Social Networks is taking the lead place in Chinese digital life, said by Jeffery Zheng, the general manager of RenRen, East China region at Social Media Week HongKong.
The following chart given by Jeffery illustrates the user growth rate in each sector of Chinese web service. Although the Music, News and Search take the top 3 most popular online service for Chinese netizen, given the fact that social networks (SNS) has 262.8% growth rate in past two years, we can probably foresee the trend.
By end of October, 2010, RenRen has in total 170millions registered users. Among them, there are around 40millions university students, 98millions white collars, said Jeffery. He also mentioned that the daily active users are around 28millions and the average time spent on RenRen per day is around 60min.
As the leader of Chinese social networks, RenRen is probably at the best position to explain the Chinese users’ online behavior. Jeffery show us some interesting data with the comparison of students and white collars users. As illustrated below, Chinese social networks users are most interested in checking what their friends’ doing online, looking for classmates, reading status updates and writing blogs, and there some of them just showing off there. The big difference in students and white collars’ online behavior is that university more like playing games (e.g. social games).
Jeffery also explained this with figures. He said on RenRen, on daily basis, there are 4.5millions status updated which generates 15millions replies; 8millions photos uploaded with 5millions replies; +0.6millions new blog post published with +2millions replies;+9millions sharing content with +4millions replies; and 1.7millions virtual gifts ‘produced’ per day, 2.2millions during holiday day.
Talking about the evolving trends of social networks especially in China, Jeffery said:
- Content socializing
- Entertainment socializing (social gaming)
- Commerce socializing (e.g. RenRen’s groupon service, Nuomi.com)
- Mobile socializing (Jeffery emphasized the LBS service)
- Network socializing
In summary, Jeffery believes that the future of social networks is to make everything social and keep everyone related. The Users are the Media, he commented.
I recently discovered AMICINA ( http://www.amicina.com ) which is probably the best social network for chinese people and China-lover… well.. it’s another world.. IF you don’t know it.. I really recomend to search it. Finally something good !