China is the world’s most populated country, with over 1.3 billion people. It also maintains the world’s second largest economy, on track to become the largest by 2016. The country has 560+ million internet users – more than any other country – and the average user spends more hours per week online than with TV, print, and radio combined. Despite this high amount of time spent online, adoption of major digital and social platforms in China has been limited. Many Google properties including YouTube, Blogspot, and Google+ are blocked to regular web browsing, along with Facebook, Twitter, and others. Instead, Chinese users spend their time on country-specific sites like Kaixin, Douban, and Jiepang.
China’s social media sites are similar to US sites and analogies can help keep things straight, but they have different capabilities and user bases. “Weibo” is the Chinese word for “microblog”. Known as the “Twitter of China”, Sina Weibo is actually much more than just that – it has over twice as many users as Twitter, and it’s used by more than 22% of the Chinese Internet population of almost 540 million people! Sina Weibo was well ahead of the game in providing users with the ability to include images and video – far before its Western counterpart, Twitter.
And don’t forget: during the 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony, Twitter recorded almost 10 million related mentions. Sina Weibo? 119 million. The biggest day in the history of US e-commerce was Cyber Monday 2012, with an estimated record US$1.5 billion in sales across online retailers in a single day. Last year, Taobao doubled that on Singles Day (11/11), seeing US$3.06 billion in sales.
QQ is an abbreviation of Tencent QQ, a widely popular instant messaging service. By Last September, there were 784 million active user accounts with approximately 100 million online at a time. According to Alexa Internet rankings, the QQ webisite ranked 8th – moving it ahead of Twitter.
PengYou, meaning “Friend”, was developed by Tencent to be a “facebook-like” site. Although, PengYou has less active users than its direct competitors Reren and Weibo, because of its multiple platforms, it’s the biggest online community in China in terms of registered users.
The Chinese have created their own networks, just like facebook, Myspace, Youtube and foursquare – but with more users – which is why every global company needs to pay attention to these sites.
i think it's interesting how they can't do certain things online. but each to their own and they're not completely banned from being on the social media front.. they got to invent their own little social media world!
ReplyDeleteChina is so smart. Knowing that Facebook and Twitter is banned, they created similar social media platforms like Weibo, Renren, QQ for the Chinese population and successfully attracted million of users. I used QQ before, it was just like MSN. China not only made their social network similar to the West, they have made it better, like free downloading international music.
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