Last year, a few members of The Practice team headed to China to explore this fascinating country. Aside from experiencing new cultures, the trip also gave us a chance to see just exactly what the younger generations do when it comes to interacting through social media. With Facebook, Twitter and YouTube all banned, we experimented with unblocking, and discovered a host of alternative platforms in the meantime.

With a population exceeding 1 billion and a booming economy, it’s no surprise that China is the world’s largest social media market; 600 million people are Internet users, with more than half of these active on social platforms. Facebook itself isn’t wholly popular in China, accounting for just 0.04% of Chinese users, which works out at around 600,000 of the country’s citizens. This in part is due to the fact that it’s blocked, but also that there are many more local alternatives on offer. Surprisingly though, Twitter comes out on top as the country with the most users, (35.5 million), despite the fact that it too is banned. So how do the locals get around these firewalls, and what did we do during our visit? Thankfully, there are ways around the restrictions, with a host of apps allowing you to change your virtual private network (VPN) settings so you can access Western sites. We were recommended to try Astrill and Onavo, which act as Internet “shields” for both desktop and iPhone. Prices start at a reasonable 9-10 dollars per month, but we opted for a free weekly trial of both, to see how these fared. We were certainly impressed with the ease at which we could register, change our VPN settings, and start accessing social media sites straight away. Aside from this, we also tested other firewall unblockers on our iPhones such as ExpressVPN and VPN Express, both which function in exactly the same way.

With some of the locals unaware of or apprehensive to access restricted sites, there are of course many alternatives. We discovered that instead of Facebook, the most popular equivalent is called Renren, and in fact its features are so similar it’s been dubbed “The Chinese Facebook”. Renren is interesting because it’s content rich, with users frequently sharing blog entries, photos, articles and video links, providing they are clear of censored material. Secondly, it’s unique in the fact that it offers its users “points” for activities such as posting updates, commenting, logging in regularly, and generally interacting more. As if we needed to be incentivized for using social media?! Twitter’s Chinese equivalent is the hugely popular Sina Weibo, which boasts over 503 million registered users and counting. Like our own micro-blogging site, posts are also limited to 140 characters, and can include hash tags and the “@Mention” feature.

However, we also discovered that there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to these sites. To make matters more complicated for marketers and showing us why China’s social media scene is so powerful, we found there to be other major competitors occupying the online environment. Sina Weibo is rivaled by another micro-blogging site, Tencent Weibo, while Renren’s main competitor is called Kaixin001. The problem is unlike any faced in the West, because all rivals are equally as popular as each other. Tencent, for instance, claims to have over 552 million registered users, actually surpassing that of Sina Weibo, while Kaixin001’s 2011 figures showed around 120 million users, to Renren’s 160 million users in the same year. Secondly, with the remaining most popular social networking sites (aside from Facebook and Twitter) all found in China, we imagine it can be extremely difficult for marketers to establish a strong presence on each site. And to add even more fuel to the fire, each site’s popularity is marked by geography- some are more successful in certain locales than others, clearly making a marketing strategy all the more complex for national and international brands alike.

Have you experienced China’s vast social media scene? And do you regularly use Chinese platforms instead of or in addition to our Western equivalents? We’d love to hear your comments, so please tweet to us @PracticeDigital and share them on our Facebook page.