Episode 10 - Navigating Social Listening in China

In this episode, we explore the challenges of social listening in China, the exciting rise of AI integration in Chinese tech companies, and the impact of "revenge tourism" on the nation's travel industry. Join us as we uncover strategies to harness social media insights and stay ahead in the competitive Chinese market.

Transcript

00:00:02 

Hey, I'm Jimmy Robinson, and you're listening to Insight China, a China marketing podcast brought to you by ping pong digital. 

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In each episode of Insight China, we give you our deep dive insights into a different area of the Chinese market, followed by a quick note down on the biggest Chinese marketing news stories you need to. 

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Know catch new episodes on all major podcast platforms every month. 

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In our bite-sized episode today, we're going to be exploring social listening in China. In today's fast-paced digital landscape, social listening has become increasingly essential. What is social listening is the art of monitoring and. 

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Analysing online conversations on platforms like Twitter and Facebook to uncover valuable insights about consumers, trends and competitors. 

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And while social listening is a commonly used practice worldwide. 

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There are some. 

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Unique challenges and differences when it comes to using these tools in China. 

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With one of the biggest challenges being the closed source culture, this is when big tech giants build high walls around their data, making it very difficult for people to get access to any information from the platforms. 

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It's not too dissimilar to what Elon Musk did with Twitter when he took over it, shutting down third party applications that previously had access to a lot of data from Twitter. 

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But why is social listening so important for anyone doing business in China with over 1.4 billion users on WeChat alone and a high penetration rate of social media users, most of the public discourse in China happens online, and the lines blur between other online. 

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Ecosystems such as E com. 

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Customer acquisition and conversion rates are becoming more dependent on social media. To stay tuned as we dive into the world of social listening in China. 

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So what exactly is social listening? It's a process of monitoring and analysing online conversations on social media platforms, forums, blogs and other digital channels. 

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This deeper analysis of conversations and sentiments provides valuable insights into consumer behaviour, their preferences, industry trends, brands reputations and public sentiment. 

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In turn, can inform marketing and product development strategies helping businesses stay in tune with what's happening online. 

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In the West, social listening is deeply rooted in business and media culture, playing an essential role in marketing, market research, PR and journalism. 

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Over the past 15 years, social listening technology has matured greatly, driven by open social media platforms and advances in machine learning and natural language processing, also known as NLP technologies. However, in China, the concept of social listening is less well known and utilised. 

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Despite being the world's largest market for social media usage. 

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This can be attributed to various factors, including the different Internet and media reality, but also the fact that marketing and PR are traditionally seen as less essential in Chinese culture compared to the widely adopted narrow results driven approach that wrongly undervalues market opinions. 

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The heavily censored media landscape and limited progress of natural language processing technologies and machine learning in the Chinese language add to the challenges faced by companies and brands. 

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And if you're thinking to yourself, well, AI will overcome all of this and save the day, I will recommend our previous episode where we delved into and explore Chinas ChatGPT competitors. 

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To summarise up a little bit, don't rely on AI technologies to solve these problems just yet. 

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As a result, the social listening industry in China is less developed. 

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With few available tools that often provide low levels of customization. 

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The most. 

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Common method used is public opinion monitoring. Now public opinion monitoring is a generic approach to media monitoring that encompasses social monitoring and traditional media monitoring. 

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This broad approach aims to gather insights from various sources, including news articles, online forums, and social media platforms. However, by adopting such a wide-ranging perspective, public opinion monitoring often undervalues the unique contributions and insights. 

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That more targeted approaches can take. 

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When we focus specifically on social listening, we can gain a more nuanced understanding of online conversations and sentiments surrounding a particular topic or brand. This specialised approach enables businesses to extract valuable insights from the rapidly evolving social media. 

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Landscape, which can inform marketing strategies, product development and brand reputation. 

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And fortunately, the generic nature of public opinion monitoring often leads to just a superficial analysis of social media conversations that typically also results in an over generalisation of specific demographics or target consumer groups. It's why China is often viewed as just one monolith. 

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Of a market rather than individual groups being identified and targeted to currently the available tools that are available in China can be categorised into three main types. 

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You have your made in China tools. These are purposely made by Chinese data companies that typically they're just too generic. Again, they default back to public opinion in monitoring results and don't provide great depth or insights. 

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Then there are the adapted for China tours. These are developed by established international market research companies, typically based on their existing tools for social listening in their home market. 

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Its the issue with these is that they're just not accurate. They don't have the capabilities to be able to scrape through, analyse and provide accurate insights into the Chinese market either. And the third option is the media's side hustle as we call it where platforms release their. 

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Own data for analysis. 

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But this is often far too limited and far too restricted in terms of the amount of information that one they're willing to provide, but also only narrowly providing insights into that one individual platforms user base. Despite these challenges, social listening. 

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Is still incredibly important for understanding China's market, with social media being the primary mode of communication, understanding online conversations is. 

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Recognising this need, we have developed our own tool that we call ping pong analytics. It's the first of its kind English speaking tool that tracks open data on major Chinese social media platforms and uses cutting edge scraping, machine learning and natural language processing technologies. 

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In order to be able to generate insights and help organisations refine their business strategy when it comes to. 

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China and as China begins to bounce back from the pandemic induced slowdown, it's tools like ping pong analytics that will. 

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Play a crucial. 

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Role in helping businesses navigate the Chinese market. 

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So stay tuned as we continue to explore the importance of social listening and its potential impact on the global business landscape. 

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Over the coming weeks and months. 

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Here's what else you need to know about China today. In recent times, more Chinese tech companies are embracing artificial intelligence, following in the footsteps of Baidu, Tencent and Facu, developed by Bite Dance, the two leading office software providers in China have released. 

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Promotional videos showcasing their vision for integrating generative AI into their tools, with 78% of the Chinese population viewing generative AI as a positive invention compared to less than 40% in the US. 

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Guess China is poised to be at the forefront of an AI empowered office workplace future. 

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As we approach Chinas Labour Day holiday on May 1st, the travel industries experiencing a significant rebound, bookings for long haul trips through sea trip have caught up to the 2019 levels, signalling a surge in revenge tourism as people eagerly seek to make up for lost vacation time. 

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During the pandemic. 

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With domestic travel flourishing, all eyes are now on the potential for outbound international Chinese tourists later this year, and it wouldn't be an episode without me giving you a quick company update as well. 

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And as we've just been teasing about how we're starting to push the boundaries of social listening by developing our own in-house analytics tool, it's only right that I quickly talk about it for. 

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Ping pong analytics scrapes through social media in China. It uses the latest in machine learning, natural language processing and LLM technologies to provide insights without all of the rubbish. 

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It gives you a clearer. 

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Picture like never before. We're currently using this tool in House and for client projects. 

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But we're excited at the potential of this technology and the future that it will unfold going forward. 

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To sum up, today we've explored where China currently is in its social listening capabilities. With the current lack of quality tools, brands have to rely on generalisations to market in China and this often results in China being viewed. 

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As a monolith and failures in demographic and regional understandings are a hurdle that will take time for us to overcome. 

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Despite these hurdles, social listening remains crucial and there are companies like ping pong digital who are trying to lead the charge in greater consumer understanding. 

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I'll be back next month to interview one of our China experts with questions from online. If you'd like your question asked, then message us on Twitter. You can find us at ping pong digital. Thanks for listening. A special thanks to Frank Ye 

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And Zhun, for his theme music, this is Jimmy Robinson signing out.