BBS tops chart for Chinese Valentine's Day buzz : CIC

Chinese Valentine's Day is also known as the Double Seven Festival as it falls on the 7th day of the 7th lunar month on the Chinese calender.

The 16th was the buzz peak for the holiday and it is interesting to see that buzz on this day was dominated by BBS. Of the 3,371 total mentions of Valentine’s Day, 68 per cent were found on BBS versus blogs, microblogs, news, social networking and video site channels.

Analysis of buzz content saw that much talk was driven by romantic and colourful posts on BBS, with a number of retailers leveraging this channel. Examples include retailers selling apparent Louis Vuitton and Apple products, small retailers selling cosmetics and other gifts, and restaurants promoting couple meals. KFC leveraged the ‘copy and paste’ BBS phenomenon around the news of a man proposing to a woman at a KFC restaurant to promote its Valentine's meal special.    

While microblogs, SNS and blogs are relatively new social media channels compared to BBS, we see that BBS still has an important role to play within the social media landscape. According to Interfax China, registered BBS user accounts surpassed three billion with 80 per cent of Chinese sites running their own BBS. BBS has a massive reach that cannot be ignored.