How You Can Make the Best Out of Your Brand on Weibo

Marc has been exploring emerging markets and their adoption of e-commerce, social, and mobile internet technology in the past decade. He is currently based in Shanghai. Disclosure: Marc is a project manager at Tencent.

Ikea's official brand page on Sina Weibo: a good example of how to do it right.

Microblog sites in China, such as Tencent Weibo and Sina Weibo, have created a huge new wave of social media fixation, the estimated combined total of users rising to more than 350 million [1] in just over two years. With more than a third of (both company’s) Weibo users connecting to this thriving community through their smartphones, this phenomenon represents the fastest growing and most connected community in China up till now.

As marketers, advertisers, entrepreneurs, and influencers, we all ask ourselves how can we efficiently use this social phenomenon to our advantage? More precisely, the question we should all be asking is: how can we leverage this platform in a way which will differentiate us from the traditional, under-stimulating, non-creatively branded campaigns we’ve seen before?

In this new, socially-connected era, the time has come to suggest recipes and use the ingredients necessary to cook up an innovative branded campaign for the hot microblogging community. Let’s begin with the basics, and take a look at the infographic below. It sums up all the features a brand or company can harness to captivate, engage, and grow a targeted community on Sina’s version of Weibo.

Let’s divide these features into five categories, which marketers should evaluate depending on their needs and what best fits their existing brand image:

• Content drivers (purple)
• Interactive applications (red)
• Graphic and visual stimuli (blue)
• Engagement enhancers (orange)
• Data and tracking systems (green)

Weibo is a two-way communication channel between brands and their consumers. The success of a campaign lies in direct interaction and engagement with followers. Campaign managers should start by identifying what mix of features will help them best utilize their Weibo account, might it be growing brand awareness, offering a live CRM tool to customers, or conducting consumer research.

Many consider Weibo, and social media in general, to be a simple and inexpensive way to create brand awareness; but they tend to focus only on the number of fans or followers as an indicator of how efficient their social media campaign is. They aren’t completely wrong but are missing the big picture: the engagement, the vitality, and the emotional response triggered by their campaign. The success of a brand on Weibo can be assessed through the viral aspect of each of its associated features: the number of app users, retweets, comments, positive user-generated content, etc.

Engaging With Polls, Contents, and Retweets

Take Vancl for example. It’s an affordable own-brand clothing e-commerce store. Its official account on Sina Weibo is the second most retweeted account on the whole service [2], because they have created an integrated Weibo strategy which brilliantly mixes a third-party developed app inviting users to create their own Vancl ad, frequent involvement in followers’ conversations, and making engaging user polls. Ikea has also effectively used a mix of Weibo functions to differentiate its brand and communicate with its audience by frequently releasing branded video content and retweeting followers’ posts that positively mention Ikea products.

Most cases of companies dealing with branding strategies on Weibo miss out on the potential of using more engaging features and focus solely on content. Content is definitely a large chunk of the mix, and a clever content strategy has brought brands such as Starbucks, Adidas Original, and particularly, Durex (that has used humorous yet topical posts), to be amongst the most popular branded Weibo accounts [3]. But using the more innovative features of Weibo will attract followers’ attention, differentiating your brand from others. Partnering with Sina, Nike has smartly used Weibo’s virtual medal reward system. Understanding the increasing desire of Chinese consumers to differentiate themselves, Nike offered a branded Nike medal to followers retweeting product and event information. Why not take advantage of it by incorporating such gamification concepts in your Weibo account strategy?