The Power of Weibo

I start to use twitter recently, but I can manage it well easily in very short time. That is because I am familiar with the Chinese vision twitter-Weibo (means microblog).

As you know, we maybe couldn’t use twitter or facebook in China, but we have Chinese vision twitter and facebook, even Chinese youtube and Wikipedia. Taking Chinese facebook- renren as an example, it has the same function and similar page design with facebook, so, like facebook in the states, renren is also very popular in China. However, in recent two or three years in China, weibo is getting more and more popular, and it becomes my favorite too. I can get information about the celebrities I followed, the discount of the makeup product I want, and I still can chat with my friends as on facebook.

At the same time, there are more and more company use weibo in business. I saw a story on weibo which is a good example: One year ago, a CEO of a clothes company released a weibo that anyone who has over 10000 followers repost his weibo about the new product of his company can get an ipad for free. Half a month later, he held another event only change ipad to iphone. He spent about $60000 in a month according to the price of ipad and iphone he sent out, but he and his clothes company's popularity have a significant improvement in the short term, the effect is much better than advertise directly.

I think it is because weibo has several advantages like it can shorten the distance between companies and their customers, it can coexist with various marketing and activities, and become the best catalyst, it can gather your target customers groups, and provide customers for any of your subsequent purpose, and the most important advantage: it is free and everybody use it. It already has 50,000,000 users in china so far, and there are 785 weibo been sent every second.

Use weibo in business especially in marketing also has some limitations. For example, weibo needs to have enough followers to achieve the effect of the transmission, and popularity is the foundation of marketing. So how to effectively increase the number of followers is the first step of weibo marketing. Another limitation is that because the new content produced in weibo goes too fast, so if the information did not notice by followers in time, it may be buried in the vast amount of information.

The weibo marketing in China is still in the early stages of development, it has a lot of aspects need to improve and enhance. Such as the awareness of weibo in China still needs to be improved, and the convenience of registration, use, and the processing of information also need to be further improved.