“Weibo Reach” Puts Serious Analytical Tools Right at Your Fingertips

Sina Weibo is a powerful communication tool. But it doesn’t offer much in the way of analytics. Enter Chinese startup Weibo Reach, which takes your tweets and produces awesome visualizations of their spread throughout the web, in addition to a bunch of other analytical data about how they are passed along.

Weibo Reach offers a “regular version” and an “advanced version.” The regular version is free; the advanced version is not yet available but presumably will cost a little money in return for more advanced services. After trying out the regular version, though, I have to say I’m pretty damn impressed.

Signing up was a snap; all I had to do was click a button, authorize the Weibo Reach app, and then we were off to the races. I don’t have a lot of followers on weibo, but I picked a recent post I made about the trailer for my documentary film (shameless plug!) to see how that post had been spread. As you can see from the image below, the results were pretty damn thorough!

As you can see, Weibo Reach arranges everything into a neat-looking infographic of sorts, which contains all kinds of data. I can see, visually, how my tweet was spread. I can see a demographic breakdown of the people who spread it, and a list of which users were the most influential in moving my tweet forward. I can see breakdowns of the geographical locations of my re-tweeters, the overall sentiment of discussion about my tweet, the rate of real users to adbots, and even more. If this is the regular version, I expect the advanced version of Weibo Reach is going to be pretty damn impressive.

Of course, my uninfluential tweeting and low follower counts don’t lend themselves to any particularly cool visuals. But it’s worth noting that when Weibo Reach tracks tweets that are retweeted and discussed much more often than mine, the results can look pretty awesome:

If you’re a weibo user, it’s definitely worth checking out Weibo Reach just for kicks, and if you’re a corporate user, you should be looking at this service very carefully. Even the regular version offers significant value, and the advanced version sounds promising.

It’s great to see that China is finally starting to crank out really cool (and well-designed) apps and services for weibo (see also Weibo Bridge, which I talked about last week). Weibo Reach is really impressive, and I hope very much that it catches on!