With an estimated 597 million people active on social media in China, the country’s top 10 sites actually have a staggering 3.2 billion individual accounts. Armed with the newest user numbers for these Chinese sites, the team at Go Globe has made a good-looking infographic showing how they all stand at present.
Along with those numbers, the data also shows that the largest section of China’s social media users – a full 30 percent – are aged 26 to 30. The perfect target for advertisers. As a whole, 91 percent of Chinese netizens have social accounts, which is way above the 67 percent in the US.
So what are those top 10 sites about? I’d categorize some of them like this:
- Twitter-like - In second and third place are the Twitter clones, Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo. The latter one gets most of the media attention, both in China and around the world.
- Facebook-y - Four of the sites are a lot like Facebook. Tencent’s QZone, Tencent’s Pengyou, Renren, and Kaixin are all focused around a mix of social profiles, albums, buddies, and social gaming. Interestingly, they don’t get so much hype these days, and feel rather like the past generation of sites on China’s web.
- Whatsapp-ish - The much talked about WeChat is like Whatsapp, and is one of a number of Asia-made messaging apps – like Line and KakaoTalk – that are battling to get onto the smartphones of young Chinese and Southeast Asian web users.
Here’s the full infographic:
(Source: Go Globe)
For more fun graphics like this one, check out previous entries in our infographic series.
Here’s a question I’ll leave for everyone to ponder. Where is time spent on social shifting? Are a few hundred million users on the “largest” networks meaningful if they 1.) no longer visit or 2.) spend much less time on them? Let’s look for the future kings of social.
Overall great landscape of China’s social still.
some weird data points in there – douban the same size as renren? and total social users exceed the total number of internet users in china…
suppose it depends on where the data comes from but still quite out of line from CNNIC…
@stickler There are people with more than 1 social network accounts which makes the total number of social networking accounts higher than the actual internet users in China.
Awesome info graphic! Thanks so much for sharing this! I work for social media analysis firm Fashionbi, and we recently added weibo on our platform, and i’ve been researching as much as I can on it – so this is really very helpful!