Weibo and WeChat are the two must have in China. Without them, you are basically lost and can’t do much. Nevertheless, we forget that they aren’t the only social medial platforms available on the market. Companies keep forgetting that to branch out socially they need to seek for new niche networks to allow them to reach more and more followers. Indeed, most of the firms are focusing on only one social media. 37% on two and 30% on three. That’s a lack of communication when you see how many people are online 24/7.
If the brands need to get known, especially in China, they should consider new websites and apps. Every social network has its own crowd. Therefore, it is important to know which one is the most relevant to your target and establish yourself on it.
Not all the social media are interesting to everyone. For the luxury sector, RenRen has been a huge flop. There are only Calvin Klein and Lacoste which are still active on this platform. We have analysed 4 of them that show some potential for the luxury industry and will be very useful should a brand wants to improve her communication.
Youku
Luxury brands need video media to buzz and convince more people. Therefore, this video platform is a must have and way much more accurate than WeChat. Even if small companies don’t have the financial ressources to make TV commercial style videos, they can still post short mini-movie, interviews, catwalk or even product’s craftmanship. It has a big impact on viewers and appearance of celebrity is guaranteed to make some noise as well. Cartier’s 90-second Tank MC mini-movie with the famous Hong Kong actor Andy Lau gathered a crowd of 2.4 million views.
Weishi
Tencent lauched this app in September 2013 and has been quite a success. It has been ranked in the three most-downloaded social networking apps in Itunes from the end of 2013 to the end of last February. It’s a Vine and Instagram video app used already by some luxury brands, including Burberry which used it to promote its Shanghai flagship opening event. All the short video have been seen by around 6,000 viewers.
Tuding
Tuding is another Instagram competitor which is its positive and negative points, especially because of the huge number of competitors in China. It allows users to import photo-tagging, it integrates other social networks (like Sina Weibo and WeChat) and even have a location tagging. The luxury brand Coach installed itself pretty well on this platform with over 48,000 fans
Douban
This online platform is older than most of the current application. It has been lauched in 2005 and attract more intellectuals. It’s mostly discussion about cultural even in China, film, book, music… The website had around 172 million of users in 2013 which is considerable. Nevertheless, the results has been torn though. Montblanc count more than 340,000 followers and over 400,000 visits on Douban. Concerning Coach, it’s reaching 212,000 followers. But other luxury brands are not successful on this platform. For example, Bottega Veneta had only 6,000 views for the New Year’s campaign, which is disappointing. Only 60% of the brands are active on this social media… That’s the reason why there are only 13% of the luxury brands using Douban and it has been decreasing by 2% over the past year.
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Good read! It is true about WeChat and Weibo, those are the kings on social media in China, and also good to know which other platforms are out there waiting for brands to be present there.
Besides these new platforms, I insist in the importance that WeChat has. Why? Is barely new for western brands, and they are starting to explore it and trying to manage it fully.
In Fashionbi we published a research about WeChat, where we can see that a lot of brands, specially premium and luxury, have presence on the platform, and in that way, they are gaining more Chinese consumers and sales. And although there is not a ‘magic recipe’ to succeed in the platform, i can see the efforts that fashion brands are making in order to reach those customers.
Definitely this is just the beginning of the app in the fashion industry, we’ll see how the future comes and how companies react to the WeChat phenomenon.