Challenges of Chinese Social Media Marketing

What you should know as a small business selling to China

So, I have started on my path to promote products to Chinese consumers in mainland China. Despite being a native Chinese, I do find myself scratching my head when using techniques that were found to be useful in the Western world but not so in the Chinese society.

Being away from the Chinese society for quite some time, I naively thought that simply setting up official WeChat and Weibo accounts will suffice. The idea of doing social media marketing in China is simple, but not easy. I’ll show you why:

1_ Western channels are blocked in China.

As the masses might have already known, popular platforms in the western world such as Youtube, Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc are blocked in China. There are naturally the Chinese equivalents of these platforms, with millions, if not billions, of users. To name a few: Weibo, WeChat, Baidu are the already-known ones in the western world.

E-commerce wise, we all know Alibaba and Aliexpress, as opposed to Amazon and eBay. Electronic payments in China are monopolised by Alipay (Paypal equivalent). If you want to ask something in a forum, there’s Zhihu (Quora equivalent), Zhidao, etc. Recently, I even found a Medium equivalent, that is TMTPost!

If you knew of these platforms already, you would have realised that you can only get access to the “international” side of things. That’d be international Alipay merchant, international Tmall, World Taobao, International WeChat account, etc. the list goes on.. This is probably their way of keeping foreign merchants away from the local crowd. A downside of having an International account could be that your products will not be found easily amidst the crowd. Take WeChat for example, the differences between an International account and a Chinese account are explained here. You might need to employ the service from a Chinese marketing agency to help you set up an official WeChat account if you don’t have personal connections or a representative in China.

2_ Heavy verification steps to set up an account.

Adding on to the previous point, there are many steps you have to take in order to verify your true identity. This is perhaps to ward off frauds and bots which have scammed many Chinese over the years. Multiple verifications might be advantageous for Chinese consumers but international merchants’ process of entering Chinese e-commerce sites has become cumbersome and tedious. Every little step takes long, and becomes a milestone that you actually want to “Prost!” to when accomplished.

You would be required to have a Chinese ID, Chinese bank account, and an active Chinese phone number, of which everything has to be under your name. Hence, if you don’t reside in China, you’d probably not have these documents. Most businesses just go with Chinese marketing agencies, pay a sum, and let them do the job. You’ll probably do likewise when you want to have a local brand presence in China. Otherwise, you’d be labelled as “international” everywhere you go. There’s nothing negative about it but you’ll need to boost your SEO a lot on Baidu and search engines to emerge from the crowd.

3_ Chinese social media users respond differently.

I have been tinkering around with mechanisms that are widely used by western social media marketers. From the smart use of hashtags, posting quality content regularly, to frantically following and unfollowing other users on Twitter, Instagram, etc. It always worked. When I did the same for Weibo, nothing worked.

One trick I’ve tried was to take advantage of Chinese New Year where many well-known Weibo accounts were giving out red packets (Chinese tradition of giving out red envelopes with unknown amount of money inside). I set out an activity to gain followers by saying, “if you follow and share one article of my account, you will get a red packet from me.” Indeed, my followers increased by 20% overnight. Recalling what I’ve learnt from the core drive of unpredictability and uncertainty, I realised Chinese social media channels do have a lot of gamified elements in them. So, watch out for window periods of mega sales and don’t be stingy on giving away deals. You may earn a lot of followers and buyers instantly.

Having said all of the above, the challenges don’t end here. Follow me on my journey to discover more. Stay tuned.

Also, don’t hesitate to comment below what you’d love to hear from me! Every day is a lesson for me.