When I explain to people about the rapidly changing social media landscape in China I simply bring this point to a sharp point by conveying the Sina Weibo story. Twitter clone come China Internet Superstar. From microblog to Entertainment and eCommerce hub.
These are all part of the remarkable journey that this platform has taken over these past few years. Today, my praise of this platform has be amplified by the Sina corporate news that advertising revenue hit $101 million in the latest quarter thanks to a 200 million and growing user base on Weibo. Wow!
Direct from Corporate PR land comes this CEO statement from Charles Chao, "For the third quarter, Sina's online brand advertising revenues reached a new high, for the first time exceeding over $100 million per quarter. Our focus now turns to adding more social networking features to Weibo to increase user stickiness,".
One of the features Sina has launched is a real-time search engine that allows users to search for Weibo posts, users, groups, activities and applications. Other new features in the pipeline include location-based tracking for smartphone users and mini-groups for users to categories their friends, much like the circles on Google+.
For some quick Weibo stats
- Sina Weibo now has more than 50,000 brands running their corporate accounts including Nike, BMW, LG, Dragonair and Dell.
- 80 million posts on Weibo per day
- Users spend on average an hour per day on the site.
- In Hong Kong, Sina Weibo has two million registered users (compared to Facebook's 3.8 million according to Socialbakers.com).
Many new companies are moving to Weibo at at least register they corporate name and find out what all the fuss is about... this is also reflected in the increase we are seeing in the Digital Jungle Social Media Management solutions. I guess that the rise of Chinese microblogging will be 'trendy' for a while until the next 'big thing to hit marketing' appears.



