In this post, I’d like to share some new data from the report by WeAreSocial on the state and trends of Chinese digital, social and mobile space.
Overall, all signs indicate that China’s online population will continue growing in both size and complexity throughout 2015. Mobile is becoming the primary way of getting online and platofrms like WeChat, define how people communicate and connect with each other as well as with businesses.
As the slide below shows, mobile remains the fastest growing sector of the online economy:
Approximately, half of Chinese population is connected to the internet which is still behind most Western countries and it means that there is still plenty of growth ahead. There are over 600 million active social media accounts and over 500 million active mobile based social media accounts, majority of which are on WeChat.
Next slide shows that 37% of population is buying products online and 25% use mobile devices for that purpose. The majority of online commerce goes to Taobao with JD mall being the second largest ecommerce site.
It is clear that mobile based internet users represent an important segment that can’t be ignored by marketers in China. Mobile marketing is well on its way to become the central component in online marketing strategy for practically every brand. Below are some numbers to illustrate the trend:
Online social media has already become an integral part of Chinese society, here is the breakdown by type of social media channels:
Lastly, the numbers on time spent online: PC or tablet still leads in the devices category with almost 4 hours daily, followed by mobile with 3 hours 35 minutes:
