Kuaishou, often translated as “crystal” or “mirror,” is a Chinese social media platform that has quickly gained popularity in recent years. The app allows users to share photos and videos with each other, and many people use it to showcase their talents or simply share funny moments they’ve experienced. Kuaishou is the biggest competitor of Douyin (Tik Tok).

But just like most of the apps in China, Kuaishou is not only a simple short-videos anymore. As Kuaishou’s initial rural orientation spread across the whole country, Kuaishou started offering business accounts to all the users that want to leverage the platform for promotion or product placement. If you’re curious about Kuaishou and wondering how to use it for your business, read on for more information!

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Introduction to Kuaishou

It is shown that Kuaishou has more daily active users than Twitter and Snapchat. Still, it would not be a surprise if you have never heard about this video-sharing platform. In fact, Kuaishou maintains a low profile outside China.

Kuaishou (快手) is a mobile app for short video sharing in China. It was first released by ByteDance in March 2016. As of 2022, the app has over 346 million daily active users. It started as a simple tool for creating and sharing gifs. Today it’s a seamlessly integrated online platform, operating business accounts, offering advertising features and e-commerce stores.

Kuaishou is known for its user-generated content, which is often comedic and exaggerated. The app has been praised for its ability to spread content quickly and organically, and for giving a voice to China’s lower-tier cities. Kuaishou users accepted the app because it was showing a lot of videos through a rural content creator’s lens, unseen elsewhere. However, the app has also been criticized for its negative impact on mental health, particularly among young people.

Kuaishou has started an ambitious plan to create a platform that seamlessly blends e-commerce, short videos, and live streaming, something available on Douyin.

Kuaishou is not as popular as Douyin (the Chinese version of Tik Tok). Nevertheless, this app is constantly growing, with daily active users nearly doubling every year since 2017. Kuaishou users tend to be younger and less cosmopolitan than the users of Douyin. That’s why it’s more difficult for Kuaishou to monetize.

Kuaishou users are mostly from lower-tier cities

One of the reasons for Kuaishous’ popularity is the fact that the target audience and user base of the app are mostly from lower-tier cities. It’s the first app focusing on those consumers, as most of the social media platforms in China are focused on first-tier cities like Shanghai and Beijing. Thanks to Kuaishou, the situation is changing on other apps as well, as brands and companies noticed the importance of those users.

In 2022, the app recorded more than 598 million monthly active users and 346 million daily active users. There were around 379 million content creators on the platform in 2022. Kuaishou has many young active user groups and the company also claims to have up to 200 million live streams every day.

Unlike Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou’s large active users are almost evenly spread between men (55.8%) and women (44.2%). Kuaishou’s users are young, 80% of them were born after 1990.

Kuaishou's demographics: dominance of rural app users

Kuaishou found a perfect niche in China’s short video market, as it attracted a lot of rural and lifestyle content located in lower-tier cities and rural areas, as creators felt left out, among luxury content of other platforms. The app is able to create personal engagement experiences with young people from all environments, becoming a safe space for all types of creators to express themselves.

How does the biggest Tik Tok competitor make money?

By looking into how Kuaishou is making money from online and offline resources, you can also get a grasp of what type of content is promoted by the app, that you can implement on your Kuaishou business account.

  • LIVE STREAMING: the main revenue is the live streaming business. This involves many users purchasing virtual items from Kuaishou to gift to the streamers.
  • ADS AND ONLINE MARKETING: this app is also making money from online marketing and advertising which brought a lot of money in the past years.
  • E-COMMERCE AND GAMES: Kuaishou has begun venturing into e-commerce and mobile games which are really famous in our society. In fact, users can purchase items from online streamers via the Kuaishou app.

Why is Kuaishou a good choice for your brand?

As we said before, Kuaishou is the second-hottest short video app in China. It holds an 8% share of the e-commerce live-streaming market in China following Alibaba’s Taobao Live and Douyin.

Kuaishou is a stronger relationship-based platform, thus the e-commerce conversion rate on Kuaishou is higher than on Douyin. Today this is the best platform to do streaming e-Commerce. The engagement rate on Kuaishou live-streaming is 5% against 2% for Douyin.

Many top-selling Kuaishou influencers own small businesses. They often create content related to their daily business. For instance, the production steps for packing a product. Nowadays, Kuaishou is pushing a lot to build its e-commerce system. It’s currently integrating with 6 e-commerce platforms and it needs more platforms to share e-commerce data.

paid marketing analyze ROI

To summarize, Kuaishou has stronger user engagement, more live-streaming content, and stronger e-commerce conversion. Although the user base is smaller than on Douyin, people are not advertising that much, which means it’s cheaper to promote your brand there and the engaged community is more willing to purchase on Kuaishou than on Douyin.

These differences create interesting opportunities for e-commerce players trying to pick the right platform to promote their products.

To start promoting on Kuaishou, you need a business account

In order to promote your brand through Kuaishou marketing, you need to create a business account, meaning that your account gets verified by Kuaishou in-house team. There are two types of official accounts on Kuaishou:

  • Individual creator accounts: this is the choice for all the artists, sportsmen, Chinese influencers and content creators.
  • Business accounts: these accounts are for brands that want to use them for promotion, offering e-commerce integrations and communication with Kuaishou’s user base.
Different types of Kuaishou business accounts

Why should you have a business account on Kuaishou?

In China, it’s important to show your target consumer that you are a legitimate company. As there are a lot of counterfeit products and brands, consumers are double careful when buying products online. This is why it’s important to verify all the accounts on social media so that you will get a “V” logo next to your account name as proof of legitimacy and authority.

Apart from standard functions available to all users of the platform, Kuaishou offers brands e-commerce integrations, advertising, growth recommendations, sub-categories for different organizations, and so on. You can also add a purchase link to your short-form video, so that encouraged users can purchase your products right away.

A business account is a proven track record of your company’s existence, you get more visibility and it’s easier to raise brand awareness with all the available functions.

Marketing strategies for a Kuaishou business account

As we already covered the importance of having a business account on Kuaishou, let’s see how you can actually promote your brand on the platform.

Publish original videos

For instance, Ziroom, a brand that provides rental services, introduced some of its advantages like a butler service by publishing videos that attract many users to download this app. To support these creators, Kuaishou started a new project to improve traffic and impressions which result in substantial growth.

Kuaishou is based on user-generated content, therefore it’s important to publish authentic, more ‘raw’ videos so that people get attracted to your content.

Post short videos during peak hours

It is said that most Chinese people prefer to use Kuaishou during the evening, exactly at 10 PM. if you want to get more visibility you should post your video at that time. This technique is true for every platform, also Instagram or Facebook.

Use special tags

When you post a video, you can add tags related to the content, the brand, or the product. If someone finds your videos by searching for popular tags, your video will have the opportunity to make a second impression.

Leverage the live-streaming function

Live streaming is one of the most effective ways to increase the number of fans for brands’ accounts. Streamers can show products to consumers clearly, sell products and interact with audiences to explain the details of the product. Additionally, they can guide audiences to join the brand’s WeChat groups – that’s a crucial method to implement relationships.

Work with influencers

This Chinese short video platform is not different from all the others, and in 2022 the best advertising solution and most effective way of brand promotion are through Chinese influencers. You can collaborate with one big influencer, that will work as your brand ambassador (a more expensive option), or you can work with many smaller influencers, for a bigger reach. Also, smaller influencers really often have a more engaged follower base.

Influencers can share your content or create dedicated content for their accounts, promoting your brand. They can also host live-streaming sessions, showing your products in use, and so on. From more than 300 million daily active users on the platform, we can assure you that the majority of them follow at least one influencer on Kuaishou.

Promote your products through paid advertising

We don’t recommend starting with paid advertising, but it’s an option for the next steps of promotion on Kuaishou.

There are many options for using paid advertising, like; display ads, newsfeed ads, and discover ads, all of which can be in the form of short video clips or banners. These can be used to direct traffic to account profiles, specific videos or live streams, games, external websites, and e-commerce stores. 

A good strategy is to use ads to promote the content of influencers you are collaborating with, so you get an even more reach, adding credibility to your brand.

Need to know more about Kuaishou? Contact GMA

We can help you promote your brand on Kuaishou, starting from account setup, through content strategy and influencer marketing. We have a big base of influencers, so we can help you find the most suitable one for your brand.

GMA is a digital marketing agency focused on the Chinese market. Apart from Kuaishou, our team will provide you with several services: from SEO to KOL marketing, visit our website to know how to help your brand succeed in China.

We offer a free discovery call, so our experts can get to know your brand and see what are the best opportunities for you in the Chinese market. Don’t hesitate to leave us a comment or contact us to discuss your project in China!

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