Chinese fervor for social media shows sharp tail off

Chinese users of social media are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact online communication is having on their lives and the number of people feeling positive about it has dropped by 12.1 percent from last year.

The second annual Kantar China Social Media Impact Report also revealed that social media is used by more age groups, less educated people and in smaller cities, while Tencent's WeChat has become the dominant leader of an increasingly mobile connected country.

Kantar, a data investment management company, carried out this year's report through data mining, Weibo text mining, WeChat article text mining and online polling. The research covered 60 Chinese cities, 66,000 respondents, 2 million Sina Weibo posts and 711 million WeChat article reads.

For the online polling part of the research, 64.7 percent of 13,341 participants said social media's impact is positive, 12.1 percent lower than a year ago. While 12.2 percent of respondents said social media made their lives worse, nearly doubling last year’s 6.7 percent. The remaining 23.2 percent felt social media had a neutral impact, higher than 16.5 percent a year ago. This gives us an overall average satisfaction score of 68, compared to last year's 73.4.

The continuous survey part of the research captured the shifting profile of Chinese social media users from face-to-face interviews with 53,112 urban residents. Social media’s reach among urban residents has increased to 34 percent from last year's 28.6 percent. People born in the 1990s usurped the 1980s generation to become the largest age group (37.7 percent) and the proportion of older generations also increased at the expense of the 1980s, whose share dropped from 44.8 percent to 30.8 percent.