{"id":2103,"date":"2020-02-09T17:58:07","date_gmt":"2020-02-09T17:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cbbcfocus.com\/?p=2103"},"modified":"2025-04-23T10:12:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T10:12:10","slug":"douyin-dethroning-wechat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/focus.cbbc.org\/douyin-dethroning-wechat\/","title":{"rendered":"What is Douyin? And how is it dethroning WeChat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Pattinson<\/strong> speaks to Arnold Ma<\/strong> of digital marketing agency Qumin<\/strong> about the hot new social media platform all businesses in China need to be aware of: Douyin<\/h2>\n

Anyone doing business with China in recent years has been aware of the importance of WeChat, a social media one-stop-shop allowing chats, promotions, shopping and payments all on a single platform. And its importance can\u2019t be understated for most businesses in China. However, its popularity and prevalence has led some companies to forget everything else and replace a broad marketing plan with a simple WeChat plan.<\/p>\n

According to Arnold Ma of Qumin, WeChat should be regarded as more of an operating platform than a social media channel. And when it comes to social, there\u2019s a new kid on the block. That kid is Douyin \u2013 a short video app that was initially popularised by people lip-synching along to famous songs. Users then started showing off other talents, performing comedy sketches and entertaining more generally; Douyin was soon mostly made up of user generated entertainment content.<\/p>\n

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Over a billion videos are viewed every day by the 350 million Daily Active Users on Douyin in China \u2013 not bad for a company that was developed by a team of 8 people over 200 days. Today more than half of its users are under 25 years old, making it predominantly Millennials and Gen Z users who are active on the site.<\/p>\n

Many of the early Western social media platforms were desktop-based sites that have since been adapted to mobile. But China \u2013 without a long history of desktop internet \u2013 leapt straight to mobile. As a result, it’s been able to develop apps that are more suited to mobile, bypassing the desktop legacy that so many western sites have been stuck with. Douyin\u2019s format of videos being presented in full portrait mode (as opposed to the horizontal mode that is more suitable for desktop viewing) has really captured a youth audience who are used to swiping, scrolling and short form content.<\/p>\n

Today, only 15 percent of teens now post to their WeChat moments feed says Ma. \u201cWhen social media platforms go mainstream, they lose the youth,\u201d he explains. \u201cWe can see how Facebook lost young people when they went from niche to mainstream and we now are seeing the same with WeChat.\u201d<\/p>\n

Douyin\u2019s video only platform has come at the right time. This is particularly true in China, where Chinese people spend a combined 600 million hours a day watching short videos on their phone. Ma argues that Douyin is leading the way in third generation social media. First generation \u2013 the MySpaces of this world \u2013 made users dive into and out of other users\u2019 pages or blogs. The second generation of social media platforms such as Facebook aggregate a feed that allows people to see all of their network\u2019s content by scrolling down one page. But the third generation Douyin-style platform is content rather than network led. Artificial Intelligence algorithms present the user with content that will be most suited to them, regardless of whether they \u201cfollow\u201d the content producer or not.<\/p>\n