The influence of the microblog in virtual China

By Parker Barriball (JIN Magazine)
Updated: 2012-07-11

Like many popular things in China. Weibo, or the microblog is a twitter clone with inevitable 'Chinese characteristics'. The word 'weibo' means microblog in Chinese and different sites will have their name (like Sina) followed by 'weibo'. Users can post tweet-esque short messages as well as photos and retweet content. In just a short 2 year span weibo sites have attracted over 300 million users (twitter boasts 140 million users after six years) Sina Weibo and its rival Tencent Weibo, China's most popular microblogs are changing the face of the online community in China.

Netizens, or those people with an online presence like a weibo account, are known for their curiosity and ability to turn news, genuine or faked, viral in a matter of minutes. While this often causes headaches for web watchers, it does create interesting opportunities for companies wanting to exploit the idea of viral marketing, a relatively new concept here on the mainland. Many brands, like Bacardi’s Breezer line, an awful wine cooler, set up its own weibo account and now sports thousands of followers. Even private businessmen like Shen Dongjun, who has 1.9 million followers, or billionaire real-estate developer Pan Shiyi , who sports 9.6 million followers on Sina Weibo engage in the online Chinese community through the new media.

According to official Chinese statistics, there are now 457 million internet users in China. They are said to include 450 million who have broadband, 140 million use online banking, and at least 63 million microbloggers. The difference in official statistics and the number of weibo users (300 million) is due to 'zombie followers', more on that later. For some perspective the entire US populations tops out at 312 million. Many netizens are estimated to spend an average of 18 hours a week online.

With the nearly half a billion internet users in China, if a business can capture even a fraction of a percent of these users via online marketing and the viral nature of social networking, the possible profits can be substantial. But how do companies engage in a virtual world where things are constantly changing. Every second trending topics evolve and shift. To say that netizens have a short attention span would be an understatement, so how to capture this impressively short attention span when it comes to online marketing?

Developing an online presence in these virtual communities is not just free advertising. It's active engagement with potential customers. People have to actively 'like' your account to see the content a business posts. This makes businesses have to produce content that people will willingly access, so bland banner adds no longer cut it. Multinationals are taking note. Nokia even hosted an online info session ahead of the launch of its newest smartphone exclusively through microblogging sites and recorded a thousand additional orders. However, on the whole Asian companies are still not fully realizing the capacity for the new media. Many corporate accounts see little activity and even then they are used for short term promotions mostly of new products. Their strategies largely miss the 'soft' advertising potential of microblogging. Rather than active engagement they focus on advertisement exposure. But as time goes by many expect virtual marketing strategies to evolve as they have in the West.

One strategy is coming from Sina itself. The new platform from is for business who want to capitalize on the wildly popular web service. The new platform will offer expanded media sharing features, such as easier linking to video hosting sites like Tudou, a Chinese site very similar to Youtube. Businesses can now have a media rich microblog to stay in contact with fans of their products. Charles Chao, the CEO of Sina Weibo announced plans to proceed as planned with the business version at a conference held in Taiwan this past February, despite the fact the regulations are set to change soon regarding weibo registration.

New regulations, which went into effect March 16 of this year, could cut down the number of active users on the site by requiring every account to register with their state issued ID numbers. The effect of these new regulations is still inconclusive as the enforcement is still very unclear. Undoubtedly the regulations will make it hard for foreigners to continue using the service as the protocols have not taken into account overseas users. Already, enterprising Chinese have found loopholes and say that for a fee (of around $80USD), they can provide official verification for weibo accounts, apparently allowing customers to register under fake identities. While the projected drop in the number of active users due to the tighter restrictions is not catastrophic in itself, however many fear that the amount of posts and retweets will drop drastically if much of the spamming activity is cut out. This may be bad news for Sina Weibo’s newest business iteration as businesses may be less keen to spend the time and effort on the site if traffic is cut down.

The scope of the possibilities available from Weibo are still impressive. Ctrip, a Chinese travel site designed to help users find inexpensive airfare and hotel deals, recently launched an automated account on Weibo. Users are able to find real time deals on both flights and hotels by mentioning Ctrip on their posts and then seeing their search results in the comments section of their post.

Even the Chinese government is getting in on the trend of having active weibo accounts. Many times this is just for the purpose of monitoring what is being said, but many times in comments sections users are accused of being paid to taught the party line. But regardless of monitoring policy, having a large online following can turn into real world recognition.

Being popular on a weibo site is directly related to your number of followers, that is, the people who subscribe to your blog's posts. Many Chinese celebrities adopt a similar strategy as their Western counterparts and post regularly as a way to stay relevant to fans between acting roles and album releases. For nominal fees you can procure 'zombie followers', accounts with no real activity but do help to increase a user's online popularity. You can also purchase re-tweets and even comments on your posts. Spam bots are also a serious problem on weibo sites and it is hard to determine and disrupt this activity as users don't need to register with their actual personal information, but this may all change very soon due to the tightening up of registration protocols.

Another peculiarity of the microblog is how much more netizens can fit into a 140 character blog post. For example, a 140 character blog post in English might look like this: Just picked up a triple Frappe Mocha Green Tea Latte Venti monstrocity at Bingjiang Dao Starbucks. Super Psyched! That's about 120 characters and only 19 words. Whereas in Chinese, 140 characters might net you 90 words due to the nature of the language. Look at how much real estate a word like 'COMPLICATED' takes up as opposed to '复杂' in Chinese. Between the nature of Chinese and slang, which is ever evolving, microblog posts can cram much more content into the same space as a tweet, with hopefully deeper meaning. Add to that the ability to link to other sites, other microblogs, and the capacity for communication grows quickly.