China’s social-media boom (b)

In previous blog, I discussed the China Social Media Market and analysed Chinese Social Media Major competitors. Now, I will move my focus on the Chinese social media users.

Deep dive: China’s distinct social-media users

Based on the motivation and behavior, Chinese Social Media users are recognized in four groups

Social Enthusiasts

Social enthusiasts spend a large portion of their time maintaining friendship networks; they account for about 15 percent of social-media users.

Normally, they  are the heavy users of social media. The McKinsey's report indicates that average online time was 69 minutes a day, compared with an overall average of 46 minutes per day. 68 percent of social enthusiasts users are update their webpage in daly base.

They use social media to build and maintain their circles of friends: 68 percent of respondents in this segment post daily updates on their lives, while only 41 percent of all users do. And they care about the number of friends they have: 76 percent agree that having a large circle of friends is important to them, while less than half of average users say so. The data incateds the segment is more educated and slightly younger than average. This group of users are enjoy to try all function on social netword and happy to see brand ads on their sites.

Resenders

Resenders, who account for 15 percent of research population, actively repost messages, such as jokes, from other sources. Although they do not post original material, they often have large numbers of followers. They are the one of the major active social media users group. They are brand friendly users which see social-media sites as a means to promote themselves. 32 percent of respondents indicate that "driving traffic to my blog and generating followers" is important, compared with an average of 18 percent for research population.

 In addition to being friendly to brands, these users are happy to contribute to Web pages devoted to a particular brand’s products. More than 40 percent say they make group deal purchases, and 69 percent say they spend money on things they see on social-networking sites every month—a level that exceeds even that of social enthusiasts.

Readers

Resenders generally do not participate, but read what others have posted. They make up about 14 percent of users. In Chinese, these group of users are divers, because of these users always stay behind and never or rarelly post message or other type of informtion to interate with other users. The research found only 13 percent of Readers may response to other's microblogs. Readers are brand-friendly. Only 7 percent of Readers will take comments on someone else's wall. They also rarely post their own content on the web. Normally, They do not reject online promotion activities initiatively. Normally, Readers also spend significant time on social media, which around 55 minutes a day, just after Social enthusiasts.

 Opinionated Users

Opinionated users are counted as 14 percent of research population. These groups of users nomally have strong opinions and large personal followings. They also have very strong personal opinion about all products and issues. They intent to make purchase decision beased on their own experience or idea and try to use their strong opinion to impact on their friends and family. So, if this group of users did not manage very well, they would become a brand's worst enemy. They spend an average of 60 minutes on social-media sites every day, and more of that time is devoted to uploading content than reading it. More than 60 percent of interviewers in this segment treat social-media sites as important places for them to delivery their opinions, while only 26 percent of research population do. Normally, they have negative opinion about online advertisement and perfor to compline  the bad experience. To this group of website users, company should carefully to design the website and function to reach Opinionated Users.


If overseas social media webiste intend to enter to China market and gain succeed, they should really careful about these four types of social media users, monitor what they are saying about their brands, and build close relationship that know how to delivery messages efficiency.

Engagement with the digital Chinese consumer
If overseas social media websites  intend to enter to China market, normally, they may face three big challenges: 
(1) some executives lack familiarity with social media and do not know how to mine consumer insights from this ocean of data, or how to translate those insights into actions, especially in the country's dynamic ecosystem.
(2) existing social-media knowledge and analysis frequently is not actionable; participating in the social-media space requires companies to build capabilities and focus on execution.
(3) executives may be unsure about how to fit social-media insight into traditional brand-planning processes

Chinese social media has lot of difference with western market, the culture, regulation system and political issue are the three critical areas that social media webistes, especially overseas social media webistes should consider extremelly carefully when theyintend enter into China social media market. 

Reference
Chiu, C, Lin, Davis & Silverman, A 2012, China’s social-media boom, viewed on 23 September, http://www.mckinseychina.com/2012/04/25/chinas-social-media-boom/