Zhihu: a Marketing Guide to the largest Q&A platform in China
Zhihu is a well-known and trusted Q&A community on the Chinese Internet. It is committed to building a knowledge-sharing network that everyone can easily access, allowing people to easily share knowledge, experience, and insights with the world and discover a larger world.
Although there are also other websites providing a question-and-answer type of service, namely Baidu, Zhidao, and Soso Wenwen among others, Zhihu generates more trust between its users and it’s what most of the Chinese community believes to be the most reliable.
As Zhihu is a great platform for marketing in China, we’re going to take a deep look at the platform, how it works, and how it can be used for marketing.
Table of Contents:
• What is Zhihu?
• Overview of Zhihu’s basic features.
• Why is Zhihu a good tool for digital marketing in China?
• Key benefits of marketing on Zhihu.
• How To Do Zhihu Marketing: Tips.
What is Zhihu?
Launched in January 2011, Zhihu (知乎) is a Chinese socialized question-and-answer website. On this platform, the Chinese equivalent of the American website Quora, questions are created, answered, and edited by the community. Its popularity has grown remarkably in recent years, and today Zhihu is China’s top Q&A-inspired online community with over 85 million monthly active users in the first quarter of 2021.
The platform allows users to explore and enjoy a variety of content from daily lifestyle and entertainment topics to sophisticated knowledge and expertise. Users, mainly experts and professionals from various industries, can write articles, join discussions, read e-magazines, give online presentations about specific topics, and interact with an audience in real-time. Besides facilitating Q&As, Zhihu offers also premium content, live videos and audio, and online education for sharing knowledge.
Overview of Zhihu’s basic features.
Zhihu stands out from its competitors not only by providing high-quality questions and credible answers. Unlike other platforms, Zhihu has also developed functions that have been able to enhance the credibility that the platform offers.
1. Account & Personal Profile
Just like WeChat, Zhihu offers the ability to apply for different account types. Personal accounts can be set up either inside or outside of China, while Organizational or Brand accounts need a Chinese business license to be opened.
On Zhihu, users can build their personal profiles. By providing basic information such as location, education background, and work experience, readers can determine whether or not the answers they are getting are from a credible source. The platform has a complex identity authentication system and requires users to submit relevant documents for verification to prevent impersonation and ensure authentic information sharing. Zhihu also provides specific badges as a reward to incentivize interactions and identify professional users.
2. Salt Value
Established in 2018 Zhihu “Salt value” is a user credit system designed to incentivize good behavior and allows users to grow and build their influence. The system is made up of ratings in 5 different categories, each evaluating a specific aspect of users behavior:
- Credibility built through building out profile information.
- Content creation, determined by the quantity and quality of content created on the platform.
- Friendliness, relating to civility towards members of the Zhihu community.
- Community behavior around compliance with official terms of service.
- Community-building derived from how much a user contributes to the monitoring and curation of content.
Different credit scores also impact on the users’ privileges: users with a high salt score are granted extra rights and access to more advanced community services, while users with a low score may have their content shown to fewer people and be deprived of the right to comment.
3. Zhihu Membership
Zhihu has two membership options for users, “The Reading Club Membership” and “The Salt Elected Membership”. The Reading Club Membership provides access to more knowledge-based information, such as e-books, live streams, and webinars. The Salt Elected Membership includes more social benefits, such as customer care, exclusive emojis, and a membership badge.
4. Zhihu University
Zhihu University offers a wide range of paid services, such as live online courses, audiobooks, magazines, and training camps. The content covers general knowledge, professional knowledge, and topics related to people’s interests and hobbies.
One of its main features is the Zhihu Bookstore. This online library is a database of all the best questions and answers content on Zhihu. The platform regularly collects them under different categories and compiles them according to topics and themes in a series of publications, namely “The Zhihu Weekly Magazine”, “1-hour E-Books” and “The Zhihu Salt-Selection”.
5. Zhihu Live
Zhihu Live is an interactive live streaming session similar to college classes. Users pay a small fee to join a one-hour lecture on general or specific topics. Participants can ask questions and get answers through a real-time chat tool, which facilitates effective learning and the spread of knowledge.
6. Zhihu Roundtable
Roundtables are online webinars that bring together people who specialize in a given topic. In each roundtable session, 1 host and 4 guests reputable in their respective industries are invited to share industry knowledge in a particular field. Similar to traditional offline panel talks, the audience is allowed to ask and raise questions or comment on the answers they receive.
7. Zhihu Columns
For those who want to create in-depth content about a specific topic, the platform launched Zhihu Column. This feature allows individuals and brands to publish long articles and share professional knowledge on specific topics, such as Finance, Economics, Science, Technology, Psychology, Travel, Household, etc.
To have their own Column, users should submit an application and wait for Zhihu approval.
8. Zhihu Paid-Consultancy Services
Professionals who have a salt value of 500 or more can earn extra income on the platform by providing consulting services in their field of knowledge. Zhihu users can choose to pay to consult with specific users, and consultants can answer their questions with voice recordings. An extra amount can be paid for follow-up questions. If the answer is not satisfactory or if the question is not answered within 72 hours, the asker is entitled to get a refund of their money.
In order to make paid consulting a solution to more knowledgeable friends, in 2021 Zhihu has launched new activities around the nodes with strong consulting demand, i.e. workplace, fashion, and education.
Through screen opening, search, private messages, official answers, etc., high-quality respondents are accurately recommended to knowledgeable friends with potential consultation needs and get more exposure, attention, consultation order volume, and revenue.
Why is Zhihu a good tool for digital marketing in China?
Zhihu is a powerful marketing tool that offers brands in specific fields the ability to target a unique audience that is searching for useful and credible information. The majority of Zhihu’s 85 million monthly active users are between 18 and 35 years old and live in China’s 1st and 2nd tier cities. This audience interacts with knowledge and personal experience, which most influence the decision-making process of consumers, making Zhihu an attractive digital marketing channel for B2B companies both for branding and lead generation.
Overall, Zhihu is a well-worth marketing channel for organizations that have already established their digital marketing foundations in China, including a Chinese website along with a WeChat account.
Key benefits of marketing on Zhihu.
Zhihu can help your marketing activity by driving awareness for your brand, generating high-quality content that is shareable on social media, and improving your organic ranking on Chinese search engines.
- Raise Awareness & Build Trust. Establishing an official account is a way for brands to engage the community, generate interaction, and enhance brand awareness. Once trust is established, Q&A topics can easily go viral through word-of-mouth across the community, which may help you gain credibility and trust from users.
KOL (Key Opinion Leaders) campaigns can also help you to establish your brand on the platform. Relevant people such as CEOs, Product Managers, or specialists in a field that affects your target audience will give your brand more credibility. - SEO exposure: By having a very high domain authority on search engines like Baidu, Zhihu is an effective tool to improve search engine optimization. Generally, at least one Zhihu page is displayed on a Baidu Search Engine Results (SERP) page. This means that whenever a keyword is searched for on Baidu, you will most likely always see a Zhihu Q&A on the first SERP. By developing your strategy and increasing brand awareness on Zhihu you increase your chances of being displayed on the Baidu SERP and thus increase your visibility, no matter what the date of publication is.
How To Do Zhihu Marketing: Tips.
1. Open a Zhihu Enterprise Account.
A professional profile is an essential first step to establishing your brand.
You can register for a Zhihu Enterprise account free of charge by following a very strict process meant to ensure the user experience is not disrupted by fake advertising. After the account is set up, it will be reviewed on an annual basis and be subjected to the same strict checking process again.
2. Engage the Community to build Brand reputation.
Engage with the industry audience by actively participating in Q&A. To generate interest, you can reach out to other Zhihu users, search for answerable questions, or create discussable topics and lead users to answer them. The better the quality of the questions and answers are, the more the account can benefit by increasing its brand awareness and building customer engagement in the targeted area. Brand’s Q&A participation is very important, also as it can act as a traffic driver to the brand’s account page.
Tip: When answering questions, do it in a professional manner. Add some supporting materials (graphs, pictures, and videos) to make the answer clear and credible.
3. Produce professional learning materials.
As we said, Zhihu users want to improve themselves and acquire more knowledge through the platform. Try to co-operate with Zhihu University to produce useful learning materials, such as live streaming sessions and magazines.
4. Leverage KOLs to Enhance Credibility & Reach.
Another way to approach marketing on Zhihu is cooperating with KOLs to write tailored content. Working with KOLs is indeed a great way to break through to the desired audience.
Tip: Focus on working with KOLs relevant to your brand’s industry scope to achieve the best results.
5. Use Zhihu paid Advertising.
When paired with quality content, paid advertisements may be an efficient way to increase brand awareness and drive users to take a specific action. Promoting your brand brings more immediate reactions than Q&A marketing as it clearly exposes it to the targeted audience. Brands can select different packages of bids, including CPM, CPC, or OCPC, depending on the goal.
Let’s discover the 3 most popular types of advertising on Zhihu:
- Pop-up Advertisements. Zhihu features pop-up display advertisements. This solution is particularly useful for catching users’ attention as it pops up immediately upon opening the app. You can further add value to your advertisement by adding an “interactive function”, such as a “click here” button that directs users to a dedicated page.
Overall, open-screen advertisement is one of the most popular forms of advertising on Zhihu and has a great effect on brand publicity exposure. The billing method is mainly calculated by CPM.
- Newsfeed Advertisements. Newsfeed advertisements are integrated within the explore page’s feed. You can customize the content of the promoted posts by adding special text or pictures to deliver a specific message.
Compared to pop-up advertisements, newsfeed advertisements are more detailed as businesses can insert more text and multiple pictures. To maximize your marketing efforts you can add more action-oriented buttons to create campaigns with multiple goals, such as encouraging app downloads or inviting viewers to register for product samples.
- Display Advertisements. Zhihu also provides traditional display advertisements, shown on internal search pages and homepages, which boosts viewership compared to newsfeed advertisements.
Zhihu also adopts a targeted strategy to accurately calculate the correlation between users and advertisements that further enhance the effect of display advertising and achieve maximum brand exposure through precise placement.
Conclusions
As a popular Q&A platform, Zhihu allows people to exchange meaningful knowledge and is a place where users can feel part of a community. This can offer many opportunities to Companies that have a lot of information and expertise they can share with users.
Being present on Zhihu will allow you to raise awareness in an authentic way, educating your target audience on your brand and products, and building a long-term relationship with your target market.
