Bilibili: Growing a Community of Content Creators in Vietnam

Bilibili is a social video entertainment platform with millions of anime, gaming and comics fans and creators. Entering Vietnam, its success depended on one thing: how quickly Vietnamese AGC fans became aware of Bilibili and adopted it as part of their daily lives, before established platforms absorbed that attention.

Vietnam's AGC community is passionate but fragmented across fan groups, forums and creator circles. A conventional launch campaign would reach them once; Bilibili needed them to stay, create and bring their friends.

Ruder Finn Era developed a strategy built on three building blocks that together form a robust community, designed to recruit Bilibili users and convert them into Bili-stans, loyal members of the Bilibili community rather than passing visitors.

In practice that meant partnering with the existing AGC ecosystem rather than competing with it: more than 30 community partnerships gave Bilibili a presence inside the fan groups and creator circles where Vietnamese AGC culture already lived, while media outreach built awareness beyond them. The programme recruited over 25,000 new community members and reached more than 6.5 million people through media.