This Guide will help marketers understand where each platform sits in the marketing funneland how metrics and KPIs can be translated into actual business success
China’s social media platforms are diverse, unique and present a challenge for brands who are investing millions in reaching your audience, but may not have the right tools to measure results and impact. We hope that this Guide to China Social Metrics will present brands with a framework to understand the Chinese social media landscape and allow you to astutely leverage each platform across the customer journey – be it in China, or among the millions of Chinese diaspora around the world that uses these platforms.
Overview of Mainstream Chinese Social Platforms
With the social media landscape in China constantly changing, it is imperative to have a broad understanding of the ecosystem before diving deeper into how success is measured across platforms. In the Guide, KAWO provides a snapshot of the current state of Chinese social platforms along with the type of content popular with Chinese consumers.
According to Statista, with around 57.7 billion yuan in user traffic value, Douyin became the most valuable short video app in China as of June 2023. The platform has over 400M active users daily, of whom over 250M consume content for more than one hour on a daily basis.
Similar to TikTok, Douyin’s recommendation algorithm is a complex system that combines multiple machine learning techniques to deliver relevant and personalized content to users.
For creators and brands who are seeking to succeed on Douyin, it’s a must to understand the recommendation algorithm, which is “Tag” to “Tag” in essence:
If you are a user, the types of video content you see on Douyin are determined by your interests described by roughly 150 tags, based on your browsing preferences. As your interests change, Douyin’s algorithm adapts, allowing you to see content that corresponds to your interest tags.
In the same way, as a creator or brand on Douyin, you will also be attributed to about 150 tags, and the same rule will apply when your content changes.
The next step is quite intuitive. As you may have guessed Douyin will match users’ tags with creators’ tags. Upon matching, the algorithm will determine whether or not to further recommend the content to a wider pool of users. This is all based on the performance data of the content. Douyin evaluates your video before recommending it with the following 5 key metrics:
Weibo is a vibrant social media platform where millions of users share their thoughts, stories, and experiences every day. While many China marketers often debate how relevant Weibo is — the truth remains that Weibo continues to boast a large user base, and is the go-to platform for breaking news and hot-topic discussions among Chinese netizens. As of June 2023 Weibo reported to have 599 million of monthly active users [s].
Standing out in the midst of this bustling online community can be a challenge. Should you create posts with text, video, GIFs. What format of posts really work best?
KAWO is able to analyze the data from hundreds of thousands of Weibo posts published by our clients over the years and what we found was a bit surprising, and something that we found many of our clients were often overlooking: the power of GIFs on Weibo.
In this blog post, we’ll explore the value of using GIFs for Weibo posts, why they are more engaging than photos or text, and provide you with a step-by-step guide on how to create and export GIFs from Keynote on your Mac computer.
Understanding consumers’ needs and wants is of great importance to marketing teams as it eliminates guesswork in decision-making. Do you know you can draw consumer insights from benchmarking your competitors’ social media performance? And KAWO can help you with that by having a fast and cost-effective way to understand the needs of your target customers in China. 🎯
How exactly? You can use KAWO to:
Explore the keywords and content that are trending in your peer group to learn what your competitors’ customers are interested in or not;
Discover and analyze your competitors’ best social media practices;
Identify your position in relation to industry averages and mediums of social media metrics, such as Follower Growth, Engagement, and Reach
Brands in the West face strict controls on who they can legally target through social, but how about in China? The government has attracted international attention for its strict policies aimed at protecting young internet users from spending too much time on “harmful” online activities such as gaming or excessive social media use — so how careful should alcohol brands be?
