Recently, we were lucky enough to receive a visit from Silvia Zeng, Tencent’s Senior Business Development Manager for New Markets. Silvia was kind enough to spend some time giving us a comprehensive overview of the Tencent ecosystem and how education marketers can get the most out of Tencent advertising to reach Chinese international students.

We’ve condensed her most important points into four posts for you to easily refer back to any time you like. In this first post, we’ll introduce you to the Tencent ecosystem.

Introduction to the Tencent ecosystem

One of the largest companies in China, Tencent has a ubiquitous presence across several internet verticals. Their ecosystem encapsulates social networking, entertainment, information, software and tools, and lifestyle and everyday services, meaning Tencent plays an integral role in the lives of the average Chinese user. In fact, Chinese users spend over 47% of their mobile internet usage on Tencent products.

Because of Tencent’s penetration, they have access to an unprecedented amount of user data, which marketers can in turn use to make ad targeting as accurate as possible.

The other thing to understand about the ecosystem is that it is highly connected. Via Tencent’s flagship products, social media behemoths WeChat and QQ, users are able to access entertainment products such as QQ Video and QQ Music, news products like Tencent News and payment services like WeChat Pay, all without ever leaving the platforms. Tencent therefore has an unmatched insight into user transactions, and how these transactions contribute to the overall customer journey.

WeChat, QQ and other products in Tencent’s ecosystem

Most would be familiar with Tencent’s biggest product, WeChat. With over 1.1 billion active users, WeChat is China’s most popular social media platform, with 50% of users spending more than 90 minutes a day on the platform. Of those users, says Zeng, around 65% were born in the 1980s and 1990s, making it a key platform for reaching university-age students.

It’s therefore critical for education marketers hoping to reach Chinese international students to ensure their official accounts are properly set up and verified. It’s also important to note that, unlike Facebook, followers are unable to see how many followers an account has, but they can see how many of their friends follow that account. In this way, followers can often spread through networks.

QQ is another major social networking platform under the Tencent umbrella. While it doesn’t have quite as many users as WeChat, its userbase is still significant, with 807 million monthly active users, and a 90% penetration rate in China’s Tier 1–4 cities. QQ is China’s no. 1 instant messenger app, and is particularly popular among youth – 58% of users are 18–29 years old. Qzone is a popular social feed within the QQ platform, with 650 million monthly active users, 69% of whom are between 26–35 years old, making this another key platform for education providers wishing to communicate with postgraduate students. QQ Browser is also China’s no. 1 mobile browser, with 280 million monthly active users, who on average open the browser 8 times and spend 37 minutes a day on it.

Other key products in Tencent’s ecosystem that education marketers in particular should be aware of are Tencent Video and Tencent News. With 72% of Tencent News’s users having a degree in higher education, these are key platforms for reaching students’ parents.

In the next post, we’ll take a closer look at targeting users with Tencent advertising.