Sina Weibo Testing Enterprise Accounts

Sina Weibo Enterprise Edition BETA

We recently wrote a report about how Sina Weibo would soon be rolling out an English version, making it possible for non-Chinese speaking users to use the popular microblog. And today we’re hearing news from Techweb about the service expanding into yet another sphere. Sina Weibo’s Enterprise Edition is currently being tested in private beta, and is now visible on at least one live account that we know of.

There’s an introductory page explaining the new service at a.weibo.com/proc/productintro.php, and questions related to the service can be addressed to @qiyeweibo

This enterprise platform would add to growing list of features that make Sina unique in the microblog space. Note that these English terms are translated and not official):

• Contests, polls: Allows greater interaction with users through polls and contests. These engaging activities can be placed on your Weibo frontpage for maximum exposure.
• Account, sentiment analysis: Enables you to track sentiments of users for quicker response. It also helps in tracking keywords within your community of followers, allowing businesses to engage them better.
• Customized layout: Businesses can embed videos, insert customized images/designs to suit their own brand image. You can also combine related Weibo accounts and put them into one single platform, such as related products, influential employees, etc.
• Analytics (to be launched soon): Allows businesses to understand their followers better. Statistics include age, gender, and geographical locations.
• Auto-publicity (to be launched soon): This feature allows you to schedule your messages for “prime-time” where you would ostensibly get maximum exposure. So far, few details on this have been revealed.

A Sina Weibo enterprise account in action

Learning from Twitter?

Admittedly, Twitter has much to learn from Sina Weibo regarding user features. But in terms of monetization, Twitter seems to be doing better. In 2010, Twitter rolled out promoted tweets, trends, and business analytics. All these are money-making products, which businesses claimed to be effective.

Keep in mind that Twitter also provides its data (our tweets) to Google to make its search result more social, bringing in substantial revenue as well. Where Twitter has succeeded, Sina Weibo could do the same too. Last week, Sina Weibo’s personal analytics provided a sneak peek of what could possibly transform into a more detailed tool for enterprise level users. We shall see how Chinese users react to Sina Weibo’s enterprise products.