to your friends in your contact list without any repost functionality. Since the launch of WeChat Channels, you can also link a WeChat Official Account article when posting a video.
As a multi-channel full service marketing agency, VI-Media specialize in WeChat marketing. Owning two WeChat Official Accounts, four WeChat accounts, we convey timely information and local news everyday to over 20,000 Chinese users on Vancouver Island. We also provide a WeChat branding service to run professional WeChat Official Accounts for your business.
Weibo, literally means “microblog”, boasts many features which resemble those of Twitter. At the beginning, a Weibo user could only post with a 140-character limit, but now you can post up to 2000 words. You can also add up to 18 images per post. To catch up with video-based platforms, Weibo has launched “Stories” and “Videos”, which are differentiated by aspect ratio and length.
- RED
Similar to Weibo, RED allows users to post up to 1,000 characters in written content, 9 images per post, or videos within 5 minutes. Users on RED tend to share life moments, shopping experience and professional knowledge, which creates a relaxed yet lively atmosphere on the platform. RED is now among the most popular Chinese online platforms used by Chinese people who live overseas.
VI-Media have influencer accounts on both Weibo and RED.
Short video
WeChat, the do-all app found on every Chinese phone, launched a video-sharing feature in 2020, named “Channels”, which allows users to post videos up to 60 seconds. Since virtually every smartphone in China has WeChat installed, Channel posts are likely to have steady audiences.
- Douyin
The original version of TikTok, Douyin uses an identical format and reigns as the top short-video app in China. Originally, Douyin only allowed videos shorter than 15 seconds, but now it permits much longer videos.
- Kuaishou
Similar to Douyin in format, Kuaishou finds its user base outside major cities, including in rural areas. Although Kuaishou has less traffic than Douyin, some Chinese media experts place more value on Kuaishou traffic due to higher interactivity between posters and their followers.
Long video
- AcFun and Bilibili
AcFun and Bilibili are the Chinese video-sharing platforms that resemble YouTube the most. However, they go beyond Youtube by featuring a commenting system called “bullet screen”. It shows comments in rapid succession on the video itself as it plays. Though originally founded as fandom communities, their high degree of interactivity has attracted content creators in all fields. Founded later than AcFun, Bilibili now has more users and traffic than AcFun.
Reaching Chinese Audiences
As you’ve just learned, many of these platforms have expanded their functions, which blurs the boundaries between types of platforms. In order to reach single-platform users, content creators tend to have accounts on multiple channels and tailor their content to each. You can start on the platform whose format fits your content best, and branch out later.
Even though English content is popular among the younger generation, and even goes viral frequently on the Chinese social media platforms mentioned above, as you can imagine, posting in Chinese will increase engagement with your audience. We have a professional team of native Chinese speakers with rich Canadian life experience who can help you narrate vivid brand stories to Chinese-speaking audiences.
Still have questions? Check out our multi-channel service for Chinese social media platforms and contact us today.
