Today, Chinese Canadians account for 5.1% of the total population in Canada. In raw numbers, this translates to 1.8 million Canadians of Chinese origins. With a spending power more than $61 billion a year, the Chinese Canadian prides itself on being one of the most affluent and financially capable groups in the country.
The Chinese Canadian today boasts a higher income with 54.8% earning more than $80k annually.
With a strong affinity to big spends across high-end luxury items, 34% of Chinese Canadians state that they ‘would pay more for products that elevate their status’, and that they ‘prefer luxury brands to differentiate themselves from the pack’.
For brands interested in speaking to the Chinese Canadian consumer:
Big prospects with a potential for virality
Pronounced wee-boa, Weibo is one of the biggest social media platforms in China with over 721,079 monthly active Chinese Canadian users. “Weibo” which literally translates to microblog uses targeted filters to reach specific users based on demographics, interests, and behaviours.
With features closely resembling those of Twitter and Instagram, businesses can leverage the platform to create, share, and promote content online. A combination of real time self-expression, the platform is perfect for social interaction, content aggregation or content distribution. The USP of Weibo as a platform is that the users develop an asymmetric relationship allowing them to add comments to a feed while reposting. This simple, asymmetric, and distributed nature of Weibo allows any original feed to become a live viral conversation stream.
By enabling its advertising and marketing users to promote their brands, products, and services to users, the platform continuously refines its social interest graph recommendation engine to target audiences on user demographics, social relationships, interests, and behaviours to achieve greater relevance, engagement, and marketing effectiveness.
At present, everyone from celebrities, brands, and key opinion leaders regularly leverages Weibo to engage with audiences, increase brand awareness, and grow their popularity.
Users can create two types of official verified account: personal or corporate accounts.
To register an account on Weibo users input relevant information like email or mobile phone number, password, username, location, and a verification code.
The verification code, that displays a blue ‘V’ on the profile picture offers businesses multiple benefits like enhanced credibility, improves trustworthiness, as such an account requires businesses to submit legal business documents for proper review and approval.
In terms of content format, multimedia content consumption on Weibo has seen sustainable growth and more brands are today, engaging with their users using this platform. The open and public nature of Weibo ensures a high level of exposure for brands. To effectively market on the Weibo platform, brands need firstly to know and understand their target audience and secondly build a strong relationship with their followers.
As Weibo continues to evolve, change, and improve with new features it is important that you partner with a team that understands the nuances, intricacies, and true potential of the platform.
Our expert team of multicultural gurus at Maple Diversity Communications are always on hand to guide and provide recommendations in terms of the platforms’ usage and how best its features can be applied to your marketing strategy to effectively target 1.8 million Chinese Canadians.
