China's Xinhua Uses Western Social Media in Global Rebranding Effort

Xinhua has become the latest Chinese brand to use Western social media platforms to enhance its global profile.

Chinese news organization Xinhua has rebranded itself with a new name and logo on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in an effort to strengthen its international social exposure.

Xinhua is China’s official press agency and has had a presence on international social media for the past 12 months, but the rebrand funnels a number of accounts onto the three platforms under the unified name of “New China.”

The New China brand has more than 700,000 likes on Facebook and 1.3 million followers on Twitter. Content includes 24-hour news, photographs, and videos.

“Many Chinese brands are going global,” says Napoleon Biggs, commercial director at Bolei Digital. “Xinhua really is trying to break out to be an independent news organization and is therefore using Western platforms which give it the freedom to really expand the brand outside of China.”

Biggs draws attention to the difficulty Chinese brands can face with pronunciation of their Mandarin names. Xinhua’s English name, however, cleverly reflects the literal translation to “New China,” but is facing the same problems many brands face on social media when trying to unify existing Twitter handles and change or merge Facebook pages, making their current branding inconsistent, says Biggs.

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are all banned in China, but Xinhua joins a growing number of Chinese brands, including Huawei, Lenovo, China Southern Airlines, and Alibaba, that use international digital channels to market themselves globally.

“Chinese brands understand they have to be social and have a deep understanding of that. But it is how do they go out of China, what’s the right platform, and Twitter can definitely be part of that,” Thomas Crampton, global managing director for Ogilvy & Mather’s Social@Ogilvy, told ClickZ in November when Twitter announced it would soon be opening a Hong Kong sales office to tap into the increasing number of Chinese brands growing their outbound marketing strategies.

Facebook has been banned in China since 2009, but it, too, has a sales office in Hong Kong to facilitate advertising sales for its Chinese customers. Rumors have circulated since May that it will soon open a Mainland office to tap into this growing customer base.

In a release, Xinhua said the social media drive was launched “in response to a wider global trend of media transformation.”

“Xinhua will use these online channels to better communicate the voices of China, while establishing the agency as a figurehead that can respond to the concerns of the international community,” said an un-named Xinhua executive.

The global accounts are being managed by a team of around 100 journalists and editors from across the organization’s global bureaus.

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