When most of us dearly cherish the group of followers we painstakingly gathered on our microblogs, others like @jiuhongbinglan, a Sina Weibo user, could easily gather strong followings and sell it to other businesses.
In around 40 days, @jiuhingbinglan gathered over 200,000 followers for a Weibo account and sold it for hundreds of thousand in RMB (more than US$15,000).
This isn’t a one-off event, as @jiuhongbinglan owns a company, which incubates microblog accounts and sells them to companies after they gathered respectable following sizes. Jiuhongbinglan said that her company has over 100 Weibo accounts with a total of 2 million followers. The accounts are built to cater to different audiences. Some accounts might share information on pets while others share on cars and shoes. Theses accounts are in stealth mode until they are sold. This year alone, she planned to incubate 100 accounts with an average of 50,000 followers each.
Besides selling Weibo accounts, Jiuhongbinglan also sells sponsored tweets, priced at a range of RMB $200 to $300 (US$30 to $45). She told a success story of a sponsored weibo, where one tweet was retweeted over 20,000 times, resulting in over 2,000 transactions on Taobao.
The business idea is bizarre but works perfectly well in China. A venture capitalist valued her company at about RMB 5 to 8 million (US$0.75 to $1.2 million). Could we have the same business model on Twitter? I doubt so. Twitter is a lot stricter. Sponsored tweets are fine but selling of accounts could deteriorate the overall user experience. (Just imagine @PennOlson were to be sold to XYZ company, I’m guessing a lot of our readers will feel uneasy.) If Twitter doesn’t allow non-organic followers growth (e.g. Pyramid follower growth model), I seriously doubt it will allow selling of accounts.
Via Technode
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