As early as 1997, when China's Internet first began to take off, Sina, one of the five major portals in the future, was still known as the "Sitong Lifang Forum". This was the earliest online community with documented records in China's Internet history. Due to its low threshold for publication, flexible text format, wide range of topics, and high privacy, once the online community with forums as its main body appeared, it became an important platform for netizens to get closer, exchange knowledge, and reflect their voices.
In the past 10 years or so, countless online communities of all kinds have "bloomed" on the Chinese Internet. They have quickly become a haven for private information in China during the transition period. They have also become an important position for many companies to promote their products and services. As early as 2005, Around this time, many popular forums have tried to publish advertising information in the form of pop-ups, banners and even announcements. After entering the 2010s, with the rise of a new wave of online entrepreneurship characterized by B2C and C2C, online communities have become a new online marketing front.
The development of online communities shows the characteristics of the "new four modernizations"
In the coming year of 2010, in addition to continuing to keep up with the hot topics of social life and stage tragedies and comedies, China's online community itself has also shown the "maturity" of user age, SNS-based communication applications, "Weibo-based" ancillary functions, and group purchasing of business functions. characteristics of the “new four modernizations”.
According to iResearch's "2010 China Online Community Research Report", in the age distribution of China's online community users for three consecutive years in 2008, 2009 and 2010, the proportion of users aged 19-24 has been declining year by year, while the proportion of users aged 25-30 has has increased year by year, exceeding the proportion of users aged 19-24; core users are still mainly concentrated in 19-30 years old, accounting for more than 70% of the total number of users, but the proportion has declined slightly. This is consistent with the SEO Information Communication Network’s earlier research on the changing trends in the age distribution of netizens in online communities based on the changes in China’s demographic structure.
On the other hand, network social services (SNS) have also become a prominent highlight in online community communication applications this year. As of November 2010, the proportion of online communities that provide SNS services is 65.0%, of which 26.2% are those that have provided SNS services for less than 6 months, and 26.2% are those that have provided SNS services for 6 months to 1 year. 12.8%, and the proportion of online communities that have provided SNS services for more than one year is 26.0%.
In addition, driven by large-scale online communities and portals such as Tianya, Maopu, and 163, Weibo is popular among netizens for its short speeches, no need to worry about the completeness of articles, and the ability to send information through mobile phones anytime and anywhere to record bloggers’ instant information. , and has been imitated by the online community: According to statistics, the proportion of online community users currently using Weibo has reached 71.7%, while 22.0% of users are willing to use Weibo, and only 6.3% of users are not interested in Weibo.
It is worth mentioning that in 2010, when the macroeconomic situation was uncertain and CPI continued to be high, group buying, as an emerging business model that pools the power of consumers to obtain extremely favorable discount conditions, experienced a spurt of development. Various group buying websites emerged one after another. , many online communities have also launched group buying services. In fact, according to iResearch’s research, only 36% of online community users have no group buying experience, which shows how huge the influence of group buying is among netizens.
It can be seen that with the "maturity" of users' age levels, China's online communities have initially formed a multi-functional, multi-level market for leisure and entertainment, information exchange, making connections, and business promotion. Various online communities based on stratification, industry affiliation, and hobbies also provide a natural classification basis for the future development of these markets.
SEO will be a huge boost to online community business
Search engine optimization (SEO), as a way to use search engine search rules to improve the ranking of target websites in relevant search engines, is being widely used and developing rapidly around the world: according to GoogleTrends data, from 2005 to the present, keywords Search volume for "SEO" increased by 2.5 times in India, 1.6 times in Russia, 2.2 times in Brazil, 3.1 times in China, and 4.4 times in the United States. This fully shows that today, as the Internet becomes popular and more and more business activities are transferred from online to online, search engines are playing an increasingly important role in promotion.
Since online communities have the characteristics of netizens compiling content and entertaining themselves, their information update speed and PV value are often higher than those of other websites. This is why many online community articles can be ranked in search engines when searching for related keywords. Top search results. More importantly, as the business atmosphere of online communities becomes increasingly strong, not only do online merchants need high traffic in the community to bring potential business, but the community also needs sustained high popularity to increase its influence. This provides excellent market opportunities for SEOs who are good at creating topics and improving search engine rankings. On the other hand, 62.2% of Chinese online community webmasters tend to choose search advertising, which also shows that SEO and online community marketing will become a hot spot in online promotion in the future.
In this regard, Li Guolin said: "At present, in addition to large enterprises gradually shifting their marketing positions to the Internet, many small and medium-sized enterprises regard the Internet as the last marketing treasure. In the past, people were considered to be 'happy online and chatting about mountains and rivers' As online communities join this business boom, we predict that the gap in online marketing talents, especially SEO talents suitable for online community marketing, will further expand. This is also the fundamental reason why the current SEO positions are "highly paid and no one is available". Therefore, SEO is like this. To truly become a huge boost to online community business, overcoming talent bottlenecks will become a top priority.”
The article comes from China SEO Training Center ( http://www.seorv.com/n-1479.html ). Please indicate the source when reprinting.
Thanks to Li Guolin for his contribution