The partnership will allow Natives’ university clients worldwide to engage with Chinese students at a local level via their preferred social media platform.

“The partnership will bring quality targeted enquiries from Chinese students”

Aaron Zheng Wang, China marketing and media manager at Natives, said: “The partnership will bring quality targeted enquiries from Chinese students”.

“[This] is why we are so excited to bring this news to the education sector,” he added.

Phillip Gray, director of International at York St John University added: “The Natives’ China team have been extremely helpful. We couldn’t have generated the volume and quality of leads without their insight, knowledge and experience, especially from Douyin/TikTok.”

Natives’ student marketing platform, Akero, connects with TikTok (Douyin) so that when a student enquiry comes via TikTok it is automatically added into the university’s own CRM system.

TikTok has become the global social media phenomenon of 2019, where hundreds of millions of young people create and share short musical and comedy videos every day.

The top two mainland Chinese universities by QS World Ranking, Tsinghua University and Peking University have nearly 3.5 million TikTok followers between them, demonstrating it is a key channel to reach the traditionally difficult Chinese student market.

Read our PIE Chat with Steve Evans, CEO of Natives here