Weibo Marketing

The development and dilemma of Weibo Marketing in China

Weibo  is the Chinese word for "microblog". Nowadays, microblog marketing is becoming an increasingly effective tool for corporations to improve their brands recognition. Although microblog is a newly developed social media platform in China, the total number of registered users significantly increased from 53 million in 2010 to 309 million in 2012, which is still soaring. Due to the growing influence of microblog in China, it has been built up as a profitable platform for corporations to promote their business. It can not be denied that microblog has invented a novel way of marketing in China.

The era of Weibo

According to Tim O'Reilly, Web 2.0 allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media platform as creators of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where people are limited to the passive viewing of content. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites,

A microblog is a platform for broadcasting and sharing information. Users can publish information on it with no more than 140 characters by web, mobile and client program and share information instantly. As microblog combines the features of blog, social networking services and SMS with a low entry barrier for everyone, the microblog becomes the most popular social media tool around the world.

Fanfou is the first microblog service in China. It was founded by Wang Xing. Fanfou's users went up from 0.3 million to 1 million in the first half of 2009. In the same year, another two websites Suixin and Zuosha were also set up. However, these several microblog websites had only less than one million registered users due to the lack of enough operating capitals.

In August 2009, the SINA Corporation, one of the top 4 web portal in China, launched the tested version of Sina Weibo, which is the biggest microblog website and immediately attracted numerous...