As I presented in my last blog, my work during these co-op term is to create new content on Chinese social media to increase our company’s brand awareness of Chinese students studying in Canada. To achieve this goal, the first step is to choose one Chinese social media platform to get started with our business. Our candidates include:
Instagram relies on photos or videos for conversation. As a result, this platform works really well for visual-based businesses, like art, food, retail, and beauty.
– DOUYIN(TIKTOK CHINA)
DouYin is known for its short-form videos. The platform is useful for targeting the 18-24 age group and building brand awareness.
– RED(aka Xiaohongshu)
RED is an Instagram-like Social Media Platform. 80% of active Red users are women and Red’s primary customer base consists of young females between the ages of 18 and 35. Using texts, pictures, and short videos.
After careful consideration, we decided to choose RED as our main social media platform.
1. After investigation, the MAU(Monthly Active Users) of oversea Chinese users on RED is higher than DouYin and Instagram.
2. RED allows users to upload videos and photos, which provides more ways to achieve our business goals compared with DouYin.
3. RED’s suggestion algorithm is based on the user’s geography location, which allows more users in Canada to see our post.
Our second challenge is choosing the right medium for our business. Firstly we tried to record videos to teach target audiences tips for job searching and writing resume, but we got only a few Likes.
We found that users like written content rather than watching a 5-6 minutes video. Because our target audience doesn’t have time to skim through a video in hopes of finding the information they need, they can easily find keywords in written content. We switched our content to articles and split the article into several photos. As a result, each of our new content got hundreds of Likes, and our social media account got more and more followers.
After two months of working, our company’s RED social media account’s followers increased from 6 to 3000, total “Liked” numbers increased from 5 to 26,000. My manager was surprised that I can get so many followers within only two months.
