China’s Weibo could transform into an awesome hyperlocal network

In my previous article, I briefly touched upon Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo’s mobile ‘look around’ feature while examining Asian diaspora populations near Silicon Valley. That time I was using the messaging apps WeChat and Zalo. This time I’ll focus on the Twitter-like Weibos.

Sina Weibo and its oft-forgotten microblogging rival Tencent Weibo have an even larger array of “hyperlocal” tools than those chat apps. Sina Weibo’s official mobile app has the largest amount of nearby options, including categories of local recommendations for nearby discounts, group buying, food, movies, bars, hotels, and other places of interest. There is also a gallery of all user photos posted nearby.

Scroll further down the screen, and there is a stream of location-tagged posts, where I found 53 postings located within 500 meters of my current location an area of northern California.

I could ‘like’ and comment on nearby user content, but it was clear that these postings were largely unintended for a nearby audience – for instance, there were many comments along the lines of “you live in the US now?” and “how is American food?” most likely from friends in China, rather than my location.

Local tweets

Basically, it seems that Sina Weibo is only able to aggregate these sort of local news feeds due to the fact that all mobile Weibo posts include location data by default.

Tencent Weibo, on the other hand, really only has two core ‘nearby’ features, which are ‘people nearby’ and ‘posts nearby’. Although some nearby Tencent postings are also aggregated due to default location settings on the mobile app, Tencent Weibo has one simple feature that hints at the possibility for a truly innovative Chinese hyperlocal network.

Tencent Weibo’s ‘posts nearby’ provides the option to directly target content to nearby users, prompting with a “Say something to the people around?” textbox (pictured above). This effectively closes the loop where Sina Weibo left off, allowing people to both consume and produce local content. Tencent could, in theory, spin this feature off into what could become China’s first hyperlocal network, somewhat akin to US-based Nextdoor.com and its neighborhood networks; or Tencent could go international by incorporating it into WeChat’s growing suite of features.

Time will tell if either of these powerhouse microblogs further explore the hyperlocal market, whether in China or beyond, but it is an interesting opportunity to consider.

(Editing by Steven Millward, Anh-Minh Do)