Facebook, Twitter, Youtube? No thanks!
The overview of Chinese social media is very rich and ever-changing. Tencent Weibo and, more important to the Western companies, Sina Weibo (500 millions accounts) are microblogging platforms, which are a mix of Twitter and Facebook.
Youku and Tudou are popular Chinese equivalents of YouTube.
Tencent QQ, with its icon penguin was the most popular social medium with around 2 billion accounts. It is a sort of skype and my space now losing its power after the boom of Tencent Weixin.
Weixin (called Wechat outside China) is a powerful platform combining social media, messaging app, e-commerce, customer service and business ads. With 400 millions users in China and 650 worldwide it is developing rapidly.
Wechat=Weixin!
Wechat is one of the most powerful social media and communication platforms in the world right now.
Chinese users use it as:
- Chat: instant messages
- Phone: voice mails
- Search Engine for searching accounts of companies/celebrities or public entities (eg. PPC opened its own official account that has 80 million followers and made training for their employees about how to use it to promote governmental activities).
- E-commerce (this service available only on Chinese platform): Once the user inserts his or her credit card, he or she is able to pay taxes or transfer money to friends or pay bills with a click.
- Through an official account you can provide info and contents to your followers and also send them messages/newsletters directly.
- Customer Service: users write directly on an official account of a company to reach their info, promotions, maps and links.
Wechat is the new frontier of digital communication and a must have for anyone who wants to communicate with the Chinese.
Chinese home page
When intending to enter the Chinese market, one of the very first steps is to create a home page in Chinese. Generally speaking, the best solution is to create a web site dedicated to Chinese customers: this means that your home page does not have to be simply translated into Chinese, but also localized, that is adapted to the Chinese state of mind. It also is a good idea to have a mobile version considering that Chinese often use the Internet from a mobile device.
Last but not least, rely on professional help when creating Chinese webpages because professionals can create and translate or localize your webpages for Chinese end users.
