In the era of mobile internet and smartphones, more and more common people are able to socialize with friends and family on inches-big modern gadgets. But how much do you know about the different demographics in China and their social media habits?
Penguin Intelligence, an internet industry analysis group under Tencent Tech, on Friday released a report summing up seven facts about online social sharing in China, based on its survey of 6,680 smartphone users.
70% of smartphone users are willing to share content.
Penguin Intelligence’s report only considered the status-sharing social networks including WeChat Moments, Weibo and Qzone, and did not include pure instant messaging platforms like QQ.
According to the report, 76.2% of the respondents in the survey said that they were willing to share things in social networks; 21% said they would rather read what others shared than share things themselves; 2.8% would neither share nor read.
Of the 76.2% of those who were willing to share content on social media, three quarters chose WeChat Moments as their first choice of social media.
33% netizens share at least one piece of information every day.
About 10% of the respondents would share three or more pieces of information every day; 23.1% of them would share one or two pieces; 47.5% said they would occasionally share something every week.
The active sharers were inclined to share the same content on multiple platforms. They were obviously more likely to interact with others who had similar interests.
50% netizens prefer to talk about themselves.
50.8% of the respondents said they often share their personal feelings over social networks.
12% of them would share things related to their work, as WeChat has been used by many companies as an internal communication tool – but only 1.9% of them would share business ads or promotional material over their social networks.
When happy, females are more likely to share than males.
Most male and female respondents said they were more inclined to share when they were happy than sad. Specifically, 50.1% of female respondents said they would share their happy feelings, distinctively higher than the 39% for the males.
Males were more willing to share when they were bored and lonely than females, but less likely to do so when sad and upset.
After you share, friends are most likely to interact.
Asked about which of their followers were more likely to react to a post, 45.6% of respondents cited their friends as having had the most interactions with their posts. This was followed by the 30.7% of respondents who cited work-related acquaintances, and then by the 26.5% who cited classmates.
Interestingly, family members and lovers had the least interactions on social media, respectively at 12.9% and 3.6%.
20% of first-tier citizens would not share with certain friends.
Netizens born in the 1970s were more worried than other groups that too much sharing would cause the rejection of their friends in their social networks, but 50% of this “70s group” would nonetheless often share articles. Only 36.8% of them would share updates that were explicitly about their feelings and life.
An average of 15.4% respondents said they would delete what they had shared every now and then. Teenagers were more likely to do so, at a rate of 22.1%.
16.1% of them would exclude certain friends when sharing certain things. Netizens in first-tier cities were more likely to do so, with a proportion of 19.5%, a number that is significantly higher than the 8.5% of the fourth-tier cities.
WeChat Moments, Qzone and Weibo are favored by different age groups.
WeChat Moments is preferred by those born in 1980s. This group is inclined to share happy feelings and work-related information, but they are conscious that if they shared too much or too repetitively, then their friends would become sick of seeing their posts.
Qzone, a social networking website created by Tencent, is favored by those born in the 2000s. This group often share personal feelings and personal status updates about their lives. They feel sad if they receive no interactions after their sharing, and they interact with their classmates more in Qzone than in other forms of social media.
Weibo is more used by people from the 90s. They are most inclined to share when bored. They interact more with interest-oriented acquaintances, and share different things in different social network platforms.
According to a report by CNNIC, China’s state-run Internet research institution, the amount of netizens surfing the Internet on their smartphones reached 656 million by July 2016. In 2016 alone, 92.5% of all netizens accessed the Internet via smartphone.
(Top photo from Pixabay.com)
