Most Popular Chinese Social Media Platforms
Social Media is a unique part of the digital marketing mix in China. The challenge of marketing Western brands to Chinese consumers on social media is that relatively few Chinese people ever use the apps that are commonplace in the West, like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat. Instead, they use entirely different social media platforms which are headquartered in China and which operate in the Chinese language. This is owing to the fact that Chinese internet regulations prohibit Chinese citizens based in China from using Western social media platforms. These platforms are blocked by The Great Firewall, a combination of laws and technologies that the Chinese Government uses to prevent access to these platforms.
The most popular social media platforms in China include WeChat, Douyin, QQ, Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book), Weibo, Kuaishou, Meipai and Douyin (TikTok). In China, there are over 1 Bn users, with this penetration having grown by approximately 30% from 758 million in 2018. According to the latest Statista data, 20% of Chinese social media users are in their 20s, 20% in their 30s, and 19% in their 40s. This falls to 12.5% and 10.3% respectively for users in their 50s and 60s.
In terms of the impact that the growing penetration of social media has had on everyday life in China - it is a seismic transformation. Much of the everyday aspects of connection, communication and information discovery for shopping takes place on social media, with the result being the increasing importance of harnessing these platforms for effective digital marketing.
Table of Contents
Top 7 Chinese Social Media Platforms
Chinese Social Media Strategy & Management Services
Chinese Social Media Success Stories
Takeaways
Top 7 Chinese Social Media Platforms
WeChat is an all-in-one app that has direct messaging, a Facebook style social wall, in-built games, short video, peer-to-peer national payment system, e-commerce and much more. It’s used by over 1 billion people a month and there are more than 20 million ‘official accounts’ made up of brands, influencers and media outlets.
WeChat, or Weixin, is developed and owned by Tencent, but was founded by Allen Zhang in 2011. WeChat is headquartered in Shenzhen in Southern China. WeChat messenger offers pure text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast messaging, video conferencing, video games, sharing of photographs and videos as well location sharing.
Given its ubiquitous penetration, WeChat’s strategy is to elevate its user interface in order to grow stickiness and usage of the app even more. It does this by improving its feature offering, for example its photo display functionality was improved in February 2023. WeChat is also incorporating the Chinese Government’s CBDC, or Digital Yuan currency into its WeChat Pay function.
Most users use WeChat for messaging and quick and trackable payment, but what sets WeChat apart from its competitors is its ubiquitous scale in China - you literally need WeChat to function in the everyday life sense if you are in China. In the last few years, the number of Businesses who have official WeChat communication pages and chats on the platform has grown significantly.
WeChat has a Western version for those outside of China, which can be accessed here
Weibo is a microblogging site which operates in a slightly similar way to Twitter in the West. Weibo’s features include being able to send short blog posts, follow other accounts, mention or message other accounts, share posts, and react with likes or other sentiments on posts. As of Q4 2022, Weibo’s monthly active user base stood at 586 million, a 3% increase on the previous year.
Weibo is owned by the internet giant Sina Corporation, and was founded in August 2010. Weibo is a publicly listed company and trades on the Nasdaq stock exchange, and is led by Gaofei Wang, who has been CEO of the company since 2014.
Initially Weibo’s strategy was to attract a huge number of Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) and Chinese celebrities to the platform in order to grow desirability, and initially offered simplified peer-to-peer contact and microblogging functionality. The platform’s strategy has developed and it has since become more sophisticated in its offering, and has developed to offer real-time news and trending topics, video function. The platform also has a strategic partnership with Alibaba’s Tmall, to ensure that as well as a discovery and information sharing platform, E-Commerce function is also increasingly being inbuilt to its offering.
Weibo’s strength lies in its maturation in the social media landscape in China, and what sets it apart from other platforms is its ability to connect users to a large number of fellow profiles through trending topics. In addition, Weibo is the platform which still retains the highest number of active celebrity accounts, and so is a go-to destination for fans and followers of high profile individuals within Chinese pop culture.
Weibo’s site can be accessed here
XiaoHongShu / Little Red Book
Little Red Book (Chinese name; XiaoHongShu) is a social media and trend discovery platform that has been described by some observers as a combination of Amazon and Instagram. Starting as a social media platform for users to share shopping reviews from outside of China, it is now the biggest hub for Chinese shoppers to gain insight before almost any purchase, which is especially important when shopping online for brands, and makes it increasingly important for brands looking to enhance their digital marketing presence in China and with Chinese shoppers overseas. Since its development, Little Red Book has opened its own in-app marketplace that has generated an estimated £300m in revenue in 2020. The platform has approximately 163 Million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and has a roughly 88% female user-base, with 83% aged 18-34. Xiaohongshu is owned by its founder Miranda Qu, who set up the platform in 2013 alongside her co-founder Charlwin Mao.
Most users typically use XiaoHongShu for brand and product discovery, so they look up particular trends and reviews as they relate to certain products before buying. Whilst the platform originally started as a beauty and cosmetic skincare peer review platform, from 2019 onwards the remit expanded out to all categories, and its image-heavy review function quickly saw it become a means of growing fame and popularity for emerging brands, for a Chinese audience at least, such as Acne Studios and Rains. The platform is different to other social media apps in that it has a younger skewing audience, and places a high premium on ‘regular’ consumer reviews, and the app’s algorithm rewards highly engaging posts irrespective of celebrity status. Recent developments have seen an incorporation of E-Commerce into Little Red Book, and whilst conversion on the app itself is comparatively low when set against traditional E-Commerce, it does offer users a seamless ability to price-check when reviewing and discovering new products and brands.
XiaoHongShu’s site can be accessed here
Douyin / Tiktok
Douyin (known as TikTok outside of China) is a short video social media platform that is owned by Chinese internet giant Bytedance, founded by Billionaire Zhang Yiming. Its active user base stands at around 743 million in China as of the end of 2022. Douyin hosts short video clips and memes, most of which are under 60 seconds and in some cases are shorter. Previously established as a platform which connected China’s disparate Gen Z, the app’s popularity has grown to every age segment across the country, and it has a relatively even split in terms of gender, unlike XiaoHongShu.
Most users typically use Douyin to seek out engaging, humorous or provocative video content, but the level of stickiness based on an interest-based algorithm means that the platform is valuable and desirable for brands, from an E-Commerce and digital marketing point of view. In terms of company strategy, Douyin initially focussed on achieving critical mass, by purposefully highlighting and sharing highly engaging, funny and provocative content on the platform, both from celebrities and regular people alike. Memes from Douyin quickly made their way into public discourse, and this was part of Douyin’s deliberate strategy in China.
Douyin+ was launched in 2018 and is essentially Douyin’s content and ad targeting platform, which gives brands the ability to pay for and target impressions. This was a clear pivot for the platform, as is often the case when critical mass is achieved (since its launch in 2016, the platform amassed more than 100 million users in one year) as they looked to strategically pivot to a paid advertising revenue model.
Douyin’s Chinese site can be accessed here.
TikTok, Douyin’s Western counterpart, can be accessed here
bilibili
Bilibili is a video platform that resembles Western platform YouTube, offering a mix of user generated content as well as professionally produced shows and films. It originated as a destination for watching predominantly anime and cartoons but has grown to be a platform where a user can watch a video about pretty much any topic. Its audience is quite young, defined by Bilibili as Gen Z +, those born between 1990 and 1999 and currently has around 223m MAUs.
Founded in 2009 by Xu Yi, now the president of Bilibili, the platform, which is headquartered in Shanghai, has since developed to create its own branded and editorial content and is one of the most popular video platforms in China.
Bilibili can be accessed here
KuaiShou
Kuaishou is a short video sharing and social media and video effects application founded in Beijing in 2011 by Su Hua. The platform is distributed worldwide in countries such as Brazil and Pakistan, but in China it is typically more popular with younger users located outside of the tier 1 cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Within China, it is seen as the countercultural rival to Douyin, and it is particularly popular in the Northeastern part of China, or the Dongbei region.
Like its rival Douyin, most users go onto Kuaishou to seek out and share humorous, provocative or meme-like videos. Kuaishou is broadly speaking known as being a platform for more everyday, down-to-earth and relatable content than Douyin, and more of a true reflection of rural life in China. According to the latest data, Kuaishou has an active monthly userbase of 544 million, up from 136 million in 2017, which means the platform’s growth has been staggering. Whilst the company was initially ad-free and social media focussed, the app has since developed strategically to offer live-streaming, digital marketing and E-Commerce opportunities for brands looking to engage Kuaishou’s highly sticky user base. Much like Douyin, Kuaishou’s algorithm rewards engaging and ‘sticky’ content. However, Kuaishou positions itself as authentic, so effects and highly stylised content is not as well rewarded on the platform as on Douyin. This means that it is slightly more popular with rural, real consumers as opposed to celebrities.
Kuaishou can be accessed here
QQ is an instant messaging, voice and video calling, microblogging and games platform owned and developed by internet giant Tencent, which is the same company that owns WeChat. The platform was initially set up in 1999 as an early instant messaging service, but has since grown to encompass almost every aspect of online interaction. The current active user base stands at around 574 million, which albeit enormous, is amazingly still down in popularity, as its active user base stood at 697 million in 2018.
QQ was the first product released by Tencent, which was founded by Pony Ma Huateng, a Chinese billionaire and one of the richest people in Asia. Tencent has about 85,000 employees worldwide, with a high proportion of these working on the QQ platform’s offering. Whilst initially a pure-play messaging service, QQ has since developed into a gaming and music platform as well as video and photo sharing messaging app. Purchases for services on the platform can be made with Tencent’s specialised virtual currency, known as QQ coin. Whilst initially ad-free, as the app developed a higher and higher user base, advertising solutions were introduced as part of the platform’s commercial offering, and celebrity partnerships and endorsements (for example, with celebrity actress and cellist Ouying Nana) have continued to keep the app relevant to a mass user base. QQ has since become a hugely popular means for brands to access a younger user base with digital marketing strategies. Over 65% of QQ’s user base is distributed below the age of 35, meaning QQ is in its own territory as a true youth platform in China.
QQ Tencent can be accessed here
Chinese Social Media Success Stories
Highlights of Hot Pot China’s work delivering successful Social Media in China for Western brands we know and love.
Games Workshop
We ran and operated a major Bilibili video campaign for Games Workshop, localising video content and growing the brand’s account to 14,000 followers in 2 months, with videos accruing over 100,000 views.
visit the full case study to read more >
Fortnum & Mason
WeChat campaigns drove a 40% increase in online sales from Chinese consumers in the UK. Hot Pot China worked with influencers to create the visuals for this campaign, visit the full case study to read more >
La Perla
Social media account management and content creation, campaigns and influencer work. Drove a 230% uplift in online sales, visit the full case study to read more >
Chinese Social Media Strategy & Management Services
The China landscape is heavily dominated by BATB: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Bytedance. These four giants are the most influential social, search and e-commerce channels in China today. Importantly, they are not interconnected; each has developed their own integrated functions, in order to keep users active and prevent them from migrating to competitor platforms. This is particularly visible in the independent development of e-commerce tools within social platforms such as Douyin and Little Red Book. This means brands will greatly benefit from specialist support for social media in China.
When it comes to social media marketing in China, selecting, integrating and operating the right platforms is both challenging and absolutely necessary. Knowing how to drive users within platforms to the right ecommerce destinations and how each channel has to act and operate for the audience is critical.
Given the close relationship between social and e-commerce in China, understanding where brand value meets commercial success is especially important. That’s where Hot Pot sits, ensuring that your social media channels feed into your overall commercial goals.
The Hot Pot China Approach: Focus on delivering commercial objectives whilst building long term brand equity and value in China.
Social Strategy
We enable you to establish a clear pathway for your social presence in China across different channels, ensuring maximum reach of target consumers.
Content Creation
We create tailormade, expert content that establishes, expands and retains a strong readership base. Each piece we publish serves a purpose
Social Setup & Management
We know what it takes to set up for success in the China market, opening and managing accounts for brands across a range of categories, from F&B to retail, cosmetics & technology.
Community Management
It’s essential that brands nurture communities in their social channels through engagement and data analysis. This ensures brands are consistently connecting with their audiences in the right way.
Social Tech Development
Interaction with your users in memorable ways takes technical development. Whether that’s a H5 game or an e-commerce mini-program, social tech development is an essential ingredient for China success
Influencers (KOL / KOC)
In China, influencers are known as KOLs or KOCs. They’re integral to helping you locate new audiences and drive consumers to purchase your products.
Conclusion
In this article we have covered information, user bases and a strategic development profile of the most popular social media and video sharing platforms for digital marketing in China. Whilst there are many options as to which platform you should select for the digital marketing of your brand, ultimately that decision will be determined by the profile and location in China of your target audience, your brand objectives and how you would like to position your brand to a Chinese audience. There are a number of considerations that you should take into account if you wish to be present on these social media platforms. First and foremost amongst these is in regards to understanding the processes involved in order to plan, execute and measure a successful marketing campaign on relevant platforms.
Doing social media effectively in China is a challenge, there’s no doubt about it. The language and cultural barrier alone present a hurdle for brands looking to connect with Chinese consumers. Clear objectives, a strong relationship with platforms and a committed and trusted partner to help you succeed will see your investment in these platforms pay off, but it's important that you make your selection after thorough analysis of the various platform options.