Golden Connections: How a Chinese Social Media Site Brings Together Seniors

Tan Yunfei (谭云飞)

Despite amassing millions of users, Meipian, a Chinese social media app targeting the senior community, continues to grapple with monetization challenges

At around 6 p.m. on a weekend in Beijing’s Beihai Park, despite temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius, a line of people in their 60s and 70s with cameras, tripods, and wide-brimmed hats start to form on the bank of Beihai Lake. They’ve come to shoot the park’s famous white stupa, and will patiently wait for hours to capture all of its different views: against blue skies, glowing under the dusk, and then illuminated under the park’s artificial lights at night.

Like young people flocking to popular restaurants to photograph the food and decorations, these elderly tourists are also seeking iconic destinations to daka (打卡, “check in”) at—and like their younger counterparts, there’s even a place where they gather to share their results online. Meipian, a social media app founded in 2015, is affectionately known as the “Old Red Book” for being similar in function to millennial and Gen Z lifestyle app Xiaohongshu , whose name translates to “Little Red Book,” but more popular among the middle-aged and elderly. If one searches for “Beihai Park,” Meipian shows hundreds of blog-like diary entries with up to 100 images included.

Unlike other social media platforms such as Weibo or WeChat’s Moment’s feed, the blogging function of Meipian allows users to post long articles and up to 100 images and videos. This has been commonly cited as crucial to its popularity among middle-aged and elderly users who might be less tech-savvy to select and edit their photos for the best few.

On Meipian, there are rarely any viral videos or influencers who recommend the latest trends to follow, but many communities dedicated to “recollections”: such as “Sharing Memories of the Countryside” and “Communicating on the Days of Being Sent-Down Youths” groups, both of which have over 10,000 members (known as meiyou , or “Mei[pian] friends”) who reminisce about their experiences of being “reeducated” in rural China during the Cultural Revolution.

And instead of responding with the latest slang terms or humorous gifs, users are more ready to sprinkle compliment-laden comments with abundant flowers and “thumbs-up” emojis. In turn, they receive kind responses adorned with similar emojis, creating a cycle of positive interactions. Debates and abusive comments, according to the users, are comparatively rare.

A haven for seniors online

According to a 2021 report by AgeClub, a Beijing-based media platform specializing in businesses that target seniors, Meipian has over 200 million registered users, over 50 percent of whom are above the age of 45. This positions Meipian as the third most popular app within this demographic, trailing behind the news aggregator Jinri Toutiao and the ubiquitous instant messaging app WeChat.

As one of the few social media platforms targeted at the demographic, Meipian aims to: “enrich the inner world of the middle-aged and elderly,” as per its upgraded mission announced in September 2021. It also updated its slogan the same year—“Come to Meipian in the prime of life”—in replacement of the original one, “Record what’s pleasant and share the touching moments.”

Meipian (美篇, literally meaning “beauty” and “piece [of writing]”) first started as a tool for editing texts and photos. Users can share the link of their finished blog-like pieces to other platforms like WeChat. Its founder Tang Qi, then a research and development engineer at Chinese tech giant Huawei in Nanjing, reportedly made the prototype of the app for his father. Tang’s father had picked up photography as a hobby in his retirement, but there were no senior-friendly platforms for sharing the many images he took and liked. At that time, blogging platforms developed by tech giants like Sina and Baidu were dying, while WeChat Moments, Weibo, and Xiaohongshu all limited the number of images and the characters their users were allowed to post.

Many friends of Tang’s own generation didn’t find the idea to be promising, as they had a hard enough time even finding nine images to post with each social media update. However, after Tang released an updated version of his app in January 2016, which included comment and discussion functions, the app’s user number soared to over 5 million by August, and doubled again by January 2017. Its official website boasted 200 million registered users by June 2020. The company was already valued at an estimated 1 billion yuan after four rounds of financing, totaling over 180 million yuan from investment management companies and funds in July 2018.

“Meipian has offered users a channel to express themselves in depth,” Tang explained to business news website 36kr in December 2021. The app addressed a need among middle-aged and elderly internet users that few existing apps had managed to meet. The platform’s popularity has largely grown in the “users self-promoting model (用户自传播),” where new users are attracted by the Meipian content shared on other apps like WeChat. The platform has also tried to make its interface friendlier to its demographic: for example, words like “follow (关注)” and “section (分区)” are replaced with “subscribe (订阅)” and “column (栏目)”—terms familiar to newspaper-readers, to make their meaning more clear to seniors.

Wang Dezeng, a 58-year-old researcher from Weishan county in eastern China’s Shandong province, learned about Meipian from ads on WeChat in early 2016. At the time, with many Chinese blog sites either shutting down or getting increasingly harder to load, he was worried about losing the hundreds of diary entries and poems he had been publishing on Sina Blog since 2012.

He transferred his content over to Meipian shortly after discovering the platform and found the warm feedback he received from other users to be motivating for him to post more. Each of the approximately 100 posts he published this year has garnered around 10,000 views, received 100 positive comments, and earned him “virtual flowers,” which users can purchase or earn by completing different tasks within the app. Meipian’s community culture encourages users to reciprocate when others follow, reply, and “gift” them. “It’s embarrassing if others comment on your writing or even write a review about it, but you don’t do anything in return,” says Wang, who has 6,900 followers and follows over 3,800 other users in return.

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