DIGITAL

Chinese Social Media in 2017: What You Need to Know

by

Yiling Pan

|

This is the featured image caption
Credit: This is the featured image credit

The “China Social Media Impact Report 2017,” which was released last month, uncovers the latest developments in China’s rapidly evolving social media landscape, providing brands with fresh insights into the field.

Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.

PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.

In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris

The “China Social Media Impact Report 2017,” which was released last month, uncovers the latest developments in China’s rapidly evolving social media landscape, providing brands with fresh insights into the field.

Chinese social media users are most pleased with WeChat, while younger generations have a higher satisfaction rate with Weibo; female consumers look to social media to make purchasing decisions, while younger generations see it as a way of relieving stress. These are just some of the findings from a recent report released in Beijing by the market research company Kantar Group, which shows that the social media landscape is not all about WeChat and Weibo anymore.

Kantar Group embraces a broad definition of “social media,” including not only WeChat and Weibo, which most brands are familiar with, but also a number of rising apps such as Jinri Toutiao (a news aggregation app), Taobao and RED (e-commerce apps with social media functionality) that have gained traction over the past year.

The discovery that people are using all types of social media has led the report to conclude that WeChat and Weibo are no longer enough to serve the needs of social media marketing for brands in China; other platforms have become way too important to be ignored if marketers hope to reach out to their targeted Chinese consumers effectively.

For example, the report goes deep into Toutiao, a news aggregation platform that has already enabled a lot of social media features. From 2016 to 2017, the usage rate of the app rose to 28 percent up 13.1 percent from the same period the year before. 69 percent of users are male. In addition, the penetration rate of the app is almost balanced across China’s various city tiers.

According to the report, WeChat remains the most important social media app in China, but the behavior of users has demonstrated several significant changes.

FoFor instance, there are a great number of younger users starting to recognize the negative impact of social media on their daily life, with about 40 percent of those surveyed who were born after 1990 reporting that they have disabled push notifications from their social media apps.

On the other hand, consumers’ preferences in terms of social media advertisements are shifting too. While in the past, emotional content tended to resonate more with users, now it’s ads that are entertaining and fun that people like most.

The above changes combined have certain implications on how brands can market toward Chinese consumers. As the report suggests, when brands are facing consumers’ increasing desire to stop receiving real-time message notifications from the social media apps, they’ll have to adjust to assume the fundamental strategy of using “the right platform to push the right content at the right moment to the targeted consumers.”

Interested in learning more about
Social Media
and how it affects your brand?

Last but not least, the study also reveals some key details about the booming KOL economy in China.

It identifies the difference between grass-roots KOLs such as Papi Jiang and expert KOLs such as Mr. Bags. Even though Papi Jiang and Mr. Bags both have huge online followings, because of their different sensibilities and modes of presentation, they generate wildly varied chemistries with brands. Therefore, it’s crucial for brands to choose wisely when looking for a KOL to work with. They should opt for one who truly fits their public image in four ways: exposure, sentiment, influence, and engagement.

This article was originally published on Jing Daily. Republished with permission.

Yiling Pan
Yiling Pan

Associate Editor, Jing Daily

Yiling (Sienna) Pan is Associate Editor for Jing Daily. She started her journalism career at Reuters’ Shanghai Bureau in 2014, where she reported on China’s financial markets and economy. She is passionate about telling stories about China’s current social, cultural, and economic transformation.

DIGITAL

Chinese Social Media in 2017: What You Need to Know

by

Yiling Pan

|

This is the featured image caption
Credit : This is the featured image credit

The “China Social Media Impact Report 2017,” which was released last month, uncovers the latest developments in China’s rapidly evolving social media landscape, providing brands with fresh insights into the field.

Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.

PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.

In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris

The “China Social Media Impact Report 2017,” which was released last month, uncovers the latest developments in China’s rapidly evolving social media landscape, providing brands with fresh insights into the field.

Chinese social media users are most pleased with WeChat, while younger generations have a higher satisfaction rate with Weibo; female consumers look to social media to make purchasing decisions, while younger generations see it as a way of relieving stress. These are just some of the findings from a recent report released in Beijing by the market research company Kantar Group, which shows that the social media landscape is not all about WeChat and Weibo anymore.

Kantar Group embraces a broad definition of “social media,” including not only WeChat and Weibo, which most brands are familiar with, but also a number of rising apps such as Jinri Toutiao (a news aggregation app), Taobao and RED (e-commerce apps with social media functionality) that have gained traction over the past year.

The discovery that people are using all types of social media has led the report to conclude that WeChat and Weibo are no longer enough to serve the needs of social media marketing for brands in China; other platforms have become way too important to be ignored if marketers hope to reach out to their targeted Chinese consumers effectively.

For example, the report goes deep into Toutiao, a news aggregation platform that has already enabled a lot of social media features. From 2016 to 2017, the usage rate of the app rose to 28 percent up 13.1 percent from the same period the year before. 69 percent of users are male. In addition, the penetration rate of the app is almost balanced across China’s various city tiers.

According to the report, WeChat remains the most important social media app in China, but the behavior of users has demonstrated several significant changes.

FoFor instance, there are a great number of younger users starting to recognize the negative impact of social media on their daily life, with about 40 percent of those surveyed who were born after 1990 reporting that they have disabled push notifications from their social media apps.

On the other hand, consumers’ preferences in terms of social media advertisements are shifting too. While in the past, emotional content tended to resonate more with users, now it’s ads that are entertaining and fun that people like most.

The above changes combined have certain implications on how brands can market toward Chinese consumers. As the report suggests, when brands are facing consumers’ increasing desire to stop receiving real-time message notifications from the social media apps, they’ll have to adjust to assume the fundamental strategy of using “the right platform to push the right content at the right moment to the targeted consumers.”

Interested in learning more about
Social Media
and how it affects your brand?

Last but not least, the study also reveals some key details about the booming KOL economy in China.

It identifies the difference between grass-roots KOLs such as Papi Jiang and expert KOLs such as Mr. Bags. Even though Papi Jiang and Mr. Bags both have huge online followings, because of their different sensibilities and modes of presentation, they generate wildly varied chemistries with brands. Therefore, it’s crucial for brands to choose wisely when looking for a KOL to work with. They should opt for one who truly fits their public image in four ways: exposure, sentiment, influence, and engagement.

This article was originally published on Jing Daily. Republished with permission.

Yiling Pan
Yiling Pan

Associate Editor, Jing Daily

Yiling (Sienna) Pan is Associate Editor for Jing Daily. She started her journalism career at Reuters’ Shanghai Bureau in 2014, where she reported on China’s financial markets and economy. She is passionate about telling stories about China’s current social, cultural, and economic transformation.

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