What China social media marketing costs per month

A foreign brand building an audience on two Chinese platforms should budget about RMB 105,000 to RMB 127,000 a month, roughly US$14,900 to US$17,900. That pays for creator content, paid media, and one operator per account. An account kept merely alive costs a fraction of that, while selling through the same pair runs close to double.

The table prices four platforms at three levels. At the lowest, maintain, the account posts and answers comments and little else. Build adds paid creators and ads to grow the following. Sell is the budget for moving product through a store or a live room. All figures are monthly, in RMB, and were checked on September 29, 2026. Each cell is a unit price, sourced or taken from our own calculator, times a volume we state further down. Swap in your own volumes and the rows still hold.

The Douyin rows leave out creators paid by commission on each sale. That cost moves with sales, so it sits with the store budget.

Our two year-one combinations pair platforms. Xiaohongshu with WeChat costs RMB 105,500 a month at the build level. Xiaohongshu with Douyin costs RMB 127,200. Both totals, and what drives the gap, are further down.

Why a monthly number is so hard to find

Search for this and you get agency directories and a chart of national ad spend. Nothing you can put in a budget.

There’s a reason for that. Each of the three cost lines is sold its own way. Ad platforms sell reach by auction, so the price moves by the hour. Creators quote per post, and the quote depends on the creator. Agencies fold staff and content, sometimes media too, into one retainer, and the split never appears on the invoice. The platforms keep most rate cards behind merchant logins. We found no public page where Xiaohongshu states its ad minimums.

“It depends” is the usual answer. That’s true, and useless. The budget depends on things you can count, starting with how many creator posts you buy and how much paid media runs behind them. Then come the people who run the accounts. Each has a published unit price somewhere, and the table above is what you get when you multiply them.

Content, media, operations: the line that gets cut

Content is mostly creator posts. On Xiaohongshu (RedNote), China’s search-heavy lifestyle app, a brand pays creators to write notes. On Douyin, ByteDance’s Chinese sister app to TikTok, it pays them for short videos. The going rates sit far apart.

Sponsored creator posts averaged RMB 10,800 each on Xiaohongshu and RMB 39,700 on Douyin from January to October 2024. A Xiaohongshu brand ran 13.7 of them a month on average. Source: Jiemian (界面新闻), citing QuestMobile, March 2025. https://www.jiemian.com/article/12440261.html

The platforms take a cut on top. Xiaohongshu charged brands 10% on deals booked through its creator marketplace when the rate was last reported, in 2021. We found no newer public figure, so the model keeps 10%. Douyin’s creator marketplace, Xingtu, takes a fee as well, and it won’t book a small order.

Xiaohongshu charged the brand a platform service fee of 10% of the deal value on creator partnerships. Source: Southern Weekend (南方周末), via Tencent News, November 2021. https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20211118A0DAAZ00

Xingtu recruitment tasks start at a RMB 10,000 order budget, with a 5% platform service fee. Source: Xingtu Help Center (巨量星图), August 2026. https://www.xingtu.cn/help-center/demander/126583

Operations is people. Someone has to post the brand’s own notes and videos and answer the comments. Someone briefs the creators and reads the numbers each week. The closest official pay data covers the national occupation that includes new-media marketing.

Internet marketing staff (互联网营销师) in Shenzhen earned a median of RMB 108,209 a year in 2024. The 75th percentile was RMB 164,915. Source: Shenzhen Human Resources and Social Security Bureau (深圳市人力资源和社会保障局), April 2026. https://hrss.sz.gov.cn/xxgk/tjsj/zxtj/content/post_12735120.html

That’s about RMB 9,000 a month at the median. It is wages only. Social insurance and the housing fund add to that, and we haven’t included them.

Paid media is the third line, and the easiest to trim, since creator posts feel like the real work and ads feel like an extra. But a sponsored note reaches the creator’s followers and whoever the feed decides to show it to. Paid media lets the brand pick that second group.

It’s also small. On Xiaohongshu at the build level, our model puts RMB 10,000 of media behind RMB 47,500 of creator notes. Cut the media and you save about a fifth of the content bill. The notes then go only as far as the creators’ followers and the feed will carry them.

China social media marketing cost per month: what goes into it

Every figure in the table comes from these inputs. If you trust the table, skip ahead. If you plan to change it, this is the part to read, because change one input and the row changes with it.

Start with content. The build level buys four creator notes a month on Xiaohongshu and one creator video on Douyin, and the sell level doubles both. Each post is priced at the 2024 average above, plus the platform’s fee: 10% on Xiaohongshu, 5% on Douyin. So four notes come to RMB 47,500, and one Douyin video to RMB 41,700.

On WeChat and Weibo the content cell reads “in operations.” Neither platform has a dated, public creator price we’d put in a budget, so the operator writes the posts and the cost sits in the wage.

Staffing follows the Shenzhen table (Shanghai publishes no public equivalent). Maintaining an account takes half a median operator, or RMB 4,500. Building one takes a full median operator at RMB 9,000, and selling through it takes someone at the 75th percentile, RMB 13,700.

For paid media we use our own numbers, taken from the Douyin cost calculator on this site at its default settings.

At RMB 2 million of year-one sales, with 15% of sales driven by paid ads at a return on ad spend of 2.5, the Douyin ad line comes to RMB 120,000 a year, or RMB 10,000 a month on Qianchuan. The year-two defaults, at RMB 3 million of sales and a 20% paid share, put it at RMB 20,000 a month. Source: TheChinaPath calculator data, September 2026.

We use RMB 10,000 at the build level and RMB 20,000 at the sell level on every platform, so the table compares content and staffing on equal media. WeChat is the exception, because its own published minimum sits higher. Tencent’s last public Moments rate card that we could verify is from 2018, so read that row as a floor from 2018 prices.

In 2018, WeChat Moments ads bought at auction needed a daily budget of at least RMB 1,000. A reserved Moments campaign needed at least RMB 50,000, at list prices of RMB 150 per thousand image-ad views in Beijing and Shanghai. Source: WeChat Ads (微信广告), Q3 2018. https://wximg.qq.com/wxp/wxadtouch/upload/t2/file-1533693930261.pdf

A month of daily auction ads at that minimum is RMB 30,000. One reserved campaign is RMB 50,000. Those are the WeChat build and sell figures, and the least certain numbers in the table: prices have had eight years to move. The WeChat sell row also assumes a China entity or a distributor to sell through, for reasons covered below.

The platform floors, and what happens below them

A floor is the smallest order a platform will run. Below it, nothing goes live. Only some of them are public.

A new Qianchuan campaign plan needs a daily budget, and the default minimum is RMB 100. Source: Douyin E-commerce Learning Center (抖音电商学习中心), June 2025. https://school.jinritemai.com/doudian/web/articlev0/aHvyeGCvMaTB

From 2026, orders a Douyin merchant generates through Qianchuan carry a 0.6% technical service fee, across all categories. Source: Ebrun (亿邦动力), January 2026. https://m.ebrun.com/636020.html

The hard floors are low. RMB 100 a day on Qianchuan is RMB 3,000 a month, and almost any brand clears it.

The floor that matters more is the budget below which paid media stops changing what the account does. No platform publishes that one, and it shifts by category and by season. Our planning figure of RMB 10,000 a month is where the Douyin calculator starts. On a two-platform plan, treat anything under it as a test, and give the test an end date.

The two combinations we’d price for year one

A foreign brand doesn’t need four platforms in its first year. It needs one place where Chinese shoppers research the product and one place where they buy it or come back to it. We’d start with one of two pairings.

Dollar figures use the calculator’s planning rate of RMB 7.10 to the dollar. Over twelve months, the build level comes to about RMB 1.27 million for Xiaohongshu with WeChat and RMB 1.53 million for Xiaohongshu with Douyin.

Pair Xiaohongshu with WeChat for considered purchases, the skincare or baby formula a shopper looks up before paying. That research happens on Xiaohongshu.

Xiaohongshu has passed 400 million monthly active users, with 800 million searches a day, according to the company. Source: Beijing Business Today (北京商报), via Sina Finance, May 2026. https://finance.sina.com.cn/jjxw/2026-05-27/doc-inhziqxq9291575.shtml

WeChat is where a brand keeps the customer it found, through an Official Account and a mini program. It’s also where Tencent says its ad business is growing.

Weixin and WeChat had 1,439 million combined monthly active users at the end of June 2026. Tencent’s marketing services revenue rose 22% to RMB 43.6 billion in the second quarter. Source: Tencent Holdings, August 2026. https://www.tencent.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Tencent-Announces-2026-Second-Quarter-Results.pdf

There’s a catch for cross-border sellers. WeChat’s own store format doesn’t take bonded cross-border goods, so the WeChat half of this pair sells through a China entity or a distributor, or it stays a service and loyalty channel.

Asked whether WeChat Store supports cross-border bonded import goods, an overseas business license or overseas settlement, WeChat staff replied: not supported. Source: WeChat Open Community (微信开放社区), January 2025. https://developers.weixin.qq.com/community/minihome/doc/000aca314d43589a14c212ae461c00

The other pairing, Xiaohongshu with Douyin, fits brands that want the sale on the same app as the video. Douyin runs its own cross-border store format, so an overseas brand can sell there from a bonded warehouse.

Douyin had 1.009 billion monthly active users in March 2026, up 14.43% from a year earlier, according to QuestMobile. Source: Kuai Technology (快科技), via Sina Tech, April 2026. https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/discovery/2026-04-29/doc-inhwckrh8029807.shtml

This pair costs more because a Douyin creator video costs almost four times what a Xiaohongshu note does, even with the smaller media line in our model. Commission creators are extra, as noted under the first table.

Weibo didn’t make either list. It has reach, and it works for a launch or a celebrity moment. But advertisers aren’t adding money there.

Weibo had 561 million monthly active users in June 2026. Its advertising and marketing revenue fell 1% to US$381.0 million in the second quarter. Source: Weibo Corporation, August 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/weibo-announces-second-quarter-2026-unaudited-financial-results-302855055.html

For how each platform fits a brand’s plan, our guide to social media in China goes platform by platform.

What this monthly budget doesn’t buy

The accounts themselves are close to free. Xiaohongshu verifies a company account for a few hundred renminbi, and WeChat charges an overseas company less than US$100.

Xiaohongshu charges RMB 600 to verify an enterprise professional account and RMB 600 for each yearly review. Companies registered outside the mainland can apply from regions the platform has opened, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. Source: Xiaohongshu Juguang Help Center (小红书聚光帮助中心), August 2026. https://ad.xiaohongshu.com/next_help/docs/195c5fe505c71b4b0335a2fe0d61d8e0

WeChat charges an overseas entity US$99 for each verification application. Source: WeChat Open Community (微信开放社区), June 2025. https://developers.weixin.qq.com/community/develop/article/doc/000e64388c0f107faf739efcd66813

Several costs sit outside the table on purpose.

A store is one. Opening on Tmall Global, JD Worldwide, or Douyin’s cross-border format means a refundable deposit up front and a commission on every order, plus an annual fee on some platforms. The Douyin cost calculator prices that side, along with the creator commission paid on sales.

On Douyin, a commission offer open to all creators can be set at 5% to 50% of the order’s paid amount. Source: Douyin E-commerce (抖音电商), August 2026. https://school.jinritemai.com/doudian/web/articlev0/112620

Employer social insurance on the operators’ wages isn’t here either. Nor is a livestream room, or a one-off launch with a top host. And if an agency runs the accounts, its retainer either replaces the operations line or sits on top of the whole table. Ask for the split between staff, content, and media before comparing two quotes.

Then there’s the work itself. Shooting the brand’s own posts every week and managing the community in the comments is a production job. That work sits with TheRedScroll, the group’s China social media agency. The money in this table buys inputs. The plan for what to post, and the call to drop a creator whose notes don’t convert, come from whoever runs the account.

How the social spend connects to a store, and to sales you can count, is the part we work on in social commerce in China. The ad buying behind it, from Qianchuan to Moments, is covered on our China media page.

Questions brands ask about the monthly budget

How much does Xiaohongshu marketing cost per month?

About RMB 66,500 a month to build an audience, per the Xiaohongshu build row in our table. That is four creator notes at the 2024 average of RMB 10,800 plus Xiaohongshu’s 10% fee, RMB 10,000 of paid media, and one operator at the Shenzhen median wage. A presence with no creators and no ads costs about RMB 4,500, mostly staff time.

Can a foreign company open Chinese social media accounts without a China entity?

On some platforms, yes. WeChat verifies overseas entities for US$99 per application. Xiaohongshu accepts company accounts from regions it has opened, including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia, for RMB 600. Selling is harder. WeChat’s store format doesn’t take cross-border bonded goods, while Douyin runs a cross-border store format for overseas brands.

Is Weibo still worth a budget?

For a launch, a celebrity tie-in, or news a brand wants picked up fast, often yes. Weibo had 561 million monthly users in June 2026. As a year-one base, it’s a weaker bet. Its advertising revenue fell 1% in the second quarter. For product research, Xiaohongshu’s 800 million daily searches make it the stronger bet.

What is the cheapest credible setup?

One platform at the build level, with the other held at maintain. For Xiaohongshu plus a maintained WeChat account, that’s about RMB 71,000 a month in our model. Anything smaller is an experiment, so set the date it stops and the number it has to reach.

Talk to us about a monthly China social budget, platform by platform and level by level