For most companies, launching into China’s social stratosphere can seem like a daunting task. Among the ever increasing number of platforms, brands are often forced to enter the debate between China’s social goliaths, Weibo and WeChat. How are they different? Which is better? Is one replacing the other? To begin with let’s get this straight,… Keep reading…
A web app is a great way for a user to have the tools they use the most right at their fingertips, but with nearly every tool on the computer being run through the browser these days, it’s easy for a user to lose what they’re working on in a sea of windows and open… Keep reading…
Knowing how often the links you post on social media are clicked is needless to say an important metric to measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy. By measuring clickthroughs you get an understanding about how many people have really read your post and are interested in your product or content. It also shows… Keep reading…
If you scan someone’s Weibo timeline or WeChat Moments, one thing becomes obviously apparent: images are the heart of Chinese social media. Curating the best images for your posts is one of the most important ways KAWO helps you to create engaging content. We’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand this challenge better… Keep reading…
In China, getting social media right can mean the difference between winning and losing in this market. Social media management is often managed by younger, less experienced team members supported by more senior talent to ensure brands are represented in the best possible light. When a team member is replaced a challenge for brands or… Keep reading…
The RISE Conference in Hong Kong at the beginning of the month was seen by many as a smashing success as it drew in more than 5,000 attendees and 500+ startups. This wasn’t too big of a shock as the team that put on these conferences drew in 20,000 for their inaugural Web Summit in… Keep reading…
A number of social media tools that currently exist only give you data and analytics on your activity. While that’s useful and pertinent, often times in the marketing and branding industry, how you’re doing against your direct competitors provides much more valuable insight to the digital traction of your brand. So, the question remains, “How… Keep reading…
This past weekend, our team had the opportunity to exhibit at RISE in Hong Kong. Despite there being over 500 startups in attendance, we were able to make some noise and meet some really cool people in the tech and startup scene. Here are some of the highlights: KAWO DOES PITCH 40 startups competed in… Keep reading…
Seeking approvals on social media content in China is never easy. Every brand or client has their own way of approving content for social publishing, and you never know if approvals will be delivered on time. Social media managers are under a lot of pressure. They spend time researching the brand, understanding popular topics, and… Keep reading…
Sina Weibo is a Chinese microblogging website. It is a hybrid between Facebook and Twitter, and is on of the most widely used social networking platforms in China. Brands are able to set up Weibo accounts in order to announce product releases, engage with their fans and followers, and to distribute brand relevant content. Here… Keep reading…
Launched at the end of 2013, in some ways ‘nice’ can be considered China’s answer to Instagram. However, with over 20 million users, 1.2 million daily active users, and a rapidly increasing fanbase, ‘nice’ is much more than meets the eye. So what does it do? Well, in their own words, ‘nice’ ‘makes it easy… Keep reading…
One of the greatest challenges for any team in any environment is having an effective method of communication. Having an open line of communication between colleagues, business, and client is essential to the success of any business. The same can be said for producing good social media content in China. With so many nuances to… Keep reading…
Winning new business can be difficult; the clients seem to always want more, the brief is often misguided, and finding a competitive edge is almost impossible against a sea of competing agencies. Lately at KAWO we’ve been exploring ways to create new value to agencies in winning business by demonstrating features that give your clients… Keep reading…
We’ve mentioned it a number of times on our blog, but the importance of KOLs is a topic worth revisiting. A KOL has nearly unrivaled influence on the masses when it comes to promoting your product or message, and they can assuage the process of achieving viral status on social media, which tends to be… Keep reading…
In China, there are over 600 censored phrases, words, and othersensitive topics that the government considers important to monitor. Staying ahead of all this can be time consuming, and you never know whatyou really can or can’t say. We’ve created a feature called KAWO Protect that takes the worry out of thisby simply offering a… Keep reading…
Multimillionaire megastar Taylor Swift – ‘three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing’. Whether this is a PR stunt or not, she and Apple have both received the attention they yearn for. News emerged on Monday that Apple had made a u-turn on… Keep reading…
KAWO is now publishing to over 26,853,000 followers across Chinese social media as we help 50+ brands and agencies collaborate on one central platform. Today we’re announcing 5 new features to provide users with more insight into what they’re doing and also reduce friction in the way brands and agencies manage the process. 1. We’re… Keep reading…
Starting this week KAWO will be adding trending topics and viral content to the Inspiration Board to help users keep up to date with what’s happening in China. Updated personally by our team members, a bilingual feed of the latest trending topics, news, helpful tidbits, and other information relevant to anyone managing social media in… Keep reading…
Users can now log in to KAWO and select a preference for language, right now we offer English and Simplified Chinese. As a Chinese social media management platform for international brands, we first developed our product in English to maximise accessibility to international clients. Recently we took a deeper look at our users and found… Keep reading…
This post is part of a series introducing the team behind KAWO that keep the fire burning and the engine turning. Q. How long have you worked at KAWO and what is your role?A. I’ve been at KAWO for 2 months now working on the front end side of the KAWO App. Q. Tell us… Keep reading…
Yesterday morning around 11 AM, Kobe Bryant made his return to the Chinese microblogging platform, Sina Weibo. The NBA star personally writes his own content on the account and has been an active user in the past as well, always causing Weibo’s huge population of NBA fans to get up in a wild bout of… Keep reading…
By: Jillian Lau WeChat has taken over China. Aside from messaging, it has become the go to app for anything you could possible need. Need to share a photo with your network? Post it on your moments. Need to find new friends? Shake your phone to find people close by. Need to call a cab?… Keep reading…
This post is part of a series introducing the team behind KAWO that keep the fire burning and the engine turning. Q: How long have you worked at KAWO and what is your role? A: I’ve been working at KAWO for the past 15 months. I started out as an intern writing content for the… Keep reading…
Even if you don’t log into KAWO everyday, we still send you an email when something important happens to your brand. Right now you can receive an email when the following events occur: A warning when your connection to Weibo is about to expire Your connection to Weibo has expired A post has failed to… Keep reading…
Chinese Netizens went into a repost frenzy on Monday afternoon when Apple CEO Tim Cook joined Sina Weibo, China’s biggest microblogging platform. We were also pretty excited to see Tim Cook join the platform, as he’s one of many recent celebrities (Ellen DeGeneres, PM Narendra Modi) to join the platform. Weibo user’s greeted the Apple… Keep reading…
Dealing with content approval in the social media world is a time-consuming, frustrating, and at times annoying task that people struggle with on a daily basis. Hours are spent sending spreadsheets and emails back and forth just to confirm a post. A trivial task like this shouldn’t have such a resounding impact on the day-to-day… Keep reading…
By now it should be common knowledge that the messaging platform, WeChat , has completely taken over the Chinese mobile social media scene in the last three years. To entertain their behemoth user base of over 1.1 billion registered accounts and 500 million active users, Tencent has been beefing their app out with every feature… Keep reading…
Running an effective digital marketing campaign is one of the trickiest steps in the vast number of issues faced by Western brands and agencies seeking to enter the Chinese market. Western firms often fumble as they try to apply their tried-and-tested advertising tactics to Chinese social media channels such as Sina Weibo. At KAWO, we’ve… Keep reading…
By: Micey Song Aside from sending messages to your friends and sharing your daily life or photos on moments, what else can you do on WeChat? Recently, Tencent partnered with the Shanghai government to provide Shanghai users 14 public services. When you download the latest version of WeChat, you will find a new category –… Keep reading…
TL:DR You might not need as many 3rd party libraries as you think. We built our own tooltip library: https://github.com/mailmangroup/kawo-tooltip/ By June 2014, the minified javascript for the KAWO app had grown to over 600kb. This was not a disaster, but it didn’t need to be so big. One of the reasons it had grown… Keep reading…
This post is part of a series introducing the team behind KAWO that keep the fire burning and the engine turning. Q: How long have you worked at KAWO and what is your role?A: I’ve been with KAWO since the very start, so about two years ago. As far as my role goes, I handle… Keep reading…
Just a few days ago social media feeds around the internet blew up with the news that Twitter added a new feature: the ability to quote an entire post without taking up any precious real estate of your 140 characters. Little did they know, Twitter’s “innovative” new function was actually adopted from its Chinese micro-blogging… Keep reading…
Users are constantly overwhelmed with social media content, making it difficult for your content to resonate with your followers and have a lasting impact. Planning plays a key role in producing high quality social media content. There are many factors that go into a successful social media strategy, from content, to posting time, meaningful use… Keep reading…
After noticing that there was a strong desire to learn more about WeChat development in the Shanghai tech and startup community, KAWO teamed up with AKQA to host an event specifically addressing this hot topic. Speakers Aaron Chang (JING digital), Alan Stafford (AKQA) and Brian van Damme (KAWO) presented about various ways to develop for… Keep reading…
By: Beryl Chung WeChat is an instant messaging application with a plethora of unique features. Aside from personal chatting, WeChat also caters towards brands that want to connect with their fans and customers. With over 600 million registered users, WeChat is a unique platform made for connecting the masses. Here we take a look at… Keep reading…
Many factors can determine social media success, but in an atmosphere dominated and propelled by near real-time content, time and timing easily separate themselves as the most valuable prongs of social media strategy. The time when content is posted can be highly influential, which is why KAWO’s scheduling feature is engineered to help you reliably… Keep reading…
When you are a brand attempting to go global, one of the biggest challenges is maintaining a consistent voice across countries, time zones, and cultures. Likewise, if you are an agency representing multiple brands, it can seem nearly impossible to patrol countless social media accounts in order to find the best ones to post onto… Keep reading…
600 million registered users. 167 million monthly users. 69.7 million daily users. This is Sina Weibo. While the people are certainly there, how do you effectively reach them? Weibo gives you two options – Fengsitong (in-stream ads) and KOLs (key opinion leaders). Fengsitong The purpose of Fengsitong is for companies to push out information about… Keep reading…
By: Alan Guan Here is a very useful tip for WeChat public accounts that I think will interest you. As of now, it is only available to add a history message link in the text. Step 1 Simply put this code in your auto message: <a href=“history link”>精彩内容</a> Step 2 Extract the history message link.… Keep reading…
Problem: Coming soon, in KAWO v5, there will be an audit trail of every change that was made to a post. In order to show the before and after differences we needed a client side string comparison algorithm that could handle Chinese characters. Solution: Step One: User Experience We started with some quick mock-ups of… Keep reading…
TL;DR: When you click the publish button it must just work. Achieving this simple goal has required relentless dedication to robustness. In the early days, similar to so many other companies, we made the classic error of constantly pushing to add new features. We assumed these additions would translate into satisfied customers. No matter how… Keep reading…
By: Yujun Wu Have you ever wondered how to make popular Weibo posts? There are several ways to make posts stand out and help your brand interact with your fans. Keep it simple Although 140 characters may already seem very short, making your post under 10 characters can work surprisingly well. Keep in mind: sometimes,… Keep reading…
By: Rufio Zhu Chinese New Year is a local holiday that marks the first day of the year in accordance with the Chinese traditional lunar calendar. Although the holiday is celebrated in other areas of the world, China experiences in a very unique fashion with a primary reason being that it has the largest global… Keep reading…
KAWO sits in the middle of various APIs and due to a high volume of requests, we’re required to push and pull images hundreds of times every day. For simplicity and in order to keep our frontend app servers stateless, we decided to put all of these images into Amazon’s marvelous S3. It seemed easy… Keep reading…
Note from Editor: This will be the first part of a 5 part series detailing some of the biggest tech challenges in China. One of our big projects in mid-2014 was forcing SSL as standard across our app. With lots of API connections affected and different pieces hosted on different services, it wasn’t completely straight… Keep reading…
With the increase of disposable income and longer holiday periods, Chinese tourists are looking for more ways to spend their vacation time. To better attract these potential tourists, companies must meet them where they are – the Internet. In 2013, the number of Internet users jumped 2.3% from 618 to 623 million users. Of that… Keep reading…
By: Michael Lin The process of becoming a KOL (Key Opinion Leader) is rather mercurial. A chance overnight tweet can make you a pivotal influencer in the world of social media. On the flip side, you can spend potential years of persistence and dedication in order to position yourself at the forefront of opinion and… Keep reading…
By: Wenxin Huang Similar to western social media, Chinese Internet shorthand is comprised of idioms, acronyms, clever double meanings, etc. There is a wide variety ofChinese Internet slang, below are the main categories that currently exist. Acronyms and Initialisms: Trends of using acronyms and initialisms by Chinese Internet users startedwith SF, derived from Sofa, which… Keep reading…
By: Yujun Wu As the premier social media platform in China, Sina Weibo does a good job of integrating hashtags into the use of the platform. As is the case with the use of hashtags in Western social media, hashtags make it easy to track and monitor the amount of buzz a topic creates. By… Keep reading…
By: Micey Song What is the top platform in China? Where can people find the latest Chinese trends? Who has the most weibo users in China? The answer to all of these questions is the same: SINA weibo. As the top platform in China, SINA weibo is always developing new features to give users the… Keep reading…