6 Reasons Why Companies Should Use Weibo

Online, January 29, 2014 (Newswire.com) - As the major social media platforms in China, Weibo shares 90% of the market with 500 million users in 6 years. Celebrates, social influencers, industrial professionals in China have used Weibo to develop close interactions with followers borrowing Weibo's large user base. For businesses targeting the Chinese audience, no matter in U.S. or in China, Weibo is the major social media platform to understand your audience. Weibo has huge potential for businesses not only because of the large user base, but many other reasons. The other reasons for American companies to look at Weibo are listed here:

Reason 1: Large audience

Facebook and Twitter are both banned in China. As China's largest social media platform, Weibo has impressive influence on the Chinese community. How to impress your Chinese Customers when Facebook and Twitter are not welcomed in China? The answer is Weibo.

From the Weibo Official User Report 2013, 90% of Weibo users are young people with ages below 34. Meanwhile, Weibo offers a glimpse into what this segment of society is interested in. If you want to know Chinese students or other Chinese citizens living in the U.S., you could start from getting a Weibo account.

Reason 2: Active Users

Sina Weibo's daily active users reached 80% in 2013, said Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Charles Chao. 58% of people have an active Weibo account, which is 40% higher than active Facebook accounts in China.

Reason 3: Threaded comment function

Weibo shares the same concept as Twitter allowing users make short posts, but it provides more functions and better user experiences, which could benefit business to understand audiences too.

The same goes for Facebook. Weibo uses the threaded comment making the tracking process easier. This function makes Weibo more powerful comparing to Twitter. When you reply to the Weibo post, you can repost it on your page at the same time with the original content, while Twitter's reply has no original sources.

Reason 4: Rich media allowed in one post

Weibo allows users to insert pictures, videos and topics into one post, largely improving the user experience, which also increases the business potential for business accounts. Companies could easily do poster advertising and video advertising in one post. Moreover, attached pictures allows more possibilities to express the information and allows long articles shown in one post. Conclusively, businesses could use rich media to deliver more informational and attractive messages to audiences.

Reason 5: Hot topics and trends categorization

Sina Weibo has functions to show the most popular topics and categorize the posts with topics. So users could browse the content based on not only the following users, but also the interested topic and category. Business could also utilize those functions to find their target group and consumers' interests.

Reason 6: Advertising Opportunity

77.25% of the Weibo users don't mind seeing advertisements, more than half of users may click on the great and popular ads. Weibo works better than Facebook and Twitter to for advertisements. Compared to 2012, product promotion includes discount promotion of e-commerce business in China using Weibo increases significantly. Weibo worked especially well at the holiday promotions. For example, on one holiday shopping day in 2013, one company post was forwarded 20156 times, and commented 3561 times in only one day.

As we know, 92% consumers report that a word of mouth (WOM) recommendation is the top reason they buy a product or service. Customer recommendations in the digital space have radically transformed the way people buy, which means you need to come up with new methods to reach customers and improve your products.

• Find out where and how your customers are talking about your brand
• Connect directly with your most influential customers
• Create compelling content to engage new customers
• Build a true social business by WOM and Fans Community