- Shenelle and Shehan become the first travel content creators to access Chinese social media
In this day and age of the internet, where anything can be accessed at the touch of a button, one must wonder how we as a country can capitalise on this and globalise everything we have to offer.
Travel content creators Shenelle Rodrigo and Shehan Thahir did exactly this – over the years, the two have managed to film and create breathtaking content promoting the lush island we live on, and just recently took this content for promotion in China. In fact, the two of them are the first content creators in Sri Lanka to gain access to Chinese social media, with the mission of taking the stories of Sri Lanka to the Chinese social media community.
Brunch reached out to Shenelle and Shehan to learn more about this promotion, how it came to be and how it can benefit our tourism industry.
Sharing their plans for promoting local content in China, Shenelle explained that they plan to push all their YouTube videos and other content into the Chinese market via Chinese social media.
“As you might know, China doesn’t use YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook; they have their own versions of it, so what we have essentially done is posted the content we made for our platforms on their Chinese equivalent,” Shenelle elaborated. They will be posting on Chinese social networking platforms like Tencent Video, which has 385 million active users per month, Tengxun Weishi, which has 53.84 million, Tengxun Kandian, which has 185 million, and Tengxun Shipin Hao, which has a whopping 450 million active users per month.
Speaking on what inspired this line of promotion, Shenelle stated that back in 2018/2019, some of the largest tourist groups that visited Sri Lanka were from China. With the large pool of content Shenelle and Shehan have created over the last three years, they successfully accessed one of the largest tourist markets for Sri Lanka.
“Eventually, when tourism picks up again, they will be coming back to Sri Lanka with far more interest and knowledge on what they want to experience,” Shenelle highlighted.
Shehan explained that although the global market can access a plethora of information on Sri Lanka online, China cannot, as they do not have the same forms of social media as the rest of the world. “They only get their information from travel agents and destination management companies – so their knowledge on Sri Lanka is very limited,” Shehan observed, with Shenelle adding that the Chinese market does not get to experience that first-person perspective of the country, as they do not have access to much of the content that is created here.
Shenelle also noted that many Chinese people tend to travel in groups because of the language barrier, and most do not get to experience travel content created by people from the country they are visiting, as their social media access is regulated. “There is only a limited amount of content that they can consume from people outside of China.”
With the promotion being carried out by the duo, visitors from China can access on-the-ground content to gain a better understanding of Sri Lanka and what we have to offer, in their own language.
Shehan also pointed out that in the last 10-20 years, most Chinese travel agents have offered the same cookie-cutter tours marketed to the typical tourist, so their mission is to navigate this and guide tourists to not only the usual spots, but to other hidden gems in Sri Lanka as well.
This is their goal as content creators overall, not just with the Chinese market, and the two hope to shine the spotlight on parts of Sri Lanka that otherwise go ignored despite their potential to bring in more tourists.
The two are currently working with Cheung Sha Media Company Ltd.; a Chinese agency based in Sri Lanka and China, which transcribes their content into Chinese and uploads their videos onto Chinese social media platforms with Chinese captions and subtitles. Shehan added that the company will also be cutting the videos up into formats that suit the Chinese audience.
When asked how this partnership came about, Shenelle revealed that the company had reached out to them. “We had discussed this possibility a while back, and at the time, it was a long-term strategy for us, as we knew China is a key market for us to promote Sri Lanka,” Shehan told us, with Shenelle adding that Cheung Sha had watched their videos and enjoyed them, and had believed that the Chinese audience would be keen and interested in the cultural aspect that Sri Lanka has to offer.
The duo had been going back and forth with the Chinese company for about six months, working out the finer details, and are now pleased to have finally taken it off the ground. Currently, they are posting one video a day on these sites, and will continue to do so for the first week, after which they are looking at two to three videos for the next two weeks, and one video per week after the fourth week, once they’ve looked at the reach and engagement deemed the promotion successful.
At the moment, they are pushing out existing content that they believe will interest the Chinese market. Shehan named the cultural aspects and experiential adventure tourism to be a few hits amongst this market, although he added that with all social media platforms, one has to do a lot of experimenting to figure out what the audience wants to see.
In terms of content that they will be posting, Shenelle and Shehan work closely with Cheung Sha, which has given them a rough idea of what kind of content the Chinese market wants. Even then, Shehan told us that since the content is subtitled and is not in Chinese, they are going through a trial-and-error phase, where they are figuring out what works and what doesn’t.
During their discussions, they came to the conclusion that China will find the cultural and experiential activities here uniquely different to what they have in China. Shehan added that they hope that with this content push, they can encourage the Chinese market to see more parts of the island than the typical tourist hotspots.
“On a daily basis, we will be pushing out a bunch of content and based on the response we get on each platform, we will tweak how we present it,” Shehan told us. Later on, the two hope to shoot content that will certainly fit the target market once they have accurately identified their audience.
As China is strict on regulating social media, and the platforms there are vastly unknown and different from the platforms available locally, we asked Shenelle and Shehan how they found the transition from our platforms to theirs.
“In this regard, having a Chinese company as our partner is helpful as they handle posting on the platforms for us,” Shenelle informed us, adding that the two of them communicate with the company on what content they want to put out. Shenelle also told us that it is difficult for them to use these platforms, as they are entirely in Chinese and navigating them is difficult if one is not fluent in the language. “We can go online and see the content that is posted, but navigating the app and posting content ourselves is futile without knowing Chinese,” she added.
This promotion plan took off just a few days ago, so they are unable to give us an update on how the promotion is doing over there, but in the next few days, they are hopeful that the content will take off and bring more tourists to our country.
Shenelle added that they expect it to grow exponentially, as although there are thousands of Chinese content creators producing content for their social media, there isn’t anything like what the two of them have created. They are certain that their content will gain interest quite fast and take off on a positive note.
