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Why Social and Mobile Are a Whole Different Game in China

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25% of all social network users in the world are Chinese (Synthesio), and yet many companies don’t have a clear understanding of the influence of social media in China.  Partly due to the insular nature of chinese social media and partly due to a shortage of organized data, many companies struggle to understand how to engage with chinese social media users. The following is a primer on Chinese use of social media as compiled by facts on Factbrower.  The facts and the reports they’re sourced from can all be found on Factbrowser’s China Page.

A Land Without Twitter, Facebook or YouTube

Three of the world’s most popular social channels (Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube) are all blocked in China according to the Data Center of the Chinese Internet.  Consequently, several China-based social networks have emerged as dominant channels in the region. In fact, the Data Center of the Chinese Internet reports that 41% of Chinese time online was spent on social networking sites in 2011, the largest percentage of any use-case. The following social networks, which operate solely within the country, are at the center of that usage.

  • Renren, a social network comparable to Facebook with 31 million active monthly users (Burson-Marsteller)
  • Kaixin, a  social network comparable to Facebook has 130 million users and increased its revenue by 41% in 2011.
  • Sina Weibo has 250MM registered users (Kaixin)
  • YouKu, a video sharing platform comparable to Youtube, has 50 million registered users and distribution agreements with 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment and other content providers. In 2011, 13.5% of Youku Premium users paid more than once per month to view premium content. (BusinessWeek)
  • Jiepang, a mobile check-in app similar to Foursquare.  Jiepang reached  910,000 users in 2011 and has cross platform sync with Tencent and Renren social networks (Technode)

Sina Weibo beats Twitter

Despite the ongoing self-censorship to align with Chinese government regulations, Sina Weibo – a Chinese alternative to Twitter- is still more dominant in China than Twitter is in the U.S., according to the Data Center of the Chinese Internet. In sheer user-base volume, Twitter claims 175 million accounts to Weibo’s 250 million, a percent difference of more than 35%. Weibo operates much like Twitter with a 140 character limit and the ability to @ reply followers. However, Weibo includes social games and paid content in addition to micro-posts. Forbes called Weibo ”more of a Twitter-Facebook hybrid than a pure Twitter clone.”  Because of these extra uses, Sina Weibo can generate revenue from targeted ads, e-commerce, and paid games among other revenue options. In March of 2011, iResearch reported that Sina Weibo had 56.5% of China’s microblogging market based on active users.

Chart from: The Next Web

Mobile leads the way in China 

Mobile use is really what’s driving the momentum of social media and eCommerce in China. There are 338 million mobile Internet users in China in 2011, up 11.6% year-on-year (iResearch China). That usage is forecasted to grow sharply. According to Forrester, India and China will account for a staggering  80% of all mobile Internet user growth in Asia Pacific through 2016.

Mobile apps in particular are seeing high rates of growth. In 2011, the Chinese app market grew by 300%, with app revenue growing by 180% (AppAnnie). However revenue from apps still has room to grow in China.  The same AppAnnie data shows that the highest grossing paid app in the U.S. is generating nearly 10x the revenue than the number one paid app in China.

A changing landscape

New data comes out all the time on social media and mobile use in China, and Factbrowser continuously aggregates this research. You can stay informed of new research by signing up for Factbrowser Daily on our homepage or follow the RSS feed for China.  If you’d like to see more detailed data on a particular Chinese social network, list it below in the comments and we’ll write a future post on it.

19 Key Tablet Stats You Need to Know Before Today’s iPad Announcement

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Today’s iPad announcement is guaranteed to to draw attention to the tablet category, Apple, and the iPad itself. We pulled together 19 of the latest tablet facts and stats to make you smarter and save you time.

Tablet Market Structure and Forecast (Tablets + Market Structure tags on Factbrowser)

Who’s Buying Tablets? (Tablets + Demographics tags on Factbrowser)

How Are They Using Them? (Tablets + Behavior tags on Factbrowser)

There are 250+ more facts and stats on tablets at Factbrowser, and more are sure to follow today’s announcement. How do you think the iPad 3 / iPad HD will change the landscape?

4 Free tools That Make Blogging So Much Easier

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The  benefits of blogging are clear.  Not only does blogging give your company a platform , but research shows that blogging significantly increases traffic and search rank (source).  So why has “I have to blog” become the new ” ugh,I have homework to do” ?  Writing good content takes time, and love it or hate it, it takes inspiration.  Amid the myriad of things you have to do on a daily basis, being creative on command is not the easiest.  Luckily, there are some free tools available to help you along the way.

Factbrowser

We built Factbrowser because we wanted to take some of the barriers down for bloggers and make content creation easier, while exposing some of the facts that inspire us.  How to use Factbrowser to make blogging easier:

  • Get ideas:  Browse the topics category and find stats that surprise you or stand out as significant. Use those stats as seeds for new blog ideas.
  • Support your argument:  Numbers give shape to posts.  Ground your arguments in data from top research firms and make a more compelling case.
  • Keep yourself educated:  Sign up for Factbrowser Daily (on the homepage) to get facts delivered straight to you.  Use these facts as ongoing prompts for future posts.

Zemanta

Zemanta tells it straight on their homepage: “Pretty much just write. We’ll take care of everything else.”  A free download, Zemanta recommends images, links, articles and tags while you write. It doesn’t work with every blog, but WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, Drupal and Posterous are covered.   How to use Zemanta to make blogging easier:

  • Save time looking for images by leveraging the creative commons images sourced by Zemanta.
  • Add depth to your posts by linking to related content from 300,000 other blogs and news feeds.
  • Drive traffic back to previous posts on your blog.

Google Alerts/Reader

This is a common one, but it has helped me out of writer’s block so many times I can’t go without mentioning it.  One of the best ways to get ideas for blog post is to consistently read them. But it can be tough to sort through all of the content out there.  Google alerts can help you find topics that matter to you. How to use google alerts:

  • Go to Google.com/alerts and use the simple form to set up your notifications,
  • Try to be specific in the search words you choose. Stay away from general words like “marketing.”
  • Then just decide how frequently you want to receive alerts.

In addition to Google Alerts, Google Reader can help you find and organize blogs that’ll bring you good content again and again.  KISSmetrics had a great post the other day on how to turn Your RSS reader nto a topic generation machine over on their blog.

StayFocused

StayFocused is an extension for Chrome that helps you increase your productivity by restricting the amount of time you can spend on time-wasting websites. I know, I know, it sounds scary. But blogging takes focus and ignoring the call of reddit or english bulldog on a trampoline is sometimes more than a person alone can handle. Add this extension and choose the sites that distract you most. Give yourself an allotted time to view them. Once your time has been used up, the sites you have blocked will be inaccessible for the rest of the day. Think of it as your mom coming in and turning off the TV. You hate it, but you need it. (See also, Leechblock for Firefox.)
Nothing replaces good solid writing, but these tools can help make blogging regularly see less daunting.  After all, if 60% of millennials are doing it, you can too.  This is just a starter list of productivity tools.  I’d love to keep it growing. Let us know in the comments below what other tools you use to make blogging easier and we’ll add them to the list.

26 Can’t-Miss Stats? Here’s 5,000+. Introducing Factbrowser.

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We’re excited to introduce Factbrowser, the discovery engine for research on business and technology.

We’re focused on making you smarter faster with a filterable database of thousands of insights and hand-picked facts, stats, studies, and reports that’s growing every day.

Factbrowser is designed to save marketers, analysts, consultants, journalists, and the intellectually curious time and money and help them make better decisions.

Whether you’re building a presentation, writing a blog post, researching a topic, or just want to stay ahead of the curve, Factbrowser helps you find the latest studies, facts, and stats on:

Factbrowser is made by an interactive entertainment producer and a strategy consultant. Its design is based on a few key principles:

  • The amount of research on the web is immense. But it’s not always easy to find. A lot of it is great; a lot of it isn’t. The world needs independent help organizing it.
  • Research and content consumers deserve more respect. Too much research is padded in fluff. The good stuff is buried, there are too many hoops to jump through to get to it, and it’s hard to know what to trust. Research and content consumers deserve to know exactly where studies come from and need better tools to help find and evaluate research.  We fight for the user.
  • Researcher firms and publishers deserve better too. Research firms and content marketers are being taken advantage of by some of the most popular content aggregators. Original sources often aren’t clearly attributed–or if they are, the report itself isn’t linked to. Not only does Factbrowser attribute research to its original source, it links to the source’s homepage and the piece of content it references. We don’t circumvent landing pages. We’ll work to help publishers get more value from their content–not less.

If it’s your first time here, we suggest you take a minute to watch the intro video.

Here are more ways to get the most out of Factbrowser:

We’re proud of the Factbrowser we’re launching today, but we’re more excited for what’s to come. We’re already hard at work improving the site and exploring new ways to add value.

Thanks for visiting, and let us know what you think.

-The Factbrowser Team