Invite colleagues
With many Western Brands wanting to create a voice in the Chinese social media world it is not surprising that most turn to Weibo. With over 200+ million users on Sina Weibo alone (not including the Tencent Weibo users), this rapidly growing microblogging social networking platform offers an easy way for businesses to stay in front of and stay engaged with customers on a daily basis.
Unfortunately, many businesses struggle with optimizing this opportunity, not fully understanding the full potential of the tool. Here I have put some simple practices that should help your business expand its Weibo horizons.
- Relevant content. Only about 15-20% of your posts should be directly related to the business. The rest should be on relevant topics that will establish a value level to your Weibo feed. Also, try not to just re-post links, but instead to also add your thoughts or own analysis on what those links. It will humanize your company and make you relatable. Look at varying your context with images, videos and text.
- Personality. Establish the voice and personality for your posts. Remember, this is a chance to truly connect with your audience so you want to avoid sounding dry or boring. If appropriate, try to have fun with the 140-character word limit you’re allocated. Using Chinese language provides so much more information within this word limit than English.
- Get some traction. Establish yourself as a more credible source by posting at least 40-50 times before you begin promoting your Weibo site.
- Frequency. Plan on posting between five and eight times throughout the day. If you give, you will receive. Use the Weibo groups/search functions to find potential users to follow. You can locate users based on interest or geography. Remember: if you follow them and engage them in conversation, they will be more likely to turn around and follow you.
- Be authentic & transparent. There are going to be people who will complain or be negative about your business. Choose to be transparent and accepting rather than trying to stop the comments. Being honest and engaging those people in conversation will go much further with them and others than trying to stifle the comments.
These five simple guidelines will help you create an engaging Weibo profile. For those looking to outsource their Weibo management to an Agency please beware that using the growth of fans as a success criteria is not a good idea. Here in China the ability to purchase 'fans' is cheap and readily available. I suggest you use numbers of postings, forwardings and mentions as these metrics are much harder to fake.
For those on Weibo, be sure to connect to me and we can engage further online - my account is: weibo.com/sinotechian
Written on Saturday, 10 December 2011 10:21 by Matt McDougall