At KAWO we often hear about the difficulties brands and agencies have finding people to manage their social media. To understand this challenge better, it’s important to get to know social media executives in China.
A good place to start is a new report released by four major players in Chinese social media (运营研究社，人人秀，新媒体管家，上线了). In total 11,580 survey responses were received from social media executives in 50 cities in China. We have selected the 4 most interesting graphics to get you up to speed.
1. Age
As you might expect, Social is a predominantly young person’s field with 78.5% of people surveyed born since the 90s. Young social media executives are heavy users of social platforms themselves, giving instant access to the latest trends.
A great example is Durex’s new Weibo campaign. On Jan 22nd, executives at Durex posted images adapted from Travel Frog, a Japanese mobile game which has become extremely popular among netizens in the last few weeks. This quick response earned Durex more than 18,000 reposts, 4,000 comments and 8,000 likes in a 24 hour period!
Of course a young workforce also means a relative lack of experience. Surprisingly only 1% of the social executives in China have more than 5 years of experience in their field.
2. Experience
For brands and agencies, this means extra effort training and supervising young teams. And this investment can be risky as the turnover rate for social execs is extremely high.
3. Turnover Intention
Overtime and income were key factors in determining the turnover intentions of those surveyed. The report found 62% of survey social media execs doing at least one day of overtime a week. The most likely to resign were those working a ‘996’ – 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week – with 26.7% definitely planning to quit after Chinese New Year.
Higher salaries are another way to keep your social media executives around. Of those surveyed, 90% currently earn a monthly salary of less than RMB 12K (around USD 2K).
4. Income
At the lower end of the pay scale, turnover intention declines quickly as salary increases. Social execs paid less than 8K a month were almost twice as likely to be undecided about their current employer as those paid between 12k and 20k.
This high turnover rate poses a challenge for brands and agencies. At KAWO we often hear stories of lost data due to staff turnover. In extreme cases, brands have even been locked out of social accounts after one of their employees left.
This is where KAWO can help. Managing your Weibo and WeChat, on KAWO brings visibility and accountability to the process. Whatever your employee turnover, you can be certain that you’ll never lose login details or historical data.
KAWO also makes it easy for new hires to get up to speed by allowing seamless collaboration for large teams.
Automatically generated weekly reports also allow the whole team to keep track of your latest campaign goals.
This is just a brief introduction to social media executives in China. Thoughts or questions? As always, please let us know.
To see the original report (in Chinese), please click here to access the file in Baidu Cloud.