Besides videos, pictures, and gaming applications, “Weibo Groups (微群)” is another function that brings this platform closer to social networking business.
About Weibo Groups
Weibo Groups are social clubs divided in 8 major categories (celebrities, industry, interests, culture, lifestyle, housing, old friends, and cities), with over a hundred subcategories. Within these categories users are allowed to create their own groups with specifically defined interests. Each group is limited to 500 users and each user is limited to 10 groups. There are both open groups (anyone can join) and closed groups (requires approval to participate as a member, but anyone can read).
What does this mean to us?
• Multiple promotional ways on Weibo itself: not only setting up accounts for our characters, Weibo Group is another place to spread the word and generate subscribers.
• Similar promotions among Weibo and other SNS: while it is clear that Weibo is a competitive threat to SNS, it is also clear to us that it’s a necessary platform that we should include in our promotional efforts, knowing that Weibo has more social networking function, our promotional practices will have more direction accordingly. Weibo has 70 million users, Renren self-reported to have 160 million users. Sina Weibo Group has launched ahead of Renren Group
How much does it cost?
While full promotional rate is not available yet, from communicating with one blogger I outreached this week, the promotion within Weibo groups that have over 10,000 fans cost minimum 500-700rmb ($75-$105)/day. These groups will promise on avg 50 RT and 50 comments.
Payment cannot always guarantee premium account, what else? Guanxi!
From former research we mentioned “verified account” on Sina Weibo, which allows over 2,000 following and is supposed to be distributed only to celebrities and business. However, from communication with industry people, “Guanxi”, “personal relationship” in Chinese, with editors enable non-celebrity figures like Xiaoxi to have verified account access as well. Is Guanxi important? Of course!
However, there are also examples showing that payment without Guanxi can guarantee everything, including subscribers. Exactly why is that? See my next article for details.
Note: Weibo is Chinese Twitter, literally means microblog.
Additional reads:
http://www.techrice.com/2010/11/27/sina-weibo-launches-groups-threatens-chinas-social-networks/
http://www.techrice.com/2010/11/07/sina-weibos-4-steps-to-dominance-in-china/
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