For luxury brands, mastering social media in China is a must for connecting to consumers and making sales. WeChat and Weibo dominate China’s social media scene, but are only part of the story. The digital environment in a market with more smartphone users than any other is constantly changing – one social media app eclipsed its competitors within little more than a year of its launch, for example. More than 80% of Chinese luxury shoppers are on social media, according to a recent report by ParkLu, a marketplace for key opinion leaders. They are also using networks on their favorite platforms to research products and brands before they buy.

Online censorship prevents Chinese consumers easily accessing popular overseas social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, so brands and marketers have to use other platforms. WeChat is a complete ecosystem, and one of the most important.“Within WeChat, brands can provide anything from content, payment methods, and social interactions to live streaming, customer service, a customized e-commerce experience, and more,” says Thomas Graziani, Co-founder of WeChat marketing agency Walk the Chat. Graziani says platforms like WeChat offer luxury brands the opportunity to “claim back the ownership of customers and their data” in a digital space that was once dominated by e-commerce platforms like Tmall and JD.com. “By setting up websites within the WeChat ecosystem, they can provide a much more customized and personal experience to their followers and customers,” he says.

Around 443 million Chinese consumers will shop on their smartphones this year, and their purchases will account for more than 75% of total online retail sales, according to eMarketer.

Every luxury brand in China should know four platforms, as reported by the South China Morning Post:

• WeChat, on which nearly every major luxury label has an official account and now reaches one billion monthly active users. Mini programs, sub-apps that exist within WeChat, allow brands to offer a service without the customer needing to exit the app and access a separate one.

• Weibo, China’s Twitter, which supports viral content, based on hashtags. Brands target the platform’s 411 million monthly active users often by working with celebrities, whose large followings tend to drive conversation.

• Douyin, better known as Tik Tok overseas, is a lot like Musical.ly, as it lets users upload 15-second clips of themselves lip-syncing to music, creating video that they can edit with Snapchat-like filters and share with their followers. Content creators with a certain number of followers can also live-stream on Douyin. It is a key platform for reaching China’s Generation Z, or consumers under 24 years old.

• Red, or Little Red Book, is focused on beauty brands. The app got its start helping millennial Chinese shoppers, mostly women, educate their friends and followers about products sold overseas. It now boasts nearly 100 million users and has its own cross-border e-commerce platform.