In a time of constant change, fierce competition and information overload, every company is in need to check the relevant news about their industry and markets on a regular basis, in order to keep up with the trends and make the right decisions. The traditional sources in Western countries for this kind of news are mostly news websites and industry-specific magazines, in combination with social media channels and newsletters.
Popular social media and messaging apps of the Western world are blocked in China. Facebook and Twitter are famous examples of blocked social media channels, as WhatsApp represents a restricted messenger. All have fallen foul of China’s myriad of extreme regulations on censorship and data collection.
WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose social media mobile app developed by tech giant Tencent. Starting in 2011, the app has grown to be one of the largest standalone mobile apps in 2017 with over 980 million monthly active users, most of them from Mainland China.
WeChat also offers the possibility to post promoted advertisements in the news feed. These are advertisements that are displayed in user's Moments. A WeChat Moments advertisement includes brand name, profile, short description, a maximum of six pictures or a six to 15 seconds short video, as well as a link to a webpage hosted on Tencent's server. Moments ads are like regular Moments post but with a sponsored tag. Users can interact with the ads: they can like and comment on the post.
Weibo is the Chinese equivalent to Twitter, surpassing it by numbers of users in 2017. Weibo is a microblogging website, used by about one-third of China’s total internet users on a regular basis. According to the company’s data, around 100 million messages are posted each day on the website.
But Sina Weibo is more than just a blogging website. It can be better described as a combination of Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Tumblr. The users of Weibo interact much more with each other than the users of Twitter do. Many topics that go viral on Weibo also started from the platform itself, while Twitter topics often come from the news or events that take place on Twitter.
Nowadays, Weibo has developed steadily to become a significant part of Chinese enterprises to stay engaged with their followers and post regular press releases and promotions. Similar to most social media channels, enterprises also can choose in Weibo to create an official company account over an ordinary account, opening more opportunities to track their campaigns. Social-media-related corporations and entrepreneurs use Weibo to reach out to their audience and clients.
Most Chinese rely on WeChat and Weibo for their daily news, since they trust these sources more than the highly regulated and manipulated governmental news agencies. Hence, Chinese companies are aware of the preferences and post their updates preferably on these platforms as well, leading to a large number of company updates.
Foreign enterprises, that have access to the regular updates of their Chinese partner or competitors, suppliers or buyers, can use the information to stay informed about the trend in China immediately from the source without having to wait for some public news if the topic is covered at all.
CCM has developed a new tool to get all relevant news and updates from Chinese enterprises and key opinion leaders on social media right to the email address. Users can simply set the relevant keywords and enterprises they want to follow in the Crawling System of CCM. The system will crawl all relevant posts on WeChat and Weibo, either from the selected enterprises or by the selected keyword. The posts will be filtered for relevance automatically and send to the email address of the user directly. An integrated translation service can be used to translate the Chinese news into English.
Learn more about the Crawling Center of CCM and apply for a free trial by visiting our online platform or contact us directly at econtact@cnchemicals.com and call 86-20-37616606.