In 2005 and 2006, Facebook and Twitter took over the communication – and the human – world by storm.
Most of the American and European social media specialists who emerged at that time started to develop some first rules, which would highly impact the way content (and community) is approached.
However, this balance needs to be entirely thought again; the social usages which are emerging no longer happen first on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. They happen in China, through a wide versatility of features shaped or ignited by WeChat, Douyin, Weibo and the versatility of booming networks. And they influence – a lot – the way the rest of the planet is using social networks, creating and absorbing content. Most of our creative approaches are not only Chinese-ready: they’ve become China-first.
Thinking “Master Content” the Chinese way
A social media post is a full package: a visual, a copy, a CTA. Agencies can no longer make their talents work as silos in their value chain: the copywriter will interfere with the visual asset, the visual asset has to play with the copy, while the strategist has to perfectly understand the designer’s work (and the copywriting opportunity) to make the most of the social networks’ functions.
But more fundamentally, Facebook and Twitter were thought as 2-dimensional networks of consumption: you consume content on a feed, you go to a Fan Page, you follow an account. Weibo or WeChat were thought as 3-dimensional networks of consumption: you chat with your friends, you might follow a brand account, and maybe you’re going to want to “dive” into a mini programme or a specific moment on the network, instead of clicking away to a web-page for instance.
This 3-dimensional integration at the very early stage of Chinese social networks changed the whole creative deal; whereas Facebook Canvas (or moments) look somehow fabricated, their Chinese equivalents are more flawlessly perceived and consumed.
Content Factory: making people dive into content
Content Factory has been a hot topic for the last 5 years. This big weapon for brands (and agencies) would mean the ability to produce a lot of content in a more industrialized manner while integrating direct optimizations coming from the insights we can grab from social networks. Funnily enough, the Content Factory is generally thought from the offer side (aka from the content makers’ or producer’s perspective) more than from the demand side (aka from the fans/followers’ latent expectations or explicit needs).
With a manic rhythm of publication for brands – unless your strategy is to be scarce – it is therefore important to think about the sorts of social templates you’re exploring for the brand. The sorts of visual principles you’ll have to repeat across the months, both in terms of look and feel but also in terms of calls-to-action and their abilities to make sense for the end-users.
Our experience is that it’s better to start from the Chinese social networks’ features, true creative playgrounds than to begin with the Facebook ecosystem. Because the whole idea with Chinese social networks is to make users dive always deeper with the content (ad or not), whereas Facebook or Instagram want the users to “engage” (essentially, comments, likes, again in a 2-dimensional way).
At an execution level, we can pick an example regarding video tutorials: in 2014, on Weibo or WeChat, local brands tapped into the power of big text layers, something which used to be a no go for some high-end luxury brands, focusing mostly on the power of images. Whereas on Douyin, some of the most popular accounts tap into a lot of text-based layers, Facebook still warns businesses not to put too much text on their ads… going somehow against the true user experience.
Another example: in Europe, there’s still this myth of the six-second video ad. If you go in some large agencies creative departments (no offence!), many briefs are about creating extremely short-format videos. As if the creative problem was summarized in a video length. On the other side, WeChat less dogmatically tells developers and creative teams how to build Mini Programs without any preconception regarding video length at all, their goal being to let brands and their teams build up experiences which make people dive if they want to.
Getting Chinese culture if you don’t speak Chinese
It is not that important to be a native Chinese-speaker to start understanding Chinese social networks. We at RE-UP try to push for the following rules:
1- Install WeChat, Weibo, Douyin, JD apps and play with them
2- Subscribe and follow brand accounts you already like on Instagram
3- Spot a couple of Chinese celebrities or brands that are attracted to and follow them
4- Start exploring specific Chinese social networks features (ie: lucky prize from Weibo) and see if these mechanisms could apply to Instagram, Facebook etc. for our clients
