Social media is the most influential medium in modern China and a part of people’s daily life. Popular sites such as Facebook, Youtube, Foursquare, and Twitter have fallen victim to the Great Firewall of China. While young innovative Chinese Netizens can find a way to get to these sites, why would they want to? Chinese social media is more relevant to Chinese consumers. The Internet in China is dominated by long-running, multi-service portals like Sina, QQ and Sohu that have been offering social networking, discussion forums, blogs, instant messaging and other “socialised media” long before Twitter and Facebook. As the nationally preferred form of social media, bulletin board systems (BBS) are available in every imaginable topic, and in these forums, Netizens can be extremely vocal, resourceful, risk-takers, subversive and sometimes a little worrisome.

Chinese consumers are more open to receiving information from brands online compared to western consumers. With all consumer-generated content on blogs, video-sharing sites, online forums, microblogs, and social networking sites, it is necessary to monitor and engage Chinese online users in social media.

Leveraging the Chinese social web where users are already investing their time in order to further increase touch-points and develop a broad online footprint, and then building a powerful link building strategy, as well as syndicating content to third party website will not only increase eyeballs, but also organic search engine ranking. It is important for the site to be hosted in China in order to achieve that goal.