Tmall just launched FUN after a month’s testing, a social network inside its mobile client promoting tagged photo sharing.

FUN has three features: recommendations, tags, and followed users.

Recommendation shows shared photo feeds with tags which are displayed once touched upon. Users can click on individual tag to view photo stream under with the same tag. This is where brands and sellers can utilize to share photos with relevant tags and spread the brand or product awareness in Tmall; and at the mean time it drives traffic to Tmall store.

On individual tag page, it shows relevant photos, where users can either follow this tag/brand or “search it” to enter Tmall product search results page.

Users can also follow other users besides following brands/tags on Tmall FUN.

Tmall FUN is definitely a feature worth merchants and brands experimenting on Tmall for driving brand awareness and traffic to Tmall store.

Sina Weibo just launched a new feature, allowing users to tag photos with clickable links to another page on Weibo, which could be user profile or #topic page#.

Each photo can include up to five tags. Potentially, this feature can be enhanced and be a good selling tool utilizing the power of photos since users can take a photo of their product with Weibo Seller app adding a link to the product page to sell directly.

Photos are important to make your message appealing, especially in social media. There’s no exception in Chinese social media. But what type of images and photos are most appealing on Weibo. Let’s take a look what iResearch data reveal.

Landscape photos are the most popular in all categories of Weibo images in year 2013, according to iResearch. 45.9% users are attracted to landscape photos, followed by food photos (39.2%) and product photos (27.9%).

In various photos, the first three types which male users pay more attention to are sports photos, car photos and pretty girl photos. The first three types of photos which female users pay more attention to are delicacy food photos , celebrity photos and anime photos.

What does this mean for marketers? For all users, marketing promotion can combine advertisement with landscape images. For male users, it can use more images related to sports, cars and beauty. And for female users, photos of delicacy, food and celebrity could be used. In doing so, companies can attract users’ engagement at best, in order to achieve better marketing result.

ZDC, which is ZOL Data Center, released a report on Chinese netizen camera phone user behavior in 2013. This report was based on a survey on ZOL, it collected 1,260 responses and received 1,248 effective responses.

Key Findings:

• 95.4% Chinese netizen had mobile phones.
• 96.3% Chinese netizen had smartphones.
• Android users reached 70%, followed by iOS users
• Samsung occupied 19.1% market share by volume, followed by iPhone and HTC.
• Dual Camera phone users occupied 70% market share by volume, 8/8.1/8.7 million pixels users reached 40%.
• 90% interviewers said they used mobile phone to take photos in daily life. 59.7% would choose camera when travelling.
• Almost 60% said they would use mobile phone to take photos of people, while for scene, plant and animal, more people would use camera than mobile.
• The major reason for taking photos with mobile was because mobile could take photo anytime anywhere.
• High quality and high resolution was the main reason why people used camera.
• Most people use mobile to take photos three or four times a week.
• Interviewers ages were mainly between 26-35, with 40%. 20% of interviewers were students, and 60.1% of students were college students.