Social Media Marketing is changing again, and you are not going to like what is coming!

Many of the business people I meet are really confused with social media, they tell me they just about have learned to market their business one way, and now they are being told it’s all changed and what they are doing does not work anymore, either way if you are doing what you were doing before and getting nowhere, well to continue blindly is the definition of insanity. What is the next new thing in Social media?

You are not going to like it sorry...

Let's go back a bit and look at the waves of what worked and what is not working in SMM;

Around 2012 the world went blog crazy after it was learned that Google prefers blog posts over selling, so everyone with good intentions started their blogs.

The first to give up were the business owners who just don’t get content marketing, as in those who wrote about 300 words with a lot of closing tactics. That failed miserably. The rest continued with information about their business and the basic facts, with some disastrously paying for inane passionless blogs from Indians, they failed as well!

Some just ignored writing on blogs and went straight to Social media with even worse results mainly because; Facebook and other social media platforms want more money, the crux of capitalism I am obliged to say, they want to get paid just like you, they have shareholders now so they turned down their algorithm that showed your free posts to the members of a page and your profile considerably, so much so; that if you have around 1,000 likes on a Facebook profile page you will only have a handful of people see your post on their Facebook feed regardless of how well written it is.

The 2% who were left, wrote passionately from the heart consistently putting themselves into their writing thus developing a rapport with their audience, the readers in turn trusted the writers and followed links at the bottom of their posts (Calls To Action) and eventually bought stuff, are still writing and sharing to social media consistently today, because they stayed the course and they know it works, mainly as they have now developed a regular audience and have become social media influencers in their own rights. Many were taught by me I am happy to point out.

However even this strategy needs to be revisited, because unless you have been living under a rock for the last decade you will see the rise of the Tiger.

China’s economy is robust and what we are seeing is a pattern, We see the first indications of their influence in the tourism sector. First the Chinese pioneers start traveling and got it all wrong, they go back and tell the next wave:

“The bus tours are awful forget them, better to spend your money in a nice hotel, you know the ones with a theme, Independent Hotels are better as they have as much as the big chains can offer in the way of amenities but because they are not paying big budgets for branding they can offer a similar experience, so go for them,” they tell their compatriots.

Hence the next wave; the 'Frequent Independent Traveler' who is on the whole well behaved and they seek out new experiences, they spend more money than their country folk who traveled before them and they book online. They also buy land, properties, investments and many things from Westerners and they use the internet a lot!

The Chinese traveler is adventurous and wants to try foreign food, and I shake my head when I hear restaurateurs bemoan that they are not seeing many Chinese coming into their restaurant, and thinking it is because they have no Chinese food, it is not that, it is because the food is not written in Chinese on the menu!

Before you go out and learn Mandarin and double up on your business posts in English and Chinese, it’s worth remembering that China is such a vast country that dialects and different nuances in writing can really make it difficult to get your message across effectively if you just do a simple blog in Chinese.

Added to that the fact that; unless your hosting company is in China and you have a {dot}cn at the end of your domain name, the only Chinese who will see your site, because it loads at a reasonable speed, are the expats who have been living outside of China for years.

Websites that are not hosted in China are very slow to load and any web guy will tell you the vast majority of people lose interest in any websites that take more than 5 seconds to load so you could be wasting your time, added to that Facebook is not visible in mainland China, nor is Google so all your S.E.O. efforts …wasted! So you are going to have to do something very special and expensive if you are going to court the Chinese living in China on your site.

China has Weibo for bloggers, and WeChat for almost everything else, and their main search engine is Baidu. To get a business account to market your business within China on WeChat is just scary expensive, you will not believe me if I tell you what it costs, so you go and google it yourself. Once you have been to see the bank manager with your home's deeds in your hands to get a loan for an official WeChat Business account then come back to me.

The Chinese believe one another more than they believe brands, so the smart marketers seek out social media influencers, people with a developed audience who follow them on a certain subject and will almost always buy whatever they recommend.

So here is the takeaway:

I believe the Chinese are playing a very clever game by keeping their social media in-house and making it as successful as it is right now. WeChat earns a lot more than Facebook does. WeChat is used almost every day in China to buy anything from a cup of coffee to houses, the landscape is very much moving to the phone applications and more and more Chinese use cash less every day.

This is what the Western economies have been trying to do for a long time without much success, the paperless money is so much more cost efficient for governments to manage, and much more secure, so, what do you think happens now?

We all will eventually go with the Chinese model of Digital Marketing, and when that happens you will need to seek out a social media influencer with good links inside China.

Brought to you by <ahem> your loyal and top B2B English speaking (and writing) Social Media Influencer based right here in Thailand…..Oh and we do have a established marketing team who live in China and can get you a {dot}cn domain name, on Baidu, on Weibo with regular well written blogs AND on our WeChat (business account) for a lot less than trying to do it yourself!