Recently updated on February 21st, 2024 at 08:06 pm
For businesses that are expanding into the Chinese market, social media marketing is no longer an option. It has become a must with the drastically growing number of Chinese social media users.
Statistics about Chinese Social Media Users
According to Statista, there’re 926.78 million social network users in China and it’s estimated to grow to an exponential 1,279 million in 2026, making China the world’s largest social media market. 90% of the population in China use the internet, and social networking plays a major role among Chinese netizens especially Millennials and generation Y.
To maximize the social media marketing impact in China, it’s important to create Chinese social media copywriting that targets these young groups.
What is Chinese Social Media Copywriting?
Unlike the professional writing style of Chinese technical translation, Chinese social media copywriting is about creating a rapid emotional connection and building a loyal community, usually in less than 100 characters (depending on platform) with hashtags, attached images, graphs, and links to maximize online visibility.
Successful social media copywriting in Chinese requires lots of creativity and time, adept writing skills with cultural awareness, the generation gap, and interactive thinking.
Chinese Social Media Copywriting Hacks for Popular Platforms
Chinese social media platforms do not only serve as a way to communicate online, they are also the main sources of news and entertainment, shopping advisors, and e-payments. Each social media platform in China is unique and serves different functions, from sharing, commenting to short video creating and e-payment.
💡Your marketing strategy should target the right platform, connect with the right audience and build a loyal community.
The following are some of the major social media platforms in China and important elements that you should include in your Chinese social media copywriting strategy.
#1 WeChat
The largest social network in China with 1.2 billion active users, WeChat is on top of the top as an unavoidable marketing tool for doing business in China. As published by Hootsuite, on average Chinese spend 1/3 of their online time on WeChat and over 81% of users spend more than one hour per day on it. The sheer number of active users and usage time makes WeChat a must-have social media platform for businesses that want to fuel their growth in mainland China.
WeChat is a multi-purpose APP including a variety of functions from instant messaging, sharing stories in moments, making e-payments, and marketing through moments, official accounts, mini-programs, etc.
What are WeChat Marketing Channels?
- Moments: Similar to Facebook timeline posts, allowing users to share plain text content, content with a maximum of 9 uploaded pictures, videos, etc. A powerful function for business is moment ads that appear at the 5th position in users’ moments feed as sponsor content.
- Official accounts: There’re two kinds of WeChat official accounts: subscription account and service account, each can publish one to six articles per day, allowing you to share long content with your community.
- Mini programs: Similar to WordPress plugins, mini-programs are third-party add-ons that give WeChat extra functions. Mini programs can be used to improve customer engagements like building an advertisement campaign, exclusive membership programs, etc.
💡Strategy for WeChat Copywriting
- Keyword research: Before any content creation regardless it’s for the Chinese market or other markets, keyword research is essential. Similar to Google Trends, WeChat index (微信指数) is a basic tool to check the popularity of designated keywords with reference data within the past 90 days. Additionally, it can be used to benchmark the effectiveness of your WeChat advertising campaigns.
- Moments: Create short personalized, interactive campaigns like lucky draws, contests to drive engagement. Spice up the Chinese social media copywriting with trendy terms and local dialects.
- Official account articles: Use personal storytelling and establish trust with your customers. Create interesting, interactive content that takes into consideration your brand characteristics and local culture.
3 Metrics to Benchmark the Level of Engagement
- Share: It’s the most valuable engagement to expand your reach.
- Like/Wow: The more readers Like/Wow at your article, it shows more appreciation, thus, it has the potential to be displayed under the “Top Stories” or “Discover” menu.
- Comment: It wouldn’t increase your reach but it contributes greatly to a heated discussion and brings you closer to your audience.
#2 Sina Weibo
An information-driven platform, news on Weibo spread efficiently and widely. Weibo’s monthly active users are mostly millennials and Generation Y. Those young users tend to get the latest news here like celebrity gossips, trendy movies, comics, dining outs, current events, etc., then voice their opinions and discuss with others. Sometimes heated discussions lead to hot topics on Weibo that can spread immediately to a wider audience.
Weibo Copywriting Tips
💡Integrate “hot topic” issues and hashtags to gain additional exposure. Create entertaining, engaging Chinese social media copywriting and distribute it through Weibo campaigns (Free Trial Campaign, Repost Campaign, Preorder Campaign, Lucky Roulette Campaign), sponsor ads, or via collaboration with KOLs (Celebrities, industry-specific KOLs, bloggers).
#3 Zhihu
Zhihu, the Chinese equivalent of Quora meaning “Do you know?”, is the leading question-and-answer website in China. With empowering and inspirational slogan “Discover a bigger world”, Zhihu is widely used by experts and professionals to share in-depth insights and carry out professional discussions on an extensive range of topics including career development, culture gap, politics, history, films, technology, lifestyle, etc.
Q&A campaign is the easiest and most common type of campaign any individual or business can do to increase brand visibility. After creating your account, you can start customizing your page, writing an introduction about your business, and demonstrating your expertise in a specific industry. Then you can search relevant questions relative to your business and answer with professional insight.
Zhihu Users
Zhihu is known for its highly educated users with higher incomes since 74% have a bachelor’s degree or above, and 1.62% with a doctoral degree. As published in 2020, there’re 420 million registered users on Zhihu, 56% are male, 70% of users are within 20-29 years old, and most of them are in first, second-tier cities. On average users spend 70 minutes per day on the platform.
Benefits of Zhihu Marketing
There’re many perks of marketing on Zhihu.
- Branding: More credibility. Zhihu is an expert community where users interact with in-depth knowledge, information, and personal experience that could your company build a professional, positive image within the community.
- Search engine optimization: Zhihu is a powerful tool to improve your keywords rankings on Baidu as it has a very high domain authority. Often Baidu gives priority to ranking Zhihu pages, therefore, with a good Zhihu marketing strategy your business has the potential to be displayed on Baidu SERP.
Zhihu Copywriting Tips
💡Unlike KOLs on other Chinese social media platforms, the content contributors on Zhihu are often academic experts and professionals. For Chinese social media copywriting on Zhihu, you must make sure the person representing your brand is posting well-structured content that is both informative and educational.
#4 Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book)
Xiaohongshu, also known as Little Red Book, is the Chinese equivalent of Instagram, the best platform in China to share fashion tips, cosmetics, product reviews and discover premium quality brands.
Who are Little Red Book Users?
Compared with the dominating social media giant WeChat, Xiaohongshu is a much smaller channel skewing towards female and top-tier city users. As of 2020, Xiaohongshu has 100 million monthly active users, and 90% are female, 46% are under age 24. Most Xiaohongshu users are in tier 1 or tier 2 cities with strong purchasing power.
If you have a premium quality cross-border brand in skincare, cosmetics, and fashion targeting females, you can’t ignore the impact of Xiaohongshu marketing.
Xiaohongshu Copywriting Tips
💡Create genuine, personalized content that speaks to the heart of your female audience. Since Little Red Book has its algorithm, optimizing the keywords into your post title and main content is vital to secure better rankings. Don’t include external links that are trying to redirect the traffic to other platforms. The maximum length of Xiaohongshu post is 1,000 Chinese characters.
#5 Toutiao
Toutiao, abbreviated from Jinri Toutiao (Today’s Headlines), is a Chinese equivalent of Buzzfeed/Flipboard, an information and news aggregation platform with its algorithm.
Hailed as the content king in China, Toutiao displays personalized (user’s interests, location, phone model, browsing history) news feed selected by AI.
Who are Toutiao Users?
As of 2020, there’re 700 million registered users on Toutiao, and on average 120 million users use the app to read 200,000 articles and other multi-media content published on the platform every day. More than 85% of Toutiao users are younger than 35 based in the first tier and second tier cities.
Second only to Zhihu, Toutiao users are highly educated, 41.3% have a bachelor’s degree or above, and 37.8% are business owners or freelancers. The proportion of male and female users is 6:4.
Toutiao can be a powerful tool for marketing in China with its young, highly educated users that have more income allotted to consumption. Toutiao is a content-based app without other functions such as instant messaging, e-payment that can distract users’ attention.
Toutiao Copywriting Tips
💡Become a registered publisher on Toutiao, set the right criteria to reach your targeted audience (gender, age, location, etc.), and create personalized, fresh, and interactive Chinese social media copywriting.
Social Medial Platforms – International and Chinese Equivalents
Almost every international social media app has a Chinese equivalent. To help you choose the right platform and target the right audience, we’ve listed every Chinese equivalent of mainstream international social media platform.
| International | Chinese |
| WeChat 微信 | |
| Sina Weibo 新浪微博 | |
| Quora | Zhihu 知乎 |
| Little Red Book (Xiao Hong Shu) 小红书 | |
| Buzzfeed/Flipboard | Toutiao 头条 |
Frequently Asked Questions
What Social Media Do Chinese Use in 2024?
The most popular Chinese social media platforms in 2024 are WeChat, Sina Weibo, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu, Toutiao, etc.
What Chinese Use Instead of Instagram?
Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu 小红书) is the Chinese equivalent of Instagram.
What Do Chinese Use Instead of WhatsApp?
The most popular messaging APP in China, WeChat is the Chinese equivalent of WhatsApp.
What’s the Most Popular Social Media in China?
With over 1 billion monthly active users, WeChat is the most popular social media platform in China.
What Do Chinese Use Instead of YouTube?
Youku (优酷) is the Chinese equivalent of YouTube.
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