I recently had the opportunity to travel back home to China to visit family & friends and make some business acquaintances. As many people will know, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are banned in China, now I am not going to take a side here on the reasons for or against it, just that my recent trip home did give me the change to test a few things out.

When you have a business trip or work in China for a long term, how can you access these social networks to keep yourself and business clients up to date? I discovered there are three solutions open to you.

1. Paid Proxies

Basically, a proxy is a server which allows the internet users to use it as a bridge, the internet users accesses the website they want to see, ie. Facebook / Twitter / YouTube, through this server as an intermediary. If the proxy is located in a different location, it will show you the site the way the proxy sees it in that location. For example, when you visit Facebook through the proxy located in the United States, it will act as if you are visiting Facebook in the United States, therefore allowing you to access Facebook while physically being in China! The beauty is that you don’t need to install anything on your computer and easily access it off any device.

SecuritTales (www.securitales.com) and Proxy Center (www.proxy-center.com) are recommended by many users. They both have a free trial to let you get to Facebook / Twitter / YouTube in China before you sign up and have 30 days money back guarantee policy. The signup fees are the same and reasonable.

2. Paid VPNs

VPN (Virtual Private Network) is a way of putting your whole computer in different place virtually. So if you have a VPN to a computer in a different country, your computer acts like it’s in the United States, or the UK – or wherever the VPN is hosted, so as Facebook / Twitter / YouTube aren’t blocked in the USA – then it won’t be blocked on your computer in China!

12VPN and Strong VPN They both are suitable for Windows/Mac OS X/Linux. They have a 7-day money back guarantee policy. Current fees are below.

3. FREE posts on Facebook or Twitter

    via Instagram / Vine

Instagram is an app to share photos with followers. You can take photos and edit them on Instagram then share the photos and captions onto both the Facebook and Twitter social networks. It is FREE to use Instagram, while it is just an one-way communication which means you are able to post the updates on Facebook and Twitter via Instagram and your followers are able to see and comment on them, however you are not able to reply to your followers.

It is the same to use Vine to have one-way share the updates to Twitter, the difference is you can only share 6-second videos and captions via Vine as it is a video sharing app.

If you find any other solutions to access the top social networks in China, please comment below, lets create a repository of access solutions for those of us traveling to China!