Weibo: microblogging with Chinese characteristics
One cannot understand the internet culture in China without going through Weibo 微博.
For journalists, companies, and influencers who research and evolve on Chinese social networks: Weibo is a must.
This ancestral pillar of the Chinese web is the preferred place of exchange for more than 445 million Internet users every month, and that’s as much as the population of the European Union.
This is the true size of the digital ecosystems in China.
If you want to be the first to know about the hot news in China, the latest buzz, the advertising scandal of the week…
…you have to be on Weibo.
Understanding the daily thoughts of 1/3 of Chinese.
With 248 million daily users, the “Chinese Twitter” is a digital anchor for society.
Launched in 2009 by the Sina Corporation (新浪公司), Weibo, which offers a hybrid system between Facebook and Twitter, has quickly become the preferred public expression space for China’s urban youth. It is often the first place where Internet users express themselves on a recent event.
Weibo gathers more than 100 million new posts daily. With a limit pushed to 2000 characters in 2016 (previously 140), it is possible to publish images, links, videos, etc… A Guinness World Record was even reached on September 21, 2014, by Wang Junkai (member of TFBoys) with 42,776,438 reposts in one day.
Now, that’s a viral post…
Despite its seniority in the global internet ecosystem, being one of the first massively adopted networks in China, Weibo has withstood the arrival of many competitors and other social networks. It is still around and central in the Chinese internet ecosystem.
An indispensable tool for communication and digital marketing in China
Weibo is a must for marketing in China.
Some key figures:
- 80% Monthly Active Users are under 30 years old and from generation Y.
- 1/2 of the users come from Tier 3 cities such as Mianyang, Hohhot, Baotou, Lanzhou, Nanyang… (the “Tier” system allows for classifying cities by size in China, Tier 1 represents cities with 15 million inhabitants or more, Tier 2 between 3 and 15 million, Tier 3 between 150k and 3 million.)
- Each Internet user follows an average of 200 official accounts.
Weibo has, more or less, all the “classic” digital marketing features available on western social networks. A paid advertising system via sponsored posts, Weibo tasks (pay per repost), and the Fensi Tong (粉丝通), an ultra-targeted advertising feature.
The microblogging platform is also the main digital home of many KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders or influencers) in the country. Many of them are actors and personalities who built their fame on Chinese television in the 2010s. Subsequently, many “wanghong” influencers 网红 have appeared in recent years.
Finally, Weibo has 85% of users on mobile. Because during the development of the Internet worldwide, China has practically skipped the stage of the personal computer … Chinese Internet users are not “mobile-first”, they have become “mobile-only”, with 99% of Internet users in the country on a smartphone.
How to use Weibo for your project in China?
Sina Weibo launched an international version in March 2017.
For 10 years, Sina’s managers have done a lot of work to attract foreign personalities and companies to create an account on Weibo, such as the French Football Federation, Tom Cruise since 2011, and Antoine Bunel a French influencer.
For me, Weibo is useful in 2 ways:
- For social listening activities, especially via the “hot trends” tab: where I used Weibo to poll the opinion of Chinese people on the last French presidential elections. You can find my analysis here: French Presidential Elections in China 2022: Which candidates are the most discussed on Chinese social media?
- For content creation, community management, or brand audit.
Thanks to a simple and efficient interface to collect information, it is easy to make a daily audit of the trends on Weibo in order to quickly respond to a trend and stay relevant in the Chinese market. For professionals, it is a simple tool that should be added to your marketing mix without hesitation.
Victim, as in the West, of waves of fake news and numerous bot accounts, Weibo has often been given for dead since 2015, but it seems to assert its resilience in the Chinese internet ecosystem.
And for me, it is definitely not ready to disappear.
(For an excellent deciphering of internet trends in China, I recommend Manya Koetse’s site, What’s On Weibo, which is among the most important analysts of modern China and its internet culture).
