The Tale of Weibo
By Ha Anh Nguyen
An Introduction
A long, long time (About 12 years) ago...
Sina Weibo (Chinese: 新浪微博), which is widely known as Weibo, is a microblogging platform officially launched by Sina Corporations in August 2009.
Weibo provides users with a platform that allow users to follow others, create, distribute and discover Chinese-language content. It is the product of the means of public self-expression in real-time with a platform designed for social interaction, content gathering and distribution. Weibo provides a simple way for a variety of its users to express themselves publicly and interact with others while staying connected with the world, making it the microcosm of Chinese Society (Weibo, 2015).
Besides being a platform for users to create, distribute and discover content, Weibo provides advertising and marketing services for customers such as brand awareness, interest generation, sales conversion and so on. The advertising and marketing services had made a substantial contribution to the platform's revenues.
With a humble starting point as a site for the user to publicly share their opinions, Weibo was one of the first social media sites emerging from China (Chi, 2021). In the year 2021, with over 850 million people in China have used Weibo, the platform has surely grown into a multi-functional social giant with undeniable influential power.
This explainer will go into detail about Weibo, the commercial situation of the social media behemoth, their core business and the challenges as well as the competitors the platform face in the ever-changing media landscape.
"Weibo has transformed the way people express themselves and interact with others in the public internet space"
Features
Discovery: the services offered in order to help users discover the content on Weibo.
The platform presents users with information feed in different forms such as relationship-based information feed and an interest-based information feed. Also, Weibo allows users to look for other users, feeds, videos, articled and pictures based on keywords, topics or popular trending through the use of Search.
The Discovery Zone is also an essential feature as this is where users can find content related to their interests and interact with other people of the same interests. In Channel, where users can visit in order to explore the content on the topic of interest and interact with users who share the same interest.
Trends would present the users of Weibo with the most breaking, real-time topics being discussed on the platform. Lastly, the Video Community combines and distribute video content for the user to access and consume.
Self-expression: this is where users can express themselves on the platforms, with different features such as Post, where users can express and share their ideas publicly in the form of text or multimedia content.
Individual page where contains the basic information of the user as well as the posts consisting of the publicly share views of the users.
On Weibo, users can also express themselves through Story, which can be easily created, consumed and interacted on smartphones.
Users of Weibo can publish beautifully presented content through Top Articles and then display them on the Information Feed.
Social: users can interact on Weibo with the use of Follow, where they can establish a relationship with other users by choosing to follow them.
They can also Repost, Comment, Favourite or Like to share their views, show support to other users or even save the posts into their favourites.
Another way to interact with other users with similar topic interests is by joining the Topic Discussion or Super Topic.
The current commercial situation of Weibo
Weibo has become an indispensable part of the Chinese society. The platform provides the Chinese netizens (the citizens of the Internet) a public space where they can discuss and disseminate current affairs as well as actively participate in social life (Zhang and Zhang, 2020).
According to a survey carried out by DigitalWebIndex (Kemp, 2021), 47,1% of Internet users aged 16 to 24 have used the platform in the past month, making Weibo one of the most-used social media platforms in China. In September 2021, Weibo’s monthly active users (MAUs) amounted to 573 millions users, a net addition of 62 million users compared to the previous year.
In terms of daily active users (DAUs), the Chinese microblogging platform counted 248 millions in China, which a net addition of 23 millions users on a year-over-year basis.
The net income of Weibo in the third quarter of 2021 was $181.7 millions compared to $33.8 millions for the same period in the year 2020.
In the third quarter of the year 2021, the net revenues of the leading social media platform were $607.4 millions, which is an increase of 30%, compared to $465.7 millions for the same period of time in the previous year. The revenues in 2018, 2019 and 2020 were $1,718.5 millions, $1,766.9 millions and $1,689.9 millions respectively. The revenues of Weibo saw a 3% increase from 2018 to 2019 and a decrease of 4% from 2019 to 2020 (Weibo, 2021). Additionally, in 2020, advertising and marketing revenues account for 88% of the total revenues.
So...
What is the core business of Weibo about?
It's all about CONTENT
According to Pickard (2011), the core business is regarded as the central activity of the firm and it is supported by the investment, the company structure and so on. He further elaborated this point of view by saying that content is the core business, the central activity of the media firms. Additionally, the creation, acquisition, packaging and distribution that transfers information and differentiate the media from others, catering for consumer needs. Applying what Pickard has said about the core business of media firms to the case of Weibo, the core business of Weibo undoubtedly evolves around content. Weibo’s priority is about providing the best user experience for creating, distributing and discovering the Chinese-language content on the platform.
Weibo is designed based on the core attributes: Public, Real-time, Social, Aggregated and Distributed (Weibo, 2015). This means that the content on Weibo can be generated and distributed to everyone; the content is original, real-time, viral and can be accessed directly by the audience. Additionally, Weibo provides a platform for users to generate discussions, create content by joining in the discussions and distribute the content by sharing them on the feeds. Content on Weibo is contributed by people from all walks of life in China, from ordinary people to government agencies and businesses and is easily and virally distributed.
Overall, it can be seen that the activity of Weibo evolves around the creation, aggregation and distribution of content on the platform. Besides the attributes of content creation, dissemination and distribution, the real-time and viral nature of Weibo is what differentiates the platform from others because it caters for the customers’ needs: people who deliver headline news at the scene of the event or the governmental organisation that would want direct access to the audience. After all, it is all about generating, collecting and distributing content to the audience.
Tech is famous for its great rivalries, and China is no exception
Due to The Great Firewall being imposed in China, some of the biggest social networks in the world such as Twitter, Facebook and so on cannot get access into the country.
As a result, the competition for user traffic and user engagement is fierce and Weibo faces strong competition in the domestic market. In Weibo Annual Report 2020 (Weibo, no date), the company has listed 2 other internet companies: Tencent and Bytedance as they compete with Weibo for user engagement, content, talent as well as marketing resources. However, in terms of competing for user engagement, Weibo’s biggest competitor is WeChat, which has about 1,165 million MAUs, whereas Weibo only has 520 million MAUs in the year 2020.
Being the social media giants in China (Chinese Social Media, 2021), Weibo and WeChat have always been in the race competing for user engagement. While being similar in terms of providing a platform for efficient and engaging communication, there are some differences between the two of them when taking a closer look (WeChat Mini Programmer, 2018). The audience uses Weibo to connect with other users, explore news and trending topics, generate and participate in discussions whereas WeChat can be used for messaging, gathering news and information and many more - in other words, WeChat is China’s all-in-one super app. Weibo and WeChat also differ in the way they operate. While the former operates on a ‘one-to-many’ basis, meaning that a user could have many other users, the latter operates on the basis of ‘one-to-one’, occasionally has ‘one-to-many’ with a much smaller scale. The nature of the ‘one-to-many’ connection of Weibo leads to the fact that the messages, discussions and activities on the platform are public and more likely to go viral (Digital Crew, no date). On the other hand, the ‘one-to-one’ nature of WeChat means that the information given out on WeChat is more direct and private.
For the purpose of advertising services, due to the nature of being public and viral of Weibo, the platform would be useful in terms of engaging mass audiences. Due to the social attributes of Weibo which allow users to generate conversation and participate in discussions of interest, this can help brands create awareness as they can build interaction with the target audience by generating relevant content that could be of interest to the audience.
Therefore, a brand can increase their visibility on Weibo thanks to the viral and public attributes of Weibo. On the other hand, the more private nature of WeChat, the platform allows for more in-depth content and discussion which is more suitable for targeted marketing, resulting in having the potential to build brand loyalty. The content on WeChat may not generate awareness or visibility for the brand but can be helpful in CRM and generate brand loyalty in a long term. Despite being in fierce competition for user engagement, Weibo and WeChat can co-exist and their features can maximise the potentials of users, such as brand, in the long run.
According to the Ultimate Intro To China Social Media report (Kawo, 2020), there is also another competitor that poses a threat to Weibo in terms of user engagement. Coming close to Weibo’s MAUs with 475 MAUs in 2020 is Douyin, owned by Bytedance - the new kid on the block. Douyin, which is the video-sharing social network and the Chinese portal of TikTok.
With the length of the video being only 15 seconds, the content posted on the platform has the potential of going viral, resulting in building awareness and visibility, which is threatening the advertising and marketing features of Weibo, resulting in the business of the platform being affected.
Challenges ahead...
One of the challenges faced by Weibo is the nonlinear growth of the platform. According to Annual Report 2020 (Weibo, 2021), the penetration of Weibo among the interest users in China in the more economically developed tier 1 and tier 2 cities who use the social media platform is more than in other parts of China. According to South China Morning Post (no date), China has 613 cities which are divided into four tiers. Each of the tiers would have different characteristics in terms of GDP, population, politics and population. The cities such as Bejing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Guangzhou, which are the most economically developed are listed as tier 1 cities. The Ultimate Intro To China Social Media Report (Kawo, 2020) has stated that 64% of the Chinese population is still located in rural areas. This means that there is huge growth potential in the lower-tier cities as they continue to develop. Not being able to attract users from the lower-tier cities in China means Weibo would miss out on a considerable amount of user base, which could affect the operating results of Weibo in the future.
Another challenge that the social media platform is facing is the issue of censorship. Social media platforms in China have faced harsh restrictions as part of Beijing’s push in order to shape behaviour and social norm (Lu, 2021).
In 2020, Chinese feminist activist Xiao Meili wrote on Weibo about her incident. After that, she received personal attacks and falsely accused messages. However, Weibo has abruptly removed the accounts of feminist activists on the platform (Yang, 2021). The suspended account of Xiao was accused of containing “extreme and ideological content”. After that, other feminists came to defend her on Weibo ended up getting themselves removed from social media as well. This changes the whole dynamic of Weibo of providing open and public content on the platform.
Yang (2021) argues that it would be harder for women to gather their voices and express themselves publicly when experiencing injustice. Later on, the feminists talked about they would move to WeChat to share relevant information. This act of censorship could affect the business of Weibo as the users engage with other platforms for distributing and generating information instead of Weibo, resulting in the platform failing to grow the user base, affecting adversely the operation of Weibo (Weibo Annual Report, 2020).
To sum up...
Providing the users with the discovery, self-expression and social features, Weibo is centred around enabling users to access the platform in order to discover, create and distribute content as well as interact with others in real-time.
Weibo has become an indispensable part of Chinese society, Weibo saw growth in user-based as the platform saw an increase in both MAUs and DAUs in the third quarter of 2021.
The core business of Weibo, similarly to other media firms, is about the creation, aggregation and distribution of content. Due to the Great Firewall being imposed in China, Weibo’s competitors remain domestically. Weibo and WeChat compete with each other for the number of user engagement but they can co-exist for advertising and marketing purposes. There is also another competitor such as Douyin, which threatens to take over the number of user engagement of Weibo.
Weibo faces the challenge of a nonlinear user base as well as the issue of censorship, which could affect the strategy of the platform to grow the user base, resulting in affecting adversely the operation of Weibo.
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