How to promote your brand through Chinese social networks?

With the worlds’ largest population, China is a lucrative market, and the fact is that an increasing number of businesses beyond local market are trying to get a piece of the pie. The intense competition urged enterprises to carry out more cost-effective marketing strategies. The effect of SEO and direct advertisement is declining, and now the better way is to leverage the mainstream social media platforms in China. They occupy most of Chinese people’s daily time and prove effective on promoting brands and boosting sales. There are different kinds of social network in China, from Chinese Twitter, Weibo, super-app WeChat to the rising TikTok short-video community; which shaped a complete different digital landscape from western countries.

Here are three common approaches to market through the Chinese social networks.

Paid advertisement

If you have enough budget, the easy way is to pay for the advertisement offered by the platforms. WeChat has three types of advertising, respectively the moment ads, official account ads and mini programs ads. Weibo ads will be presented in the feeds of targeted audience according to some qualitative factors such as interest and region etc.

Promotion through KOL

Chinese KOLs are having a significant impact on consumers’ shopping behaviours. They are either celebrities, influential bloggers or experts of a particular field. They build an intimate relationship with their followers and shares or communicate useful and valuable information, so they are considered reliable source of information. Collaboration with KOL not only effectively converts loyalty customers but also helps target the customers more accurately. KOL usually focuses on a few certain areas and so their audience have similarities in terms of age, interest or values.

A sponsored from a Weibo KOL receives 11k+ likes, 200+ retweets and 8k+ comments

Create compelling content

In the era of social media, everyone can be a self-media with extensive influence as long as you produce attractive content. Diversify your ads through digital forms, be it text-picture posts, livebrodcast, vlog, H5 page or short videos, and you will obviously receive more engagement. For example, a makeup tutorial short video will greatly arouse users’ desire to purchase the product.