how Key Opinion Leaders are important?

Navigating the world of social media stardom can be difficult

When it comes to finding the right  KOLs to promote brand awareness in China, navigating the world of social media stardom can be difficult. It’s common for WeChat and Weibo accounts to be fake or for their users to purchase thousands of followers, making it particularly important for brands to track how their well blog posts and tweets from their influencers are performing. A new study by consulting firm R3 and data-analytics company Bomoda unveiled which luxury brands seem to be doing just fine with their KOL engagement, in part thanks to popular bloggers and a mix of both Chinese and Western celebrities who are very active on WeChat and Weibo. The verdict? Dior, Gucci, and Chanel see the best return on their KOL investment in China, with Louis Vuitton, Givenchy, and Estée Lauder following close behind.

Fan Bingbing, Angelababy, and Taylor Swift Among Top Stars Boosting Luxury Brands on WeChat

Bomoda and R3 scanned 4 million WeChat accounts and and 60,000 on Weibo to come up with the top 400 celebrities and bloggers and the top 25 brands they’re most associated with, calculating how many likes their posts received, how many times they mentioned brands, and how many reads their posts received over the month of July. They separated popular bloggers on Weibo and WeChat and popular celebrities on these platforms into four categories to give a clearer picture of how engagement looks on each platform. The top 10 brands within each platform were very similar, but cosmetics brands (Estée Lauder, Lancôme, and Olay) had a slight lead in terms of success on Weibo’s KOL accounts compared to WeChat’s.

One thing that’s especially clear from this data is that the number of time brands are mentioned doesn’t necessarily show how engaging a KOL is to followers. Actor Xu Weizhou mentioned the top 25 brands only 334 times on Weibo, but gained more than 64,000 reposts, much more than the actress and model Liu Yifei, who mentioned these brands more than 2,000 times and received just under 20,000 reposts. It emphasizes the importance of brands following up with their KOLs to really understand how the word about their brand is getting out to followers.