The penetration rate of mobile internet is still growing and more and more digital consumers are grabbing a mobile phone to surf on the social media. These days, no-one can neglect the importance of mobile channels and mobile commerce.
Popular Mobile Channels in China
Mobile Social Platform
The biggest mobile communication program must be WeChat and QQ and the penetration rate of the mobile channel is 92.3%. Overall, they are building the connection among users, contents and service providers. Inevitably, it becomes the major gateway channeling all the traffic.
Take a detailed look on WeChat, Mini program was launch in January 2017. It took the lead to re-distribute traffic pointing to other internet services. On the social media side, 'Top Stories' and 'Search' were launched in May 2017 to enhance the content distribution among users. With these functions, the market share of WeChat rose to 84.3% by the end of Q2 2017. QQ and Weibo were 65.8% and 38.7%, respectively.
Market Share of Social Media Channels 2017 Q2
Similarly, quality of content became the main focus in first half of 2017, generated by professional media, PR Agency, KOLs and UGC. Content was also covering different economic sectors including advertisement, gaming, eCommerce, finance and O2O.
Mobile News Platform
As the second largest platform segment in China, mobile news platform captured nearly 0.6 billion users and the mobile penetration rate was 83.1%.
No. of Users of (Mobile) News Platform and its Penetration
The news platform has already been developing into an information collateral and distribution platform and market division is pretty clear. Content providers are transformed from past professional media to media specialists or consultancy and self-media. The platform itself is focusing on product operation, technology and data distribution.
Online news platform is also a popular platform for marketers to advertise the brand and products due to the large user base, high traffic volume and accurate content targeting technology. However, the challenge also comes due to the overwhelming information, content contributors and unwanted noise. Competition from self-media is also severe.
So, the presentation upgrades from words and photos to videos and live stream in order to catch attention.
Live Stream
Live stream is a rising market in China, in total 0.34 billion users until June 2017. Real person live stream and game live stream share the market. Major resource on the live stream platform is tilted onto the PGC, making the lives stream content become more professional and advertisement oriented. Cosmetic, fashion, music and sports are major industry utilize live stream and insert advisement in it.
No. of Live Stream Application Users
Conclusion and Prediction
First, internet development makes the overall market transparent. Quality and content marketing becomes more important in product and service differentiation in the highly competitive market.
Secondly, the connecting social media platforms benefit the information spreading and the sphere of influence of every aspect. Additionally, ubiquitous mobile devices are accelerating this. Therefore social media marketing has become a must in the nowadays ecosystem.
Finally, the development of big data analytics, artificial neural network and AI provide further opportunities for target marketing, intelligent recommendations and even content composition.
Data Source: 40th China Statistical Report on Internet Development, CNNIC
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