1. Social Media in China August 2011

3. 181 million bloggers

4. 117 million bulletin board systems

5. 235 million social network users.

6. 879 million mobile phone subscribers

7. 304 million online gamers

9. In terms of education, users with high school or a TAFE equivalent degree make up 38.3% of users, while 16.1% of total users have university degrees.

10. Students make up more than one in three of all social media users, followed by junior office staff (17%).

12. 56% are male

13. 27% live in rural areas

14. 88% access the web from home

15. 66% access the web from their smartphones

16. The average web usage per user per day is 150 minutes

17. Users between 18-27 spend an average of 5 hours a day

18. 92% visit social media sites at least 3 times per week

19. 87% have ‘friended’ or followed a brand

22. Membership: Users must pay an annual membership fee to join.

23. Traffic: Qzonedraws traffic from QQ Messenger (like the chinese version of MSN)

24. Target Market: Teens, Rural, and casual users

25. Gaming: Low quality; Qzone develops in-house copies of popular games, but prohibits users from adding games without paying at certain times.

26. Financing: Tencent, Qzone’s parent company, is massively profitable and can employ incredible resources should it so desire.

27. Business strategy: There is a lack of advertising and quality games,and nothing equivalent to business fan pages on Facebook. The only way to advertise would be to set up a member profile in the business name.

28. Other information:

29. Pengyou is the official name of Qzone’s social networking site, however it is regularly referred to as Qzone or QQ

30. It holds the teen demographic, but poor site design and management have cost it ground against its competitors. Qzone is shut out of the market for older students and white-collar workers, and RenRen is now encroaching on its core demographic of teens

31. A closed platform, meaning that developers can’t alter the HTML code to customise pages.

33. Membership: Free to join.

34. Target Market: White Collar Workers.

35. Gaming: Was the first site to launch the social gaming craze in China and its users love them. It now lags behind Renren in terms of quality since it doesn’t allow for third party developers to create games. Only around 50 apps.

36. Financing: The network commands a large, high-value audience, and it has strong ties to the Sina Corporation, so being acquired is a possibility (Sina holds a stake in Kaixin001 and Binghao is a former Sina CTO).

37. Business strategy: Kaixin001 has seen rapid growth and has captured a desirable demographic of white-collar workers which is appealing to advertisers. A mix of business profile and paid advertising would be suggested.

38. Other information:

39. Kaixin’s users spend twice as much time on the site compared to other networks.

40. Its interface is very clean and simple – like a pared down version of Facebook, with minimal advertising.

42. Membership: Free to join, must use real name.

43. Target Market: Majority of users are students although Renren strives to retain those users after graduation.

44. Gaming: More than 250 apps (almost all games) and has the most and best in the China market. The umbrella group, Oak Pacific Interactive, is building an empire on top of Renren. Renren users are channeled toward Oak Pacific Games (gaming is the traditional cash cow for China’s Internet).

45. Financing: In the process of offering an initial public offering sometime in 2011 or 2012

46. Business strategy: Renren’s primary revenue comes from advertising (similar to the Facebook ads) and (again similar to Facebook), you can create a fan page for your business howeverRenren is strong when it comes to monetization. Brand campaigns are sold to companies at high prices. Fan pages, while free on Facebook, start at 600,000 yuan (about $90,000).

47. Other information:

48. Renren’sdesign and business model are copied from Facebook – whenever Facebook brings out a new app or change, Renren follows suit. One unique feature to Renren is that it shows a ‘footprint’ of the last person to visit your profile.

49. Application programming is open source, and users can have customised themes for their profiles.

50. Renren is actively developing advertising, gaming and e-commerce revenues, and is set to become the largest network in China.

52. Membership: Free to join.

53. Target Market: Similar to twitter, a mix of general interest microbloggers to business users in main metropolitan areas.

54. Gaming: Like twitter, no gaming platforms at the moment.

55. Financing: SinaWeibo has more than 70 million registered users, expects to keep growing rapidly, and perhaps even exceeds Twitter in active users. This explosive growth has brought the value of the network up to an estimated $2 billion.

56. Business strategy: Sina, also the owner of China’s largest portal site, has lofty ambitions for Weibo that could compete with traditional social networks. It’s constantly experimenting with new features and already seems to have stolen away much of Kainxin001s audience.

57. Other information:

58. SinaWeibo is a microblog that far surpasses Twitter in functionality (threaded comments, groups, audio messages and direct video uploads)

60. Resources http://asiancorrespondent.com/61403/ http://www.chinainternetwatch.com/category/statistics/ http://www.etravelblackboard.com/article/121881/social-media-needs-to-better-target-china-sinotech http://mashable.com/2011/03/18/china-top-social-network/ http://www.chinasocialgames.com/?p=372 http://www.chinainternetwatch.com/whitepaper/ http://www.sinotechblog.com.cn/index.php/component/content/article/56-opinion/585--what-chinese-social-media-will-look-like-in-2012 http://www.symphony3.com/_blog/Online_Business_Strategy_And_Digital_Marketing/post/Social_Media,_Web20_and_eCommerce_in_China/