Chinese Web Users Love Social Media – and that’s Great News for Brands

We’ve long known that China’s hundreds of millions of web users are especially engaged with social media online – more so than users in the US – and now we have updated stats for 2011 that show how huge microblogging is becoming here.

A sizeable 42% of Chinese netizens are posting to microblogs – Twitter.com clones such as Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo, or the new Baidu Talk which I reviewed last week – during their time online. That contrasts to only 10% of Americans posting to a microblog – well, Twitter, which is the only option there.

The greater online social media engagement in China – as compared with in the US, in a new report by Netpop Reasearch – runs across the board: from a far greater likelihood to send or forward emails, to a greater propensity towards rating or reviewing products (which is likely an affect of the phenomenally popular shopping site Taobao.com). A whopping 92% of all those online in China will engage with social media in some way, in contrast to 72% in America.

Check out this Netpop graph for comparisons between areas of online engagement in the two countries; the US is blue, while China is purple:

Chinese netizens seem more likely to share something online in the form of a blog, a tweet, or an uploaded photo or video. This level of engagement – especially in real-time microblogging – is great news for brands in China, which have a wired and willing audience potentially keen to share news about your brand online.

In contrasting lack of enthusiasm, there seems more reticence in China towards posting your location – ie: checking-in – and posting to a social networking site. Those are two snippets of bad news for LBS such as Jiepang.com, and conventional SNS such as Renren.com and Kaixin001.com.

Also catch: Maybelline’s Sina Weibo and Renren Marketing Strategy