China’s Microblog, Sina Weibo is Approaching 100 million users

Sina Weibo hit 50 million last October and now it’s on its way to the 100 million milestone. So, what’s the strategy behind its strong growth? Like Twitter, Sina invited celebrities and famous business people to join the service. The result has been tremendous, as influential users create a greater network effect.

Even Tom Cruise is on Sina Weibo to engage with Chinese fans and his entrance would inspire other Hollywood celebrities to follow suit. In Beijing, the Chinese police department has also used Sina’s microblog to alert public on crime, traffic and safety matters. There are more than 300,000 thousand fans that have followed the alerts.

However, the “Twitter” war in China is still far from over, especially with Tencent’s Fanfou still in the race. As some of you would have known, Tencent’s system is similar to Google’s where one email can lead users to many services. With a user base of over 600 million, Tencent could easily win the Twitter war based on number of users. In fact, it already has. Tencent’s Fanfou has already surpassed the 100 million mark but with less activity. The buzz seems to on Sina Weibo’s favor.

In terms of market cap, Tencent is China’s largest Internet company at $48.5 billion while Sina ranks sixth at $5 billion. We can expect Sina’s market cap to head north as its microblog product gains steam in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. The challenge still lies on monetizing its huge user base, though. Sina Weibo is facing the same problem Twitter faced during its earlier stages. Some monetization methods, which Sina could adopt from Twitter includes licensing data to search engines and ads (promoted tweets). The Twitter war in China goes on and Sina Weibo seems to have the edge, at least for now.

Source: Forbes