Six most popular body image Weibo trends

Weibo trend #1: hairy armpits selfies

This trend was started by Xiao Meili (first from left), women’s rights advocate, who encouraged women to take selfies of their unshaven armpits and post them on Weibo. Her idea was to challenge common stereotypes of female beauty that pressure women to shave their armpits. Original contest that was viewed almost 2 million times, was followed by selection of 3 winners. The first place winner (third from the left) got a hundred condoms, second place received a vibrator and the third ten winners were awarded with female urination device.

The contest participants have received quite a bit of support from other social media Chinese users and even from those outside of China. Critics, however, were quick to point out that shaving armpits doesn’t have much to do with feminism but a matter of personal hygiene. Others noted the fact is that shaving armpits for women didn’t become widespread in China until the 90s, one of many western trends that took root in Chinese society at the time.

Weibo trend #2: belly button challenge

Participants in this challenge were asked to reach their belly button from around the waist and post the picture of their success. It was mentioned 130 million times and spawned 104,000 active discussions threads on Weibo. Apparently, being able to do so demonstrated one’s skinny figure, the ideal to strive for.

As it later turned out, ability to accomplish this feat had nothing to do with fitness but more with the length and flexibility of one’s arms. The trend was also mercilessly mocked by people uploading their humorous take on the challenge. It also exposed more serious issues related to promoting eating disorder in never ending quest of already thin people to lose even more weight.

Weibo trend #3: coins on the collarbone

This new social media craze took over Weibo just after a week following the original belly button challenge. In order to demonstrate their skinny figures, young Chinese females were taking selfies with stacks of coins standing upright on their collarbones. Some people were able to balance as many as 20 coins on a collarbone.

A well-known Chinese actress, Lu Jiarong, was even able to fit 80 coins (40 on each side) while still managing to take a selfie. Although not as big as other trends, it still attracted over 30 million views and was followed by usual mockery with people balancing everyday objects, such as coffee mugs, eggs and cellphones on their shoulders.

Weibo trend #4: underboob pen challenge

This viral trend has started in Japan and quickly gained popularity among Weibo users in China. It was tweeted with hashtags #carrypenunderbreast or #UnderBoobChallenge which is pretty self-explanatory. Most troubling was the fact that it was often accompanied by caption “pass the challenge to prove you are a real woman”.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the challenge has seen its fair share of mockery too. Few overweight men took humorous selfies with stationary stuck under their “manboobs” while some fit male participants demonstrated their ability to hold pens between their sculpted pectorals.

Weibo trend #5: A4 waist

This challenge that started in February this year required women to take selfies with a piece of A4 printer paper in front of their waists. Being able to completely hide one’s waist behind it was the proof of successfully meeting the test. The width of A4 paper is 8.3 inches which means that a woman waist had to be no bigger than 25 inches.

This trend quickly became as controversial as the previous Weibo trends and was criticized for promoting unhealthy lifestyles. Some women went on to take photos of themselves behind their diplomas to make the point on the superficial nature of this challenge while others covered their faces with A4 sheet.

Weibo trend #6: iPhone 6 knees

The latest of the viral Weibo trends from last month was about being able to hide one’s knees behind iPhone 6 placed on top of kneecaps. This trend was all about promoting pencil-skinny legs – the latest standard of beauty in China. “iPhone6 legs” has already accumulated over 90 million views and 80,000 comments on Weibo.

Although the challenge was supposed to involve standard iPhone, it still isn’t clear whether using iPhone Plus models was considered “cheating”. Some even suggested the next challenge such as being able to completely hide one’s body behind iPad Pro… In China, anything is possible!

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In terms of monthly users, Weibo is the second largest Chinese social media platform after WeChat. However, unlike WeChat, it is still primarily PC based. Weibo is one of the most powerful marketing tools in China offering wide range of possibilities for reaching people across various demographics and psychographics.

Weibo offers to marketers a powerful Weibo Index tool to learn more about what platform users are searching for. Compared to previously covered Baidu and Qihoo tools, it is structured in sig
nificantly different way allowing generating other types of data.

It is important to note that social media platforms like Weibo could be quite similar to search engines in many ways. Platform users search for terms in a similar way as they do using Baidu or Qihoo. This allows Weibo to generate wealth of information that could be indispensable for marketers looking to customize their message for this particular audience.

Weibo Index into four main tabs: historic keyword trends, real time trends, geographical interpretation and user attributes analysis.

Let’s examine what Weibo Index shows for the same keyword we used for Baidu and Qihoo tools covered earlier.

The first graph shows search volumes for a keyword on PC and mobile. It is quite clear that there is a certain correlation with the search results we have seen with the search engines: both types of data show a sharp peak in the second half of March:

Looking at both PC based and mobile searches reveals the fact that most searches have been done from mobile Weibo app rather than PC based website:

Next tab displays search volumes in the past 24 hours. Here, peaks occur in different times compared to results from the search engines. Apparently, Weibo searches for iPhone 8 have peaked at around noon and then again at 23:00:

Such information can be particularly useful for social media marketing. It can allow marketers to figure out optimal timing for posts to receive maximum exposure on the network. In fact, the data can even be reduced down to an hour level in order to identify search volumes of every single minute within a particular hour!

The location tab shows geographic distribution of the searches:

Here the situation is also a bit different from the results we have seen with Baidu and Qihoo. It seems that people in Hebei and Zhejiang provinces were the ones most interested in iPhone 8.

Last tab, audience attributes, shows even less correlation with the search engines data for this particular term. This time, women represented the vast majority of the audience (80%) vs. only 20% of men. Also, the audience is significantly much younger on Weibo: most people searching for iPhone 8 were between ages 19-24.

This information could lead to a different approach for marketing this specific product. On Weibo, marketers could be tailoring the ad to a largely young female audience while Baidu and Qihoo ads should cater to older male crowd. Optimizing marketing approach across different platforms would be much more difficult without having such data.

Last section of the audience attributes tab relates to user persona that seems quite irrelevant for this particular keyword. Also, Weibo shows the data on zodiac signs of the users searching for a particular term:

Apparently, Libra born users were more active in their search for iPhone 8. Why was that the case? I guess we will never know.

In any case, Weibo seems to be the only network out there that enables marketers to incorporate astrology into their marketing…

Continue to WeChat Index tutorial >>>

Here are our tutorials on China keyword research tools:

Keyword research on Baidu: Baidu Index

Keyword research on Qihoo: Qihoo Index

Keyword research on Weibo: Weibo Index

Keyword research on WeChat: WeChat Index

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In this post, we are going to review the primary routes for promotion and advertising on Sina Weibo. There are three basic ways to promote a brand on Weibo:

• Weibo Fans headlines (粉丝头条)
• Weibo Fans pass (粉丝通)
• Weibo Micro task (微任务)

Weibo Fans Headlines

This is the simplest way to promote a post by pushing it to the top of followers’ feed. At present, Weibo charges 2.37 RMB per post to be displayed above others in the feed for 24 hours. There is 40% discount for any posts that mention anything related to Weibo itself.

Making a post more prominently displayed can be an effective way to attract clicks from brand followers by having them notice the content as soon as they log in. The obvious disadvantage is the fact that it only improves your content’s visibility with your existing followers and does little to acquire new ones. On the other hand, the price for this type of promotion is fairly affordable.

Fans Pass

This type of promotion involves an ad campaign and can be initiated and managed with an ad account. The ad account opening process requires local ID and usually takes about 3 days to complete the approval process.

There are two pricing models: CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and CPE (cost per engagement) which are determined by automated bidding process, similar to the familiar Google Adwords.

CPM prices start at 5 RMB per CPM and can be increased by bidding up with 0.1 RMB increments.

“E” in CPE type of Weibo advertising stands for “engagement” that can be either click, a forward, a like or a follow. The initial price is set to minimum 0.5 RMB per CPE and can be increased at 0.01 RMB increment. The final price will be ultimately determined by quality of the content and competitive offers. If the price is set too low and the content is not engaging enough, the ad may not receive enough exposure, so setting the right bid and making adjustment to the content takes a bit of tweaking.

Weibo ad account provides some analytics tool to judge the effectiveness of an ad campaign but finding the right combination of all the parameters takes some skills and experience.

Micro task

The third type of promotion, which is also unique to Weibo, is called Micro Task and involves engaging KOLs, or Key Opinion Leaders.

KOLs are basically people with a lot of followers and are considered to be authority figures in their areas of expertise. Some KOLs have millions of followers which enables them to broadcast a targeted message to a very large audiences.

Depending on a specific industry, Weibo offers a range of KOLs to choose from. Typically, those with the largest following are more expensive to engage.

Working with KOLs requires opening an account and paying a deposit that is currently set to 2,000 RMB for companies. Once a suitable KOL is chosen, you can set a task (hence the name of this feature – “micro-task”) that normally involves posting your content in KOLs account that should appear at the time of your choosing and remain visible for a set period.

Depending on a specific KOL and the type of promotion task he/she receives, the price is set by Weibo automatically.

Individuals (as opposed to companies) can also use micro-task to promote posts. There is no deposit for individual account and you pay as you go per each task. On the other hand, individuals can’t pick KOLs that will be assigned by Weibo automatically.

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In China, Sina Weibo and WeChat are two most popular platforms. Sina Weibo has evolved around desktop use while WeChat only works with mobile. I have already those platforms in much more details in this blog. For now, suffice it to say that, for the purpose of market research, Weibo is much more suitable and this is what I will be focusing on.

Using Chinese Social Media Channels for market research

First of all, searching for something like “sunglasses” on Weibo is unlikely to be a very useful exercise – most results would probably quite irrelevant returning mostly some news or pictures of people wearing sunglasses.

While searching Chinese social media channels, it is much better to make a more focused searches such for specific brand names of competitors for example.

In any case, when it comes to searches for social mentions Weibo is fairly similar to Twitter with the difference that instead of preceding a term with #, it should be enclosed with # like this: #太阳眼镜#.

One useful aspect of a search for a broad term is finding out who is advertising with that keyword. Here is the screenshot of a sample search results with the ads shown on the right panel:

The best way to use social media search is to find out about the competition and how they are using this channel. For example, let’s search for one of the famous brands for sunglasses – Oakley (the brand name searches don’t require #):

The first result would usually be the official brand account followed by news and social mentions which also can be quite useful.
While browsing competitors accounts it is a good idea to note how many followers they have, how frequent they post and whether they receive engagement on their tweets.

In the above example, Oakley’s account reveals a fairly active channel with over 80K followers and 5.5K tweets (as of November 2015). The company seems to be engaging in promotions via sponsored sports events and many tweets feature new designs and product launches:

In summary, social media searches on Weibo are best for researching competitors and their ways of using this highly effective marketing channel. It can help you to figure out how much emphasis on social media your marketing campaign should include and what you should be tweeting about to keep your targeted audience engaged.

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Most recently, Weibo has introduced the set of new rules on what KOLs can and can’t do on their platform. Some of those rules are designed to fight completion, others to maximize the ad revenue.

ParkLU, a digital advertising platform that connects China’s internet celebrities and brands, recently released a list of rules that are currently being enforced on Weibo.

Here are the new Weibo KOL posting rules:

Link blocking to all e-commerce sites except Alibaba properties

In light of fierce competition within BAT (Baidu-Alibaba-Tencent) this rule makes a lot of sense and is hardly a surprise. Since Alibaba is the largest shareholder of Sina Weibo, they want to make sure to benefit as much as possible their own ecommerce platforms such as Taobao and Tmall.

KOL accounts need to seek permission before promoting more than one brand in a single post

This new Weibo KOL rule is most likely aimed at improving quality of the posts. Promoting multiple brands in a single post typically benefits KOLs themselves (since they can charge more), however the marketing message gets diluted which probably isn’t what a brand is paying for.

All posts with external links will receive a 20% media exposure penalty

Clearly, Weibo would like to keep as much traffic as possible within the platform. For example, posts linking to other Weibo posts or pages would get better ranking vs. those linking to pages outside the platform.

Posts containing plagiarized content will receive a 50% page weight penalty

This new Weibo rule still doesn’t go as far as the equivalent one for WeChat where such posts are most likely to be taken down completely. Of course, in some cases, proving who copied whom can also be tricky.

Posts containing long form images will receive a 50% page weight penalty

According to ParkLU CMO Elijah Whaley, this rule is rather confusing. Such images have been quite popular with users and it is not immediately clear why Weibo doesn’t like them anymore.

Accounts that only repost will receive a page weight penalty

This rule once again is designed to improve the posts quality and encourage creating original content by KOLs rather than recycling and reposting content already existing elsewhere.

Post containing a QR code will receive a page weight penalty

The penalty for QR code is clearly targeting Weibo’s largest competitor WeChat. It isn’t anything new though – Weibo wasn’t allowing posting WeChat QR codes for a while now.

Posts that mention WeChat will receive max page weight penalty, limited to 10% total visibility

Here is another shot against WeChat. In fact, WeChat has been blocking all the links to Alibaba ecommerce stores (Taobao or Tmall) for years now, so it is only fair that Weibo would reciprocate.

Accounts that mention marketing, sales or advertising businesses could receive a page weight penalty

With this new Weibo KOL rule, the platform is trying to avoid promoting competition that may take some of Weibo’s advertising revenues. Posts should be focusing on promoting brands, products and services rather than potential Weibo’s competitors.

Lucky draw campaigns must use Weibo’s official lucky draw function or receive a page weight penalty

Since lucky draws are quite popular in Chinese social media, Weibo prefers to use their own tools rather than third party service for this type of campaigns. This way, the traffic stays in Weibo rather than goes elsewhere.

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Although, the number of Weibo registered users has plateaued in the last 2 years, the number of daily and monthly users continues to increase. In September 2015, MAU (monthly active users) reached 227 million which represents 33% growth compared to the previous year. DAU (daily active users) for the same period was at impressive 100 million – 30% yearly increase.

What it means is that, although the platform total user base didn’t grow, it has become much more active than before.

Marketing on Sina Weibo, is it worth it?

Weibo has managed to successfully reposition itself from primarily desktop based platform to a mobile one. Its mobile app is quite popular and the source of more than half of the network’s traffic. In fact, people between 17 and 33 years old, who also represent the most active user base, is 83% mobile.

The platform has positioned itself as a discovery based network which makes marketing on Sina Weibo a more natural choice. This is in contrast with the larger WeChat that is still centered around its chat function. Much more private nature of WeChat doesn’t allow the same type of discovery as Weibo does. This fact makes Weibo much more attractive to marketers and, as result, the largest part of the service’s revenue comes from its various advertising programs.

Network’s ability to target users more accurately based on their interests and behaviors is what also boost the effectiveness of marketing on Sina Weibo.

Sina Weibo users tend to be quite educated. According to the latest data, over three quarters of users hold higher education degree. No such statistics is available for WeChat.

In terms of age distribution, almost 80% of Weibo users are between 17 and 33 years old. Only 13% are older than 34.

A few years ago, Sina Weibo was only popular in 1st and 2nd tier cities. Lower tiers still preferred Tencent Weibo at the time. This has also changed – Sina Weibo has achieved roughly equal popularity and market share among all city tiers. This trend is  also attributed to the fact that Tencent‘s WeChat is gradually cannibalizing Tencent Weibo.

Weibo paid membership has also been on the rise. VIP user base has risen by 60% in Q3 2015 compared to the same period a year ago. According to Sina, revenues from VIP membership fees in 2015 exceeded USD 15M.

2015 has also seen a closer cooperation between Sina Weibo and Alibaba, its strategic partner. It is expected that, at some point, Sina Weibo will become more integrated with Alibaba’s e-commerce platforms like Taobao and Tmall.

Published content on Sina Weibo has also become more diverse. Previously, the main Weibo’ topics used to be centered around news and media, business and celebrities. Now, the more diversified content covers movies, books, games, arts, lifestyle and other areas – another reason why marketing on Sina Weibo can be a more suitable choice for brands.

In conclusion, marketing on Weibo still offers good value. Company’s strategic measures like cleaning up the network from “zombie” users and re-positioning it for mobile space, have clearly paid off. In addition, accurate targeting for advertisers still makes it an attractive marketing channel in China.

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First interesting fact is that approximately 9 out of 10 China’s online users have a social media account.

Qzone remains the largest social media platform and QQ the most popular messenger. No platform, however, can challenge WeChat‘s dominance in mobile. 

Although, Weibo has some luster, it is still a very effective advertising platform as it has the ability to target users much more accurately than other services.

Chinese social media marketing is even more important when is comes to ecommerce. As the infographic shows, Chinese are very active online shoppers, spending a lot of time researching products online and commenting on the experience. 75% of online shoppers would provide feedback at least once a month as opposed to only 25% of US users.

Finally, 77% of Chinese expect a brand to have a social media presence – a clear sign to marketers that it is one of channels in the marketing strategy mix that can’t be ignored.

Here is the full infographic:

Chinese Social Media Marketing for Business

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However, there are still relatively inexpensive ways to take advantage of KOLs on Weibo through a system called Weibo micro task (微任务). My earlier post on brand marketing on Weibo goes through some technical on how to activate this service, so here I’m going to focus on ways to choose a suitable KOL to engage and avoid common mistakes.

Weibo KOL score

Weibo provides some basic metrics on each KOL, that is registered in their database, such as number of followers and 6 star based score. How exactly the stars are assigned is not disclosed but it is assumed to be based on the power of influence rather than the number of followers. There are some KOLs with large fan base but low score and vice versa. The price is ultimately determined by the number of stars assigned to a particular KOL.

Quality of fan base

When KOLs are used for small business marketing, quality almost always takes precedence over quantity. Unfortunately, there are still many fake accounts, created specifically to boost someone’s following. Obviously, working with KOLs with a lot of such zombie fans would be a complete waste of your marketing budget. Doing your due diligence on the fan base is not easy but you should look out for a few red flags, such as low star score (i.e. inexpensive to engage) but too many followers or those that are new but managed to accumulate large fan base too quickly;

Relevance

Relevance to a product or service you are promoting is the most important parameter to consider when choosing KOL from those that Weibo suggests automatically. It is almost always a good idea to stay way from KOLs whose blog is too general or covers very wide range of topics. Instead you should go with the one that focuses on a niche audience that you are targeting.

Geographical reach

In some cases, you may choose to target a specific geography rather than running a nationwide campaign. In such cases, you should make sure that KOL, whom you are considering, covers that region or, better yet, focuses on it. Also, you could simply count the number of followers who come from the area that you are targeting.

KOL’s style and tone

In order to judge whether a particular KOL is a good fit for your brand, it is best to simply read their posts. The style should match the marketing tone that you are trying to convey, be it humorous and lighthearted or serious and corporate. Also, it is worth reading further into the past to determine whether KOL’s style has been consistent;

Engagement level

Although, Weibo’s own scoring system is supposed to reflect this important parameter, it is something that is recommended to check as well. How often the posts are being re-tweeted? Do they generate comments? Does KOL respond to the comments in person? Clearly, it is not easy to go through thousands of posts to determine the engagement level, so I recommend using tools such as Hootsuite which now includes apps for digging into Weibo;

Involvement with other media

Influential KOLs are often present on multiple platforms, such as WeChat or have their own blog site. When determining authenticity and authority of a particular KOL, it is a good idea to check those other channels as well. Are they consistent? Do they cover same or related topics?

Develop closer relationship

As a next step, you can get in touch with KOL and establish relationship outside of Weibo. Encouraging them to personally try your product and write about their experience could go a long way in the long run;

Events

Once you have managed to establish offline relationship with the KOL, invite him/her to your events such as product launches or participation in trade shows. Covering it in their blog could become an excellent piece of PR for your company.

In conclusion, there are ways to maximize your KOL marketing campaign efficiency and navigate around common pitfalls. However, at the end of the day, it is still, to some degree, a trial-and-error process. My advise it to start small first and try few KOLs that look most promising, then measure the return. This way, you will be able to figure out fairly quickly, and with the least cost, which one delivers the best value.

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In addition, numerous studies how that word of mouth is, many times, more effective than advertising. Hence, leveraging KOLs for brand marketing is becoming a way to harness that power.

Almost every big brand marketing in China involves, to some degree, using KOLs in their marketing campaigns. Most often those are celebrities, but, depending on the type of product being promoted, could also be influential bloggers and intellectuals.

In this post I’m going to list the main ways big brands choose the right KOL for their marketing campaigns. Since some of the methods require hiring agencies and extensive research, not to mention considerable costs, they may not be suitable for smaller brands. In the next post coming up next week, I’ll make another list of down-to-earth methods that can be used by smaller companies, those without multimillion marketing budgets, to engage KOLs.

Methods of selecting KOLs by big brands

Determining most suitable KOL type

First off, companies should decide which type of KOLs best fits the product being marketed. Celebrities can be an obvious choice for high fashion and cosmetics but may not be suitable for other types of brands. Often, the best way to go is to engage a subject matter expert who specializes in a specific area and has recognized authority in the field. Such experts may not be a household name but can often be many times more effective than a celebrity;

Focus on authentic experience

Authenticity is quickly becoming a new buzz word in marketing and it basically means that in order to be effective, a marketing message has to carry high degree of credibility. Increasingly sophisticated consumers tend to distrust standard product endorsements putting more value into trustworthy opinion. One way to achieve that is to encourage KOLs to actually use the product and honestly express their experience;

Quality of fan base

One of the key definitions of social media KOLs, such as those on Weibo or WeChat, is the size of their fan base, or number of people following them. Numbers, however, do not tell the whole story. With the proliferation of fake accounts in social media as well as notorious services that claim to boost one’s number of followers, marketers are forced to look more deeply into the quality of one’s followers. There are some companies who develop complex mathematical models to measure KOL’s influence. Also, Weibo itself has a scoring system that takes into accounts various parameters;

Virality and engagement

The key component in KOL’s efficiency is their ability to generate “viral effect” with their messages, as well as keeping followers engaged. Clearly, tweeting a particular message to a large audience without it going further beyond the immediate followers would indicate that the message, or its delivery, wasn’t effective. In such cases, engaging a KOL would unlikely to deliver the expected value. As with the quality of fan base, there are tools and methods to judge the effectiveness of specific KOLs.

Covering events

One of the best ways to engage KOLs is to have them cover high profile events, such as product launches. Companies would often invite them to such events providing front raw seats and other incentives. In addition, KOLs would have valuable opportunities to network and meet celebrities. They would be expected to write an account of their experience with some engaging content such as pictures and video;

Engaging KOLs outside of social media

Big brands tend to build long lasting relationships with the most effective KOLs which go beyond social media presence. If there is a good fit between KOL’s personality and the brand, such relationship can become brand’s key marketing asset in the long run and can be employed with whatever future online or offline platforms we are going to see in the future;

Obviously, most of those methods are only suitable for big brands and companies with deep pockets. There are still opportunities for small businesses in engaging this promising route in their marketing efforts. I’m going to discuss those in my next post, stay tuned.

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Although, having lost some of the luster to WeChat, Weibo remains one of the most important channels in social media campaigns targeting Chinese market.

Also, from marketers’ standpoint it can be used in a different way and achieve different results compared to its Tencent’s rival.

I’ve covered those differences extensively in my previous posts on WeChat vs. Weibo Part I and WeChat vs. Weibo Part II.

This post is about the functionality of Weibo and how it used.

We start with the main Weibo features which can be seen as a combination of Twitter and Facebook/Google+ functionality:

Tweets

Tweets, or status updates, are limited to 140 characters limit. That number is clearly borrowed from Twitter and has little relevance in Chinese language. Clearly, one can pack much more content in 140 Chinese characters than with 140 English letters;

Referencing topics

Similar to Twitter and unlike Facebook, topics can be referenced with #hashtags. The only difference in Weibo is that #hashtags# should envelope a word from both sides;

Referencing people

Referencing other people or organisations with Weibo accounts is done with @, just like it is common with Facebook and Twitter. Reposts/retweets are done in the same way;

URL shortening

Most popular URL shortening services like bit.ly are blocked in China. All links are automatically shortened with Weibo’s own service t.cn;

Media

Almost all types of rich media can be inserted with posts. That includes graphics, sounds and videos;

Commenting

Commenting on posts is similar to Facebook with comments appearing below the posts. When quoting, users can  choose to include the original post in the comment;

Here is an example of a home page of a corporate account:

Status update is at the top and this is where one can type in a message, insert emoticons and links as well as include pictures or videos.

Basic accounts statistics in top right corner shows the number of followers, number of accounts you follow and number of published tweets.

Blue V indicates that the account has been verified with blue Vs reserved for organisations and yellow Vs for individuals. Verification is an important process that Weibo encourages accounts to go through. In case of companies, it is pretty much the norm and required for almost any type of promotion activities on Weibo.

In the center, right below status update section, is the newsfeed section which is generated from either the followed accounts or sponsored ads.

On the right, there is a section featuring suggestions on the accounts to follow, they are automatically selected by Weibo based on your interests, topics you already follow as well as tweets history.

Here is an example of a corporate Weibo account of Alibaba Group:

Recently, Weibo has been cleaning up some design clutter and now the accounts look a bit more structured, although, some say, visually less interesting than in the past. The top part with the logo and cover image now resembles Google+ but the bottom is more in line with Facebook style, although the display panels with newsfeed and ads are reversed.

Here is another example of a celebrity personal page of Alibaba’s CEO Jack Ma:

In fact, the structures of both corporate and personal pages are very similar, however corporate accounts allow higher degree of design optimization. Next to the yellow V, indicating verified account, there is a king’s crown bestowed on people with large following. In the case of Jack Ma, over 16 million people are connected to him on Weibo.

Here is another such “royalty”, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who is, indeed, enjoys full celebrity status in China.

Bill Gates is followed by an impressive 3.2 million people and is one of the most popular foreign celebrities on Weibo.

Stay tuned for my next post on the ways to leverage Weibo for brand promotion and how different marketing campaigns are setup and run on this platform.

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