Social Media Usage in China

Inbound marketing usually involves the posting of content on other websites in order to promote a target business. The content will almost certainly contain a link back to the target business.

When doing this type of marketing, we not only need to consider the value of the link. We must also consider the value of the content itself. We must ask ourselves:

 “How much value does a piece of content posted on another website bring to my business?” Read more...

The Swiss brand valuation agency BV4 recently released the report “The Most Valuable Social Media Brands 2012” (pdf Read more...

The CNNIC report for January 2012 came out, so I've updated my graphs to reflect the recent data. The data is up-to-date as of the end of December, 2011.

Highlights: Read more...

This post is now outdated.

See the Jan 2012 edition at http://www.east-west-connect.com/chinese-internet-user-demographics-jan-2012.

Here it is! 15 years of data on Chinese Internet usage, reorganized into a more easily readable format. I think there are some really cool figures here! Read more...

Along with the explosive popularity of the TV program “If You Are the One”, Chinese dating websites have grown by leaps and bounds as well. Read more...

The phrase ‘Online Water Army’ refers to the hordes of people out there that are paid to post comments on the Internet. These part-time or full-time workers make use of social media websites, forums and blogs to influence public opinion. They make positive posts about the companies that employ them and attack competitors. Read more...

According to a recent Chinese-language article on QQ, QQ's microblog now has over 80 million users. 

From the article: Read more...

China's leader Hu Jintao recently started microblogging. His microblog on People's Daily's microblogging site gained over 14,000 followers since it was setup yesterday. For comparison, the next most popular microblog on People's Daily has about 2,500 followers.

From a Tom.com article published on Feb 22 (Chinese):

"Yesterday, a new special name appeared on the "People's Microblog" which was launched this month - the country's chairman, Hu Jintao." Read more...

Competition Spurs Development of Many Feature-Rich Chinese Microblogs

While the English microblog market is characterized as being ‘Twitter and challengers we compare to Twitter,’ the Chinese microblogosphere is bursting with competition, creativity and copying. Multiple contenders jostle with each other for 400 million Chinese Internet users that haven’t yet decided which microblog they would prefer to use, if any. To add to the confusion, Chinese government censors have already shut down a couple microblogs. Read more...

On the right are 50 user profile pics that I random downloaded from Twitter and on the left are 50 random user profile pics from Zuosa. Zuosa is a Chinese-language micro-blogging website like Twitter.

Can you see any differences in online culture between Chinese and English users from this pic alone?