Nokia has struck deals with two of China’s leading ISPs, SINA and Tencent, to integrate its Ovi Maps service into local social networks, allowing users to share their location information with friends and online communities. The move will allow Chinese Nokia phone users that also use either SINA’s microblogging service (Weibo) and Tencent’s online community (QQ) to check-in to locations and upload location-based content such as recommendations and comments of restaurants, shops and movie theatres. According to Nokia, over 250 million mobile users in China have a Nokia device. The first location-based services for SINA and Tencent customers through Ovi Maps are planned to be available during the first quarter of 2011.

The deals appear to mark a new strategy by Nokia to integrate its Internet services at a local level following the failure of international services such as its Ovi Music Unlimited offering, which was withdrawn from most of its markets earlier this month. Indeed, the two Chinese ISPs already provide instant access to millions of Internet users. SINA’s Twitter-like Weibo service, for example, was only launched in August 2009 but is on track to hit 100 million users by 2Q 2011 (view our video with SINA Mobile’s Gaofei Wang on Weibo here). Nokia’s announcement today follows yesterday’s lacklustre fourth quarter and full-year 2010 financial results.