Microblogging in China

A Short Introduction to Sina Weibo

‘Weibo’ literally translates as ‘micro-blog’, there are multiple sites in China that offer microblogging services, but Sina Weibo is the most popular one around the Chinese web.

Below is a classification of Chinese social network platforms in order of sharing rate and comment rate.

Source: China Internet Watch (2013).

We can see from this classification that Sina Weibo ranks at the top in terms of sharing rate. Weibo is an instant message application of Sina Group. This microblogging platform has 50 million active users who spend time on it every day. Weibo users are generally the younger generation, 70% of them are in their thirties and 40% in their twenties. Chinese webinars spend 780 million hours on Weibo every year.

Weibo has become the best marketing and promotion tool for companies. From local start-ups to global groups, businesses of all industries are using Weibo to reach out to their potential customers. Brands communicate effectively with their consumers on this platform because of its popularity among Chinese webinars. Companies can create their official home page and customize accordingly with their theme colors. Researches showed that 56% of Weibo users follow at least one brand. Below is the official Weibo page of L’Oréal Group.

Source: L’Oréal Group (2015). http://www.weibo.com/lorealparis

How to market your brand/event on Weibo?

The very first thing to do is to create an account with your email and customize your page – background, font, theme color, and so on. Getting a “V” account – V for Verified – always helps to attract more followers and to build a trustworthy image for the brand, which might be new to Chinese consumers. The next step would be just publishing information and content that might attract the attention of users. Weibo is a great tool for companies to improve their reputation and engage with the Weibo community. One of the most important things to bear in mind when designing and updating your official brand/event page is that Chinese users love ‘news’ and they zap all the time, so it’s really important to update your content at least one or twice per day. Another tip is to interact with your followers. Almost all companies who have their official pages on Weibo have a dedicated Social Media team in their company, or outsource to a Social Medial agency, just to comment back and interact with followers. Many consumers even ask questions/inquiries on the comment section of a brand’s Weibo page. Lastly, there are many KOLs (key opinion leader) on Weibo who have millions of followers each. They are opinion leaders from different fields, cosmetics, fashion, car racing, horoscope, etc. Their posts are read, shared and commented by thousands of followers shortly after published.

QZone is a social network created by Tencent Group in 2005. Users can create blogs, publish photos and videos, and leave private/public messages on friends’ personal pages. QZone also has its own huge database of all kinds of music, to the point that a lot of users log in to their accounts everyday just to discover the ‘music updates’ of their contacts. Another feature of QZone is that certain services are not free of charge for users. Until last year, almost 600 million users update their profiles once per month. More than 350 000 applications are available in QZone, which has generated 324 million dollars (equals 2 milliard Yuan) for app developers.

Wechat is another proud product of Tencent Group. Created in 2011, this social network platform has 236 million users in China and more than 400 million users all over the world. Wechat is Weibo’s principal competitor. Users use Wechat to send instant voice/video/text messaged, but other features such as publishing/sharing/commenting/posts and articles have made Wechat more than just a ‘wakie-talkie’. Most of Weibo’s users are active ones who really use this platform not only to communicate with their families and friends, but also to get news and spend time.

Not surprisingly, Facebook ranked 20^th on the list. I think the main reason for this is the fact that users need to have a VPN to access their Facebook accounts when they are geographically in Mainland China because Facebook is ‘blocked’ by the Chinese government since the very beginning.

Written by:

Xue Dong
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