How to do social media promotions in China

After one month of effort, we finally finished the Chinese version of the e-book and set up the e-book Chinese website, embedded with the most popular Chinese payment platform, Alipay. As of July 6 AliPay had more than 200 million users and a daily transaction volume exceeding RMB700 million (around CHF100 million), through more than 4,000,000 daily transactions. So we decided to use Alipay instead of Paypal in our e-book Chinese website.

I have started the promotion this week using many different approaches. Chinese internet users get used to keeping 2 or 3 different IM tools on at the same time, like myself — I keep QQ, MSN, and Skype on when I am online. So I used IM tools to promote our e-book. First I updated my QQ/MSN/Skype signature with “This is my first e-book I have translated, and please go to our e-book website to take a look. If you can help me promote it, I will appreciate it”, of course in Chinese. Then I sent the message to all of my contacts with the same content, informing some guys who are not always online. I have 200+ contacts at QQ and 100+ contacts at MSN, it’s already a good base, if some of them help me promote it that would be great. I also used QQ or MSN and posted some messages in group talks, which may have bigger influence.

I wrote some emails to Chinese general portals, tech portals, and specific IT or ICT portals, asking them to take a look at the e-book website and see if they are interested in promoting the e-book or not. Some bloggers and tech events have a big influence on the public opinion. It is definitely worthwhile sending them emails as well. Often they protect their e-mail inboxes from spammers and you need to subscribe first before being able to contact them.

Social media networks are actually a very important way to do promotions nowadays. Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) are a very popular way in China to deliver information. I wrote some posts in the most popular BBSs in China, such as MOP.com and Tianya.cn to talk about our e-book. Maybe I still need to find more professional BBSs related to IT or ICT, which are more targeted. Social Network Services (SNS) started to boom in China since 2006, I set up some group sites in Kaixin001, 51.com, Myspace.cn and Weaklink, which are similiar to our Chinese e-book website. Since Facebook and Twitter are disabled in China, I prefer using local stuff, naturally.