Many have asked me about international Social Media recently, especially strong interest in Chinese Social Media. Sure, there are strong arguments that this is a fast growing sector, if you think about it, there are over 300 million net users in China already (380 million if you include other Chinese speaking populations), this means, there are more Chinese Net-Citizens in China than the entire US population! Many are also predicting 500 million users by 2015, the figure itself is quite beyond imagination!

But what about freedom of speech and Internet media? They are of “grave” concerns to many marketers, and their concerns are quite valid. Recently, I asked my team based in China to conduct Facebook marketing for a client, and it has caused a lot of frustration as it takes 20 minutes to reload each Facebook page for her! In the end, I have to give up and rotate the task to our team based outside China.

Another good example is Video, YouTube is frequently banned and removed in China, and again, this is causing a lot of frustration for advertisers; as they are unable to reach the target consumers in China.

But these are what we call as “technical issues” and should not stop you to try out new campaigns. Indeed, Social Media Marketing is true and growing in China, although many are call it different terms - whilest Facebook maybe banned, there are millions of Blogs, Forums you can use in China!

Put it simply, China is a total different market, and what works in US and Western World, such as Google may not be the same in China. There are Chinese version Google, Chinese version Facebook, and Chinese version type LinkedIn websites, call them if they have copied the ideas or not, I do not know, but one thing for sure is all these sites have huge number of users, and serve great platforms for Social Media Marketing!

We have spent a lot of time and effort in putting these sites together, some are very basic, others are quite well organized with advanced contents management systems - we have used these forums / sites to increase our membership, and the result has been quite impressive!

If you are interested in Chinese Social Media Marketing, come and talk to us, we have now built an unique strategy and platform to assist you.