Unsurprisingly for a country with 1.35 billion people, China possesses a massive amount of citizens on social media. The country beats out Japan, the United States, and South Korea in the percentage of its population that uses social media. China social media use is a juggernaut with no signs of stopping any time soon.
In a new McKinsey survey of nearly 6,000 Chinese Internet users, it was found that 95% of people who live in large Chinese cities have an account with at least one social media site. Not only that, but
China social media users are far more active than in other countries, with 91% of them saying they had visited a social media site in the past six months. What this survey has begun to reveal is that the social and mobile landscape in China is huge, complicated, and very different from that in the United States and other parts of the world.
As the percentage of the population in China who use the Internet continues to rise (projected to be 800 million people by the start of 2016, up from the current ~620 million), it has become more essential than ever for American and other marketers to familiarize themselves with
China social media use and truly understand how the landscape there differs from the rest of the world.
One of the reasons this is necessary is because the McKinsey survey shows that social media has a larger impact on the buying decisions of Chinese consumers than on those of any other country. If a Chinese consumer sees a product being touted positively on a social media site, especially by a friend or acquaintance, they are far more likely to actually purchase the product than his or her counterpart in other countries. Peer recommendations are a huge influence in Chinese culture, as formal institutions are less likely to be trusted.
To begin to understand the
China social media landscape, it helps to have an understanding of how many and what kinds of users there are. The McKinsey survey identified six types, including
social enthusiasts, who spend a lot of time engaging with others on social media sites;
resenders, who are on social media mostly to reshare others’ content;
readers, who do not participate in conversations but read them;
opinionated users, whose strong opinions help them build their own online followings; QQ
spillover, who are registered with social media thanks to QQ, an instant-messaging system, but only minimally participate; and
inactives, who still have social media accounts but no longer use them actively.
Two important
China social media sites that marketers should be aware of are Weibo and Wechat. Weibo is a microblogging platform similar to Twitter that boasts 280 million users, down from 308 million in 2013 when the Chinese government mandated that users must register with their real names. This is no doubt at least one of the reasons for the rise of the Wechat, a mobile messaging service that is comparatively more private than Weibo. Wechat can claim 82% of the market share in mobile messaging, no mean feat as mobile messaging remains the most popular communication channel among the Chinese today. Weibo, on the other hand, with stringent government rules driving away users, may be on its way out.
