This document provides an overview of Chinese social media in 2011. It discusses the history and growth of social networks like RenRen and microblogs like Sina Weibo. By 2011, China had over 235 million social network users and 294 million blogs. RenRen was one of the largest social networks at the time with over 165 million users, while Sina Weibo was the dominant microblogging platform with over 140 million registered users. The document contrasts features of these Chinese platforms to Western sites like Facebook and Twitter and highlights their role in online expression in Chinese society.

1. CHINESE
SOCIAL MEDIA
PRESENTED BY: ADAM ZHANG
Client Strategy and Innovation Intern
Adam.zhang@socialmediagroup.com

2. AGENDA
 History
 Year of 2011
 Social Networks
 RenRen
 Microblogs
 Sina Weibo
Background:
Global Map of Social Networking 2011
Designed by Rikard Andresen, global web index

3. HISTORY
3

4. TIMELINE Data
from
CIC
1994
1999
2002
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
Social Media Penetration Trend
*Million
Users
4

5. PATH Data
from
CIC
ADOPT . INNOVATE . EXPLODE .
485,000,000
Internet Users
PATH

6. V.S WORLD
Data
from
Internetworldstats.com
TOP 10 COUNTRIES WITH HIGHEST NUMBER OF INTERNET USERS
percentage of population
36% of the Chinese Population
Percentage of the world
23% of the World Netizen
6

7. YEAR OF 2011
BeiJing

8. BY 2011 Data
from
CIC
Over…..
235 million social network users,
294 million blogs,
181 million bloggers,
148 million bulletin board systems (BBS)
284 million online video users
8

9. CHINESE SOCIAL MEDIA LANDSCAPE 2011
Data
from
CIC
9

10. MAJOR PLAYERS Data
from
TechRice
&
D/BM
China
MAJOR
PLAYER
S
Baidu search engine has over 90% of the market
share
Tecent QQ is the biggest IM software, with
700 million users
Alibaba Taobao is the biggest B2C & C2C
eCommerce website
Sina runs the biggest blog &
microblog community
Youku is the biggest video website
10

11. Great Wall
SOCIAL NETWORKS

12. TOP SOCIAL NETWORKS
 Founded in December 2005
 Founded in March 2008
 Founded in March 2005
 Claims to have over 165  Over 90 million  Claims to have over
million registered users
registered users
388 million registered
 Mostly university students.  Mostly white collar users
Now more and more white workers from urban  Mostly teenagers and
collars are joining RenRen
area such as Shanghai
rural users
 Owned by Oak Pacific  Biggest thing is Social  Owned by Tencent Inc.
Interactive
gaming and virtual
goods

13. RENREN BACKGROUND
Dec.2005 Xiaonei.com (meaning “On Campus”) was created by Wang Xing. Oct.2006 Sold
to Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI) for 4 Million U.S dollars. Nov.2007 Expanded market to
white-collar workers. April.2008 OPI successfully raised 430 million U.S dollars. Dec.2008
Xiaonei.com adopted new logo. July.2009 Xiaonei.com released open app platform. Aug.
2009 Changed name to RenRen.com (meaning “Everyone”). May.2011 RenRen.com IPO in
Nasdaq, successfully raised $743.4 million U.S dollars. RenRen.com Now has over 160
million registered users and growing.
Oct.2006
April.2008
July.2009
May.2011
DEC.2005
Nov.2007
Dec.2008
Aug.2009

14. RENREN PROFILE PAGE -1 News feeds are categorized
into different sections. Special
Attention only shows feeds
from Special Friends.
Highlight #1
VIP Status is one of the most Highlight #2
important royalty programs
Recent Visitors section
on RenRen. You have to
shows who visited your
login everyday for certain
profile recently.
period of time to become the
The feature is useful for
basic VIP. It allows more
flirting.
features such as customizing
profile page. You can also
become VIP by spending
RenRen Beans- RenRen’s Highlight #3
Virtual Currency.
Social ads allow video
Highlight #4
content, which shows
directly once clicked.
You can set
specific
friends as
Special This section is only for
Friend. RenRen public page
Special promotions.
Friends will
always show
at the top of
your profile
page.
Bottom tool bar allows users
to see live activities from Upcoming friends’
friends, such as commenting birthday always shown
on photos, or leaving a wall on the page.
message.

15. RENREN PROFILE PAGE -2
Social ads here link to 3rd
party website such as
company website or blogs.
Highlight #5
RenRen keeps record of
visitors to your page.
Number of visitors
determines popularity.
The bottom part of the page
always show the most popular
users among your community.
15

16. RENREN GROUP & PUBLIC PAGE
Highlight #6
Basic information
RenRen Group is about the group.
quite different
from Facebook. It
works like a mini-
forum, where
members can
start threads and
discussions.
(More like a
Linkedin Group)
Highlight #7
Companies
cannot set up a
public page
without RenRen’s
approval. This is
part of their
Revenue Source.
Left Bar Shows the
most popular public
Public pages are
pages.
categorized into
different sections.

17. 17
NIKE PAGE

18. 18
TOSHIBA COMPUTER PAGE

19. MAJOR DIFFERENCE FROM FACEBOOK
The majority of RenRen’s revenue
comes from corporate pages,
social gaming, and virtual goods.
As well as social ads and
marketing campaigns.

20. MICROBLOGS
HangZhou

21. TOP MICROBLOGS
Sina Weibo
Tencent Weibo
MICROBLOGS MARKET SHARE
 More than 140 million  Claims to have 160
registered users
million registered users
 Mainly white collar  Mainly teenagers, 2nd
workers from urban and 3rd tier city users
area
 Mainly exiting users
 Elite-based-celebrities,
from Tencent QQ
media figures and
corporations
 22% of the total market
 57% of the total market share
share
 9% of the total
 87% of the total browsing time (2010)
browsing time (2010)

22. SINA WEIBO BACKGROUND
Sina runs the Biggest & Most Influential Blog Community
Top celebrities, public figures, politicians
Primary example:
Han Han
Ranked #2 in Time Ranked #25 in Fast More than 460
Magazine’s 100 Company 100 Most Million Visitors to his
most influential Creative People in blog hosted on Sina
people of 2010, and Business 2011
the world’s most
popular blogger
Leverage the exiting user base: star blogs, celebrities, etc.
Video
2010 “Year of the Microblog in China”

23. SINA WEIBO MAIN PAGE
Access to Weibo Square, Micro
Groups, Applications and Game
Centre.
Shows latest
comments,
Highlight #1
RTs and DM
Weibo allows much more received from
types of media content such followers.
as video, photo, or music.
Badges are one of
the royalty programs
Express much more with 140
offered by Weibo.You
characters in Chinese than many
can receive different
other languages. Allows 280
types of badges
English character.
based on different
Social Ads. Companies criteria.
Highlight #2
can create campaign
Media contents page on Weibo.
such as videos,
photos are visually
attached to each Top trending
tweets, they can be topics.
easily viewed
without leaving the
page. As well as Highlight #3
Retweets.
Number of RTs, Retweet shows
Comments can the original
be easily found tweet with all
under each entry.
the original
Highlight #4
comments and
Comments RTs. You can
and Replies add a full 140
listed under characters on
the entry, like top of the
traditional original tweet.
blog.

24. OTHER FEATURES
Highlight #5
Highlight #6
Sina offers two types of Virtual currency: Sina
verified account: Personal Weibi (micro currency)
(orange) and Institutional to purchase virtual
(blue).
goods.
Highlight #7
Highlight #8
You can create and ask users to join Micro Groups. It Not only apps, Sina Weibo also offers social games.
is like Facebook Group which allows you to see You can share latest scores, view ranks on specific
members’ latest tweets within the group.
games, etc.

25. CAMPAIGN EXAMPLE : LIVE Q&A
Shows date and
time of the Live
Q&A Session
Click to ask a
question or view
the past
question. Tweet
will be shown on Guest user
news feed.
featured in this
Q&A session

26. SINA WEIBO V.S TWITTER Data
from
HP
Labs
Top 10 Followed Users
Grass Root Celebs on Weibo
Rank
Weibo
Followers
Twitter
Follwers
1
Chen Yao
10,824,244
Lady Gaga
12,744,068
2
Xidi Xu
9,774,844
Justin Bieber
11,995,297
3
Kangyong Cai
8,655,952
Barak Obama
9,741,427
4
Na Xie
8,335,855
Katy Perry
9,239,141
5
Wei Zhao
8,253,130
Kim Kardashian
9,111,765
6
Jong He
8,246,497
Britney Spears
9,077,878
7
Ming Yang
8,068,048
Shakira
7,742,819
8
Bingbing Li
7,891,438
Taylor Swift
7,549,211
9
Kun Chen
7,502,214
Ashton Kutcher
7,445,541
10
Jianxiang Huang
7,117,866
Ellen DeGeneres
7,338,445
Top 10 Retweeted Users
Rank
Weibo
Retweets
RT Ratio
Twitter
Retweets
RT Ratio
1
Urban Fashion Magazine
1,194,999
99,583.25
vovo_panico
11,688
179.81
2
Fashion Brand VANCL
849,404
65,338.77
cnnbrk
8,444
100.52
3
Online Trend Magazine
127,737
57,987.48
keshasuja
5,110
100.19
4
Gourmet Factory
553,586
46,132.17
LadyGonga
4,580
84.81
5
Horoscopes
1,545,955
40,683.13
BreakingNews
8,406
84.06
6
Silly Jokes
3,210,130
39,631.23
MLB
3,866
62.35
7
Good Movies
1,497,968
39,420.21
nytimes
2,960
50.17
8
Wonderful Quotes
602,528
35,442.82
HerbertFromFG
2,693
46.43
9
Global Music
697,308
31,695.81
ESPN
2,371
35.92
10
Funny Jokes Countdown
366,7566
30,310.49
globovision
2,668
35.57
26

27. SINA WEIBO V.S TWITTER Quotes
from
HP
Labs
&
TechRice
KEY FINDING #1
“ In China [onmediaWeibo], the trendsjokes,created almost entirely due to ”
retweets of
Sina
content such as
are
images and videos, whereas
on Twitter, the trends tend to have more to do with current global
events and news stories.
KEY FINDING #2
“ The number of retweets that than the get on Sina Weibo are several ”
orders of magnitude greater
authors
retweets for the trending topics
on Twitter, although they contribute to fewer topics.
KEY FINDING #3
“ We also observe that there are more unverified accounts among the
top 100 trend-setters on Sina Weibo than on Twitter and most of the ”
unverified accounts feature discussion forums for user-contributed
jokes, images and videos.
27

28. LATEST UPDATE Data
from
TechRice
VERSION 4.0 – DESIGNED FOR MARKETERS
New Top Bar Design，Three Columns Layout, Photo Albums，Corporate Account，Real Time Search….
Social Ads
DATA
R-T Search
Mobile
Social Gaming
eCommerce
28

29. THANK YOU !
“ In a society where the collective has
long been emphasized over the
individual, first thanks to Confucian
values and then because of
communism, these sites have
created fundamentally new platforms
”
for self-expression.

30. ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA GROUP
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