Entrepreneurship and networking

"In several  feld sites social media and e-commerce more generally are becoming seen as a promising instrument for developing small-scale local businesses. In our Chinese factory  feld site we meet A-mei, a female factory worker. She used her kinship networks and images from the commercial shopping site of Taobao to establish a make-up business on WeChat, only to find there were already too many people doing the same thing, partly because with social media there is such a low barrier to entry into commerce. By contrast a free-range chicken and egg business in the same area succeeded, but mainly because the customers were mostly friends, family and work colleagues. Mainly such ventures are set up by young women as a supplement to formal work rather than as a full-time occupation. More generally McDonald and Wang argue that personal recommendations have far more influence over what people buy in China compared to Western countries, and this is fuelling the growth of e-commerce on platforms such as WeChat."

Source: "How the World Changed Social Media", UCL Press