This social media whiz explains WeChat, Weibo, and China’s online consumers

Photo credit: Shao-Chun Wang / 123RF

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Ashley Galina Dudarenok is a Hong Kong-based entrepreneur, professional speaker, and vlogger. She’s the founder of several startups, including social media agency Alarice International and resources platform ChoZan. In my previous interview with her, she talked about the Chinese social media landscape and how foreign companies can leverage that to enter the market.

Now, Dudarenok just wrote a book called Unlocking the World’s Largest E-Market: A Guide to Selling on Chinese Social Media. She was back on the show to discuss some of the insights she shared in the book. Here are the highlights.

How do WeChat and Weibo integrate into a Chinese person’s life?

They are extremely different because WeChat is more like an operating system for life. It’s something you cannot survive without in China. You use it when you want to book something, hail a taxi, pay for something, and communicate with somebody. If you’re at a business meeting in the West, you exchange business cards. In China, they’d say, “Can I scan your ID?” so they can connect with you through WeChat.

The WeChat that most Westerners have on their phones is not the real Chinese version. That’s the stripped, international version. When foreigners look through that app, they say, “I don’t see anything extraordinary.” It’s because they are not looking at the right app.

Weibo, on the other hand, is a great platform for marketing. Think about it as a news platform where a lot of bloggers, media outfits, government departments, and ordinary users share stuff. It’s like Facebook plus Twitter plus a lot of other things like SlideShare, etc. There are Instagram-like features, so you can also create stories. It’s a great platform to track what’s hot in China right now, and you can sort those hot topics by region or city.

In the West, we primarily use social media to send instant messages to each other, connect with our friends, stalk people, and share a couple of pictures. In China, there is ecommerce in social media—you can buy directly through WeChat, Weibo, and live streaming platforms. You can follow celebrities, use it as a news platform, participate in campaigns, and use it as your CRM (because nobody in a million years would ever go to complain and call some hotline or send an email).

Do you think there’s still room for one or more players amid Alibaba and Tencent’s domination?

I definitely believe that as we progress, the younger generation will need their own social media platforms and completely new ways to connect and share their lives.

The other question is, who is going to own them? If you don’t look deeper right now, you will probably not know that Alibaba is investing in a lot of social platforms. WeChat is investing in others too. But it’s just like in the rest of the world where big companies always try to add allies into their camps.

So there might be a rise of another company or two, but eventually, I think they will still ally with one or the other. Remember when there were three players in the market, i.e. BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent)?

Baidu is not part of the social media wars (which drives China’s whole digital landscape), which is why it is now losing its grip. It is still powerful in search and location-based services but we have yet to see what’s going to come of it.

What are some hot areas for Chinese people now?

Entrepreneurship is hot, especially in the first- and second-tier cities (basically Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou). A lot of Chinese people go and set up companies straight after school. They even have a term for the startup entrepreneur lifestyle: 9-9-6. It means that they work from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. It’s always good to launch products that support entrepreneurs.

Self-development is another thing. Almost everybody in China is into developing skills—communication, speed reading, programming, etc. China is a very pragmatic, fast-paced, and competitive market. Everybody wants to succeed at something. So if you can help them get closer to their goal, you have a huge opportunity.

How does the rising middle class spend?

What would be your advice for entrepreneurs in Asia?