Weibo is China’s most influential social media platform, with more than 520 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) and 230 million Daily Active Users (DAU). With 50% of the user base in third- and fourth-tier cities, it has more than a million recognized content creators publishing topics in 55 categories. Weibo’s platform is a digital marketing goldmine for brands and KOLs seeking to establish brand awareness in the Chinese market.
It’s no secret that digital marketing is important for any business, but figuring out how to best utilize Weibo to meet your specific business needs can be difficult. This is especially true in the Chinese market, where there are many nuances to digital marketing that can lead to a lack of results if you don’t know what you’re doing.
For example, a common marketing strategy in the West is to use case studies or testimonials from existing customers to build trust and attract new ones. However, these types of campaigns don’t work as well on Weibo, where the audience is highly skeptical of marketers and their claims. This is because of their strong desire to be authentic and the fact that they are heavily influenced by social proof and peer recommendations.
One of the most effective ways to generate social proof and increase engagement on Weibo is to run a repost campaign. This is a great way to reach a large audience, and it can be very cost-effective. In addition, this type of campaign can be used to drive traffic and sales to a website or physical store.
Another effective tool is to run a search promotion campaign. This is a form of paid advertising that allows businesses to pay to promote their posts and landing pages in Weibo’s search results when users look for certain keywords or phrases. This is a great way to generate more leads and sales from Weibo.
Weibo also offers other tools to help businesses grow their audience and engagement, such as fan headlines and fan tunnel ads. A fan headline is a sponsored post that appears at the top of user feeds for 24 hours. It targets a specific audience based on their demographics, device, location, interests and more, and can be run using the CPM model.
A fan tunnel ad is a similar but more advanced type of ad. This type of ad can be run on both the Discover and Hot Topic pages, and is a good option for reaching targeted audiences based on their behavior, including searches, follower demographics and other data points. It can be run using the CPM or CPE models, with the latter offering more targeted ad placements and higher performance metrics. These include clicks, favored posts, followers and more. In addition, it can be run on both verified and unverified accounts.