Social Networks – Alternatives in China
Lucas Liang | June 3, 2011Since 2009, most of the world’s famous social network sites are successively blocked within China. But as usual, if one service is no more accessible, a local alternative will start to emerge from the market.
What are the Chinese equivalents for the known social networks?
Social Network Site – Facebook type: RenRen and Kaixin001.
RenRen (人人网), previously called “XiaoNei”, started in May 1999 as an alumni system for the Chinese university students. The website works quite the same as Facebook, it reflects the real relationship of the students in Universities. XiaoNei provides to the students a platform to share contact information, send messages or organize events. The first requirement to have a XiaoNei account is that you must register with a university .edu email address, and limited to a block of IP address matching your school. This was the method XiaoNei used to assure that only students are in this network.
With the rise of Facebook, XiaoNei decided also to expand their service: in 2009, after years of the limitation on the students, XiaoNei decided to change the brand name to RenRen (direct translation: Everyone), and to remove this limitation and allow all people from the society to be able to create an account. The official reason for this is that most of the students have graduated and stepped into the society, and it’s more convenient for the graduated students to still log in to their XiaoNei account without this limit. But the real reason of this delimitation is that RenRen wishes to become a SNS serving the whole Chinese society, but not only to the students.
After the opening of the platform API, RenRen and other 3rd party web application development companies have developed thousands of RenRen applications, including blogging, photo sharing, music and video sharing, and therefore, gained many new users. In 2010, the number of RenRen registered users has passed over 150 million.
Kaixin001 (开心网) is the second most competitive Facebook alike social network in China. Unlike RenRen, Kaixin001 was not designed to serve only the students. Kaixin001 first targeted the young white collars, offers a platform to share updates of your status, blogs, moods, and most importantly: playing games. Kaixin001 has rapidly taken market share in 2009 with a vegetable stealing game. With an extremely easy control, and the ability to interact online with your real friends, the game not only grabbed the young white collars, but also other social groups with all ages, from college students to grandpa and grandma. The motto for Kaixin001 is “It’s good to be happy” and to “help more people be happier”. The game experience has surely done this. Until late 2010, the registered user of Kaixin001 has climbed up to 100 million, and active user counts to more than 50 million, weekly page views passes 8 billion, and daily time spent on the vegetable stealing game counts up to 1.5 billion minutes.
Micro-blogging site – Twitter type: Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, Sohu Weibo, NetEase Weibo…
Since summer 2009, Twitter and Facebook were successively blocked inside China, a vacuum of the social media presented among the Chinese internet users. This has surely left a vast space of development for the famous Chinese media portal website – Sina, for his new born micro blogging system, “新浪微博” (Sina Weibo).
Sina is one of the 4 leading Chinese content portal websites (the other 3 are Tencent, Sohu and NetEase). Sina’s registered user number counts more than 230 million, and daily visit number surpasses 700 million, which explains its popularity in Chinese internet market. Just like for other services blocked from China, when Twitter was no more connectable within China, Sina decided to create its own version on Micro blog. In August 2009, after 3 months of testing, Sina launches Sina Weibo, using t.sina.com.cn. This has soon attracted the attention of the Chinese internet users and other leading portal websites. Compared to Sina, the other 3 leading portal websites (Tencent, Sohu and NetEase) launches their micro blogging system until the beginning of 2010. Sina Weibo already took a great advantage at the starting line of the course, and it has become the now the main information source of a great number of Chinese internet users.
Sina Weibo has now become the No.1 micro-blogging service provider in China. According to the official stats of Sina, the total number of Weibo user has reached 100 million and over 25 million messages were sent daily. If based on online browsing time, Sina Weibo takes up to 87% of the Chinese micro blogging market.
Blog providers: Sina Blog, QQ Spaces, BlogCN …
The blog service provider in China has gone through some big ups and downs. It’s quite the same as what has happened to other blog provider in the world: in 1998, a blog about the Lewinsky and Clinton scandal was published. With the follow up of the main media, the blogging system has created its influence all around the globe.
In 2002, the famous Chinese Internet observer Fang Xingdong praised the Blogs broadly in China. His opinions have frequently appeared on “Southern Weekly” and other traditional medium. Fang created a blogging platform “博客网” in 2002. And then, the main content portal websites and other independent blog service providers have launched their blogging systems successively. This is the sign of the blogs entering the Chinese market.
During 2003 and 2005, the golden development period for the Chinese blogging systems, the main players on the Chinese blog market have emerged: BlogCN, BlogBus and BlogChina, Sina Blog, QQ Spaces… These are the local born Chinese blog service providers. Since 2003, Sina Blog has been well praised by a great number of Chinese internet users. QQ Spaces, based on the 400 million QQ users, also attracted many users.
However, with the entering of the new social media websites (Facebook, Twitter…), the blogging system without a specific profit pattern, started to appear obsolete… Most of the bloggers or blogging service providers had a difficult time to figure out a way to make profits with the blogs (except for Sina, who played well with the blog of celebrities, with a well developed advertising rewarding system). The form of only publishing articles has become less interesting for internet users, comparing to interacting with real friends, sharing videos, and other new experiences provided by the new social media. These signs of blogs going down do not mean that no one uses blog anymore. In March 26th, a famous writer Han Han published an open letter to Baidu CEO, and has earned several hundreds of thousands of clicks in one day. Tang Ke, a former senior engineer of Blogbus said: “If you want to express your opinions to people of different ages, there is no other better media than the blog.”
Companies in Social Media
Social network sites are not only toys for the individual internet users, companies are also interested in taking part in the social network activities.
Sina Weibo has created a brand list, for all the companies who have registered a micro blog account. Alibaba has created its Weibo list for all its sub brands: Alibaba, Taobao, AliPay, Koubei… All of these micro blogs have one common objective: create more buzz, gather more fans, so to reinforce the brand image. Alibaba has now gathered 1.8 million fans on all its micro blogs.
悦活 Lohas is another classic example of company using social networks to communicate their brand. When Kaixin001 launched the vegetable stealing game, Lohas contacted Kaixin001 for cooperation. They wished to create some virtual vegetables/fruits for the game, so people can grow them, and when they are rape, people can make juice with these vegetables/fruits. This was the communication they did for the new vegetable juice 悦活果汁.
This is the virtual tomato with the mark 悦活 Lohas. The player can plant these kind of vegetables in the farm, grow them, and finally make juice with them. Send the juice to your friends as a gift, and you can get the chance to have one real juice in the real world.
During spring festival 2011, in order to cooperate with the offline activities, Lohas launched a 3-aspect online social network campaign – “悦活年” (Lohas Year). 1st step: Start the official micro blog on Tencent. Together with the several topics launched about Lohas and about the New Year, this 1st step targeted to attract middle aged city white collars. In the mean time, launch the virtual vegetable representation Lohas Baby in the farming game of QQ Farm, communicating the “Nature First” message. Thirdly, combing with the minisite specially done for this event, and interacting with the users through micro blogs and QQ Farm, Lohas provided opportunity to turn your gaming results to real drinks. This activity has only stayed active during one month, but combining different social network sites, minisites and offline activity, Lohas has achieved a very optimistic communication result.
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