Varieties of communities are built online and organized by companies, interest groups, or entrepreneurs in China. The most frequently used platforms of communications in the online communities are WeChat Group, QQ Group, and WeChat Official Account.

Online communities use a variety of tools for communicating with community members including WeChat (61.1%), custom-made app (55.6%), WeChat Official Account (52.8%), websites, QQ Group, Weibo, online forums, Baidu Post Bar (Baidu Tieba), Weibo Group, emails, and Douban.

The top platforms of communications in the online communities are WeChat Group, QQ Group, and WeChat Official Account.

Engagement is crucial for maintaining and growing online communities in China; the top types of engagement activities are offline activities, online sharing of information & resources, special offers for community members, and etc.

Most online communities members don’t have a high income as about 55.6% make no more than RMB 100,000 a year.

Read more: China social application user insights 2016

Social application market develops rapidly, satisfying users’ various needs such as communication, entertainment, interests, and work. Instant messaging and social networking are the top two most popular features of social applications in China.

Instant messaging had for the highest usage rate of 90.7% according to CNNIC, followed by social networking (60.7%), and photo/video networking (45.4%). Online community ranks fourth most popular feature with 32.2%.

Users between 20-29 years old represent the largest age group in China social media, followed by those 19 year-old and below, and 20-29 y-o.

Users who have junior high education account for 35.8%, followed by senior high/technical secondary/technical school education (31.3%).

About one-third of social media users in China has a monthly income of between 3,000 to 5,000 yuan, representing the largest income group of China social media users, followed by 2,001-3,000 yuan (17.8%) and 5,001-8,000 yuan (17%).

Enterprise company employees form the biggest profession group of China social application users (31%), followed by freelancers (15.7%) and professional technicists (13.7%).

Over one-third (36.9%) of China mobile social media users’ has a daily average online duration of over 6 hours.

QQ and WeChat are two leading platforms in terms of instant messaging app usage rate, accounting for 90.3% and 81.6% respectively.

Mobile instant messaging apps QQ (75.8%), WeChat (69.1%), and Momo (7.3%) are top 3  by usage rate.

Baidu Tieba ranks top among China’s online communities with almost half (45.7%) social media users.

2.9% social media users in China use Maimai as their professional social networking application, ranking top and followed by LinkedIn China’s app.

Interacting with friends is the top purpose for people to use social applications (72.2%) in China, followed by following trending news in time (64.3%), following interesting content (59%), getting useful knowledge and help (58.3%), and sharing useful knowledge (54.8%).

Watching videos and listening to the music is the most frequent used feature by China social media users.

Contacts in social applications are mainly friends in real life (87.3%), classmates (85.3%), colleagues (81.2%), and families/relatives (79.7%).

China social media users are quite active with more than 63% accessing to social applications on a daily basis.

Also read: Mobile social app Momo benefiting from China’s booming live broadcasting business

Baidu announced its new plan for Baidu Tieba last Friday that it’s going to help enterprises connect with fans through Tieba online community on both PC and mobile.

Baidu Tieba will invites enterprises, organizations and media to open official Baidu Tieba account, with support such as Tieba management access, data, search marketing and mobile technology and services. 

According to the official statement, there are thousands of enterprises and organizations that have set up accounts on Baidu Tieba including JD and Tmall.

Baidu Tieba was established in December 2003 and now has one billion registered users with close to 8.2 million topic boards. And the number of monthly active users is close to 300 million.

Bear in mind that 70% of Baidu Tieba users are post-90s and it’s a channel we recommend if you target post-90s audience.