The 3 Essential Apps For Business To Achieve Success in China - Weibo, Little Red Book, Douyin

Hi everyone, hope you are having a wonderful day today, welcome back to my channel!

I'm Yuri O, as in “Oh right, so these are the latest hot mobile APPs in China!”

So in one of my previous videos, the national monster APP, WeChat was introduced, but if you thought that was the beginning and end of popular APPs in China, well let me tell you there are a lot, LOT more that have huge numbers of users which is what I’ll be sharing today.

Topic Today: The 3 Essential Apps For Business To Achieve Success in China - Weibo, Little Red Book, Douyin

It’s important to realize that for every globally recognized APP, there is an equally popular and sprawling number of APPS created in China which are developing fast, and generally adopted and implemented by users far quicker than in other countries.

Many Chinese are very proud to say that well laid out APP has been created domestically as opposed to relying solely on western-developed platforms, like Instagram or WhatsApp.

Ever heard of Sina Weibo? No? Well, in many people’s eyes it’s China’s answer to Twitter, with Twitter created in 2006 and Weibo, as it is typically known, arriving in 2009.

Weibo is one the largest micro-blogging platforms in China, and while the arrival of WeChat and later Jinri Toutiao (literally meaning Today’s Headlines) took its toll on its dominance, Weibo remains a hugely popular platform for sharing news, personal blogs, connecting with celebrities and much more, with over 500 million active users as of 2020. This platform too is considered a hugely valuable resource for brands looking to make it in China, with visibility gained through Weibo influencer campaigns, Weibo Advertising and cross-promotion.

Moving onto Little Red Book, or ‘xiao hong shu’, and over 200 million active users are using this nifty little app, which is kind of like a combination of Instagram, Pinterest and Net-A-Porter.

Unlike these platforms however, it doesn’t use ad services, relying instead on lively social interaction and KOLs to promote brands.

Its main purpose is to enable users to shop, share information about the items or shopping experience good or bad, and its most popular category on the app is indeed fashion, along with beauty and cosmetics.

You can also learn and share lifestyle hints and tips too. You can swap fashion ideas, and with over 8000 brands on the platform, that’s a whole lot of fashion tips to wade through!

As the APP continues to grow, so too does the number of different product categories and content, making this quite a favourite APP for fashion-conscious Chinese shoppers.

One particular feature that the fashionistas among us love is ‘Shopping Notes’ which provides in-depth and candid product reviews and pictures, giving users all the pre-purchase info they need to feel properly informed.

They can then purchase through this feature too, ensuring an exceptionally efficient shopping process all on the same platform.

Finally, I’m sure everyone knows Tiktok, the APP now synonymous with hilarious and cool video content, but what if I said DouYin?

The Chinese version of Tiktok, DouYin is most commonly used for posting short videos and live streaming, clocking in at over 400 million active users.

Both versions of the APP have similar homepages that show users the latest trending hashtags and links to popular short videos; however, DouYin also includes rankings of top accounts in a wide variety of categories including celebrities and brands to name a few.

Another feature only present on Dou Yin is the offering of full movies, a feature widely used of course in recent months with cinemas across the country closed. Dou Yin’s e-commerce features are of course different to Tiktok in that Tiktok offers links to Instagram and Youtube, apps that are both banned in China and inaccessible without a VPN.

Dou Yin instead links effortlessly, and somewhat perilously for serial shoppers, to the likes of Taobao and TMALL through it’s shopping cart feature meaning purchasing items is very much a few clicks away!

So, there you have it, 3 APPs introduced with a combined user base of over a billion, of course there will be some crossover there, but nevertheless it is an astounding number that will only have grown during the pandemic, and will continue to grow with 5G looming large over the Middle Kingdom.

That’s it for me, so let me know in the comments if you use any of the apps mentioned, what your experience of them is

I appreciate you, if you haven't subscribed yet, take a moment, click the subscribe button, because this channel is all about China, genuine insights from me and my team, who have all spent time living in both UK and China. Take care my friends, have a wonderful day, and I will see you soon!

Yuri O x