5 tips to adapt your personal branding in China

If you are an artist, a football player, or even a CEO, Personal Branding is really important in China, and should not be neglected.

What is Personal branding in China?

Personal branding is the practice of people marketing themselves and their careers as brands. Personal Branding is powerful because you can reinforce person-to-person trust in China.

In China, you are your brand.

In China, the best way to make your personal branding is to use social networks as a communication opportunity to reach a significant portion of China’s population.

Social Media in China

As the Chinese social media landscape is the most dynamic and unique one in the world. Even though China does not offer access to popular US social media channels like Facebook, YouTube or LinkedIn, China has created its own social networking platforms to enable authorities to better monitor what is going on there.

There are communication tools such as Weibo and WeChat that have achieved mass-market penetration.

• Indeed, China had 900 million Internet users at the end of last year,
• and 91% of Chinese netizens have accounts on at least one social network.
• Chinese spend an average “of 25 hours” per week on Social Media

Moreover, an increasing number of users access social media on their mobile phones rather than via their PC or laptop, this trend is showing no signs of stopping.  This greatly facilitates online interactions as the user can conduct their daily activities and engage with their social network simultaneously.

There are 5 ways to adapt your personal branding to those Chinese social media:

Weibo, the Chinese Facebook Page

Weibo is a micro-blogging platform that works the same way as Twitter. Users can exchange content with their friends and with 500 million registered accounts it is the key social network to be engaging with if you are attempting to get known in China.

It is a great social platform for personal branding in China; western celebrities, artists, and business leaders in China are using it as Victoria Beckham, Tom Cruise, and Bill Gates.

Thus, it is essential to make an account on Weibo and it will be better to make all your Weibo posts in Chinese.

For example, TIM Cook, the CEO of the famous brand Apple, has joined recently Weibo but he counts already 677085 followers.

Wechat, internal communication

WeChat is Tencent’s fast-growing mobile social platform? With around 600 million users, WeChat is the largest mobile messaging app in China and is currently ranked the fifth most popular mobile app in the world.

First of all, wechat is a social network system, part e-commerce platform, and finally marketing tool?

Butt you can also interact with the publisher once you subscribe to the account. The app allows you to leave a voice memo for the owner, and send an emoji or a message, just like how you chat with your friends. You can update once a day to all the subscribers but can selectively respond to your messages or send out a voice memo to all subscribers at once. The experience feels much more intimate than the comment section of a website or a blog. It’s a bit like having a private messaging thread with the writer you like.

Even some foreign celebrities are making personalized posts aimed at their Chinese fans. It is an opportunity for the Chinese audience to connect with celebrities from Hollywood such as Selena Gomez or Paris Hilton.

Forums – for the Reputation

Chinese netizens are more and more interested in Western culture, you must interact with them on forums. For example, there is a community on Baidu, Baidu called Tieba, Users share information and ideas by sector, by type of information. Internet users can make comments, and post pictures and videos.

The objective here is to establish a large enough following who are ranking their content highly so that it appears at the top of the Tieba community page.

Having a Baidu Baike (Wikipedia) page is proof of trust for many Chinese.

Douyin -to leverage Videos

Online video and music platforms are massively popular in China as 433 million Chinese users watch video content online.

Douyin is the leading video APP in China and the best way to promote stars, artists, and football players.

Platforms similar to TikTok are widely used and are also a great source of advertising for your personal branding.

You can find people streaming videos on desktops and on mobile all over the place, from a coffee shop to the metro. on video-streaming sites like Youku, Tencent Video, or Sohu Video.

PR, public relations to be quoted in Chinese Media

Many people have diverse and sometimes conflicting educational and career histories, and there’s no problem at all with that, providing that you can weave your experiences together to make a coherent career story.

From all your experiences what did you learn, how did you change, and how has it brought you to a clear sense of where you are now and where you are going? In the end, all successful branding is about the story. Learn yours well so that you are comfortable telling it.

So don’t only focus on your ‘branding’, you must interest your public with interesting content, not only superficial content. Share your stories and experiences, this is what the Chinese netizens want to know about.

Great content built trust

Develop your brand image but also the content shows your expertise.

If you want to know more about personal branding in China check out this interview with Isabelle Patissier. or our Case studies.

Need an Agency to help you in China?

We are a Personal Branding Agency based in China and can help Stars, actors, artists, sportsmen…. to increase their popularity in China.