Top China Social Media Platforms and Websites
Chinese internet users don’t really use well known western social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, unless they connect via a VPN.
Given that Gmail, Google+ and the video sharing platform YouTube are hard to reach as well, it has created great opportunities for chinese internet companies like Tencent and Baidu.
Let’s take a closer look at the leading social media platforms in China.
What are the leading social media platforms in China?
(Million users)
With 829 million users, QQ remains the leading social media platform in China.
QQ: 829 million users
Qzone: 629 million users
WeChat: 468 million users
Baidu Tieba: 300 million users
Sina Weibo: 167 million users
QQ Online Messaging Platform – adopted by 829 million users.
As one of the biggest internet actor in China, the company Tencent became famous in 1999 for having developed the messaging software QQ, involving features such as text messages, video, voice chat and files sending stuffs.
The company then extended QQ’s features to social gaming, music, microblogging and even online purchasing.
Qzone Chinese Micro blogging – social media platform in China- 629 million users.
Also developed by Tencent, Qzone is a 644 million monthly active users social platform gathering blogging features, photo sending but also videos and other things.
WeChat – The messaging App and its exponential growth- 468 million users.
WeChat is probably the social App that has shown the most spectacular growth over last periods.
Created in 2011, it took one year for Tencent to reach an impressive 50 million users – things went even faster starting april 2012 when “WeiXin” became “WeChat”, nearly doubling its monthly number of users, dramatically increasing to seduce more than 300 million users in 2013, 468 million users at the end of 2014.
The Chinese social media particularities – Great opportunities for local internet actors
As VPN connection is needed to connect to most of the censored social media platform, you won’t be able to connect to Facebook unless using a Virtual Private Network or proxy server..
Technically, using a VPN will make the transmitted data encrypted (in theory), and potentially hide your real connection location toward servers you go through browsing the web.
China’s Online Global Advertisement Revenues
Every of these social media platforms gather lots of users, they are also a great way to attract advertisers who seems more and more interested in this new mobile internet usage.
Smartphone owners are mainly young, with a quite decent purchasing power – that’s a pretty good target for advertisement activity.
RMB 154 Billion global online Ad revenues in China – 2014
209 billion yuans forecasted revenues in 2015, it could even double within the next 4 years.
The online advertisement is going well, especially in China – and latest surveys seems to show a steady growth of its related revenues (forecasted to reach something like 393 billion yuans in 2018).
China’s Social Media Perception
According to the research firm Kantar, 64.7% of chinese web users have a positive opinion of chinese social media platforms.
The year before they were 76.8%. Let’s wait next year figures and know how social media will be perceived.
Meanwhile, at Sekkei Studio we all agree on one thing – Internet social things are really a significant improvement, we even think we can’t do without it anymore..
America and many countries aoscrs Europe. However, the leading social network in China is Qzone and according to China Internet Watch, the social network has over 500 million active users as of 2011. Social media sites such as
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