How destinations and tourism attractions promote themselves on Chinese online platforms

With a monthly user base of more than 1.2 billion people, WeChat is the most important social media platform in China. However, even for those tourism businesses and destinations that are active in this messaging app, integrating Weibo in their marketing strategy could be a successful way to widely reach and engage users.

We should start by considering the main differences between these two networks. WeChat is an app designed for chatting as well as allowing its users to do everything from payments to booking flights and hotels. Weibo is a microblogging network, with around 600 million registered users, designed to connect, find news and information from trustworthy sources, research brands and share experiences. While WeChat is more private and relationship-focused, allowing businesses to address their marketing strategy to specific targets and build customer-loyalty in the long-term, Weibo is more open, fast, engaging and visible, due to its ‘one-to-many’ approach providing brands with a big following.

The different approach and possibilities given by these two social media platforms emerge also from the data analysis regarding tourism businesses and destinations’ performance in 2020. Dragon Trail, indeed, tracked the performance of NTOs, DMOs, attractions and other tourism related businesses to identify best practices and benchmarks of digital marketing in WeChat and Weibo.

By analysing the two 2020 Full Year Rankings Reports, we can observe European destinations’ performance in the two platforms. As regards WeChat Report, among the first 10 overseas DMOswith the highest number of views for all posts published we have Forever Edimburgh and YesMilano. European NTOs performing among the top 10 are Visit Sweden, Visit Norway and Visit Britain.

Shifting our attention to Weibo Report, we look at a different situation. Forever Edimburgh, Visit Flanders, Bayern Tourismus and Visit Copenhagen are among the first 10 overseas DMOs with the highest number of engagements for all posts published. With respect to NTOs, the Italian government tourist board drives the ranking thanks to the engagement obtained with a post about Fu Jing, a Chinese singer and actress who was named a “friend to Italian tourism”. Also Visit Norway, Switzerland, Germany and Visit Denmark are among the best performing destinations in terms of engagement.

As for European museums and attractions, the British Museum, the Louvre Museum, the V&A Museum, and Versailles prove to be among the top 10 overseas attractions in relation to views on WeChat as well as to engagement on Weibo.

At Twissen we observed that tourism businesses and destinations willing to reach the Chinese audience need to be active on both WeChat and Weibo, and build their communication strategy according to the objectives and peculiarities of each instrument: while WeChat has a wider impact on the performance of specific marketing campaigns and Call To Actions due to its vertical communication, Weibo could be fundamental to increase awareness, engagement and draw attention to the brand of the destination.

Twissen