TRENDS IN CHINESE SOCIAL MEDIA

At PingPong Digital we live and breathe social media, our in-house team of social media kung fu masters create awesome new content for our clients on a daily basis, eating creativity and drinking analytics. But what does this vast and at often times confusing platform offer? And what are the current trends on Weibo and Wechat? Weibo is a massive platform with over 500 million accounts and almost 100 million active users. Apart from its status as a twitter facebook hybrid, Weibo also offers a lot more rich media functionality and some really awesome features that set it aside from it’s western cousins. One very popular method of communicating on Weibo has been to use a “long” Weibo (chang Weibo), this is where a post includes a newsletter style attachment to accompany the regular 140 characters. These newsletters will often vary in formatting, sometimes taking the form of a long infographic, but one universal characteristic of a long Weibo is that is contains a lot of information, something Chinese netizens prefer, as opposed to oversimplified and compressed information, the more the better. This has now also extended to Wechat where a long newsletter style post is popular on service and subscription accounts, and in return for this rich content, these posts often receive a high read percentage. A unique feature in Weibo is the ability to upload 9 images to one post, and have all these 9 images visible at the same time (as shown below), giving you the ability to create some awesome content that utilises all 9 image slots, especially when you use gif’s. Speaking of gif’s, these have started to become more and more popular on western social media platforms recently, such as twitter and facebook, but have long been a hallmark of Chinese social media for many years and still remain very popular, with the creation of gif games and interactive gif ads. The possibilities are endless! (unless you need audio).  

  #duang# I wrote about Duang previously, and like Twitter hashtags are all the rage in Chinese social media (although still not as widely use, and certainly not in the same way as Twitter). Just using one word hashtags is not very common, instead Chinese hashtags tend to be short phrases, and usually there will only be one hashtag per post so it’s very important to get this right. And also very important to be on trend with the latest phrases and nuances as these change often, and correct usage demonstrates that you are in-touch with these hot fashionable new terms, and can often attract more followers to your account. These are just a couple of the top trends that can be seen on Weibo and Wechat, are there any trends you have noticed on Weibo or Wechat? If you would like to learn more then please feel free to drop us an email info@pingpongdigital.comJimmy Robinson