According to Weibo’s Q2 2018 financial report, its monthly active users increased 19% since Q2 2017, up to 431 million. And of the 190 million daily active users, 93% accessed the platform via mobile.
With this huge audience-base, Weibo is the best social marketing channel for cosmetics, media, tourism, luxury, and lifestyle B2C industries. Here, we discuss why—and how you can market your business on Wiebo.
Weibo has a younger demographic
Weibo’s demographic is younger than WeChat’s—most are from the Zen generation and post-90s.
Compared with WeChat, Weibo provides better access to the latest news. This is better for the younger generation, who is more interested in hot topics, trends, idols, and showing off their fashion lifestyle.
As such, Weibo is the leading channel for communicating and consuming entertainment, lifestyle, and social opinion trends in China.
More than 20,000 Weibo KOLs have more than 1 million followers
There are more than 20,000 Weibo accounts with over 1 million followers.
This shows that while Chinese influencers have grown in various other social media, Weibo is still the leading platform for KOLs to build followers and maintain influence. It also shows that audiences prefer to obtain information through Weibo.
Therefore, Weibo is the best social marketing channel for cosmetics, media, tourism, luxury, and lifestyle B2C industries.
When brands use Weibo KOLs to market, the number of followers is not the only metric to analyze. It’s important to look at the bigger picture. Key metrics include:
- KOL daily/monthly active followers, open rate, conversion rate, readers, follower structure etc.
- KOL background, features, pushes, and image styles
- KOL brand compatibility
- KOL sales for similar products/categories
Weibo’s hot search function builds organic exposure
In addition to KOLs, Weibo has another popular feature that benefits social marketers: hot search topics ranked in real-time.
How does this help? Well, for example, according to the Weibo Q2 report, #World Cup reached 100 billion readers, 100 million participants, 17 billion videos, and more than 1 billion in user interactions. Those numbers show significant engagement.
If you can participate in or better yet generate some of these hot searches, you build unprecedented brand awareness and drive traffic.
Let’s have a look at how a topic can appear on the hot search rank.
Weibo’s Hot Search Formula
(search heat + communication heat) × topic factor × interaction factor
- Search heat is based on search rate
- Communication heat is based on readership
- Topic factor is based on discussion rate
- Interaction factor is based on the comment rate of the results page
Weibo’s Hot Search Ranks
- Hotspot search
- New era
- Hottest search
- Friends search
Hotspot search updates every minute. The most common words searched relate to celebrity gossip, social hotspots, popular TV dramas, and other pop-culture topics.
According to Weibo’s Hot Search 2016 Product Report, hotspot search content contains:
- 34% entertainment news
- 27% non-entertainment news
- 13% film and television
- 25% new stuff, including digital products, beauty trends, and more
The report also pointed out that Weibo users actively searched 250 million times a day and created 6.5 billion exposure opportunities. Microblog hotspot searches reached a peak of 250 million times a day, guided 135 million in search heat, and created 3.3 billion exposure opportunities on the search results page.
Hence, hotspot search is one of the most important traffic drivers on Weibo.
With huge traffic aggregation, most of the content on the hotspot search will be further spread to other Weibo users, media, and other institutions and platforms. This makes Weibo the first platform on which people can actually send information and discuss topics in a wider community setting.
Brands should follow hot topics and write related content or create related posts about their own products to bring organic exposure and promote brand awareness.
Recently, many brands developed creative content and posts, combining hot search elements and their own products in relation to a popular TV drama: Story of Yanxi Palace.
For example, the Weibo accounts of Library Magazine and the Taobao store of Old Palace used hot search topics to attract likes, discussion, and engagement and increase their brand impression to Weibo users.
There are significant opportunities to market on Weibo. And the opportunities are only growing.
