Weibo

For foreign bloggers and smartphone users, they usually spend a lot of time to browse the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or YouTube but sorry you cannot view it in China due to the Chinese censorship program, most of the popular social networks they are not working in China.

Weibo is a micro-blogging platform which people treat it as Chinese Twitter.  Originally, the Weibo is created to compete with Twitter however the micro-blogging service was evolved and have more influence to the users.  From the Social media in china (Agency, 2016) economist Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economics said that 2014 might be the last year that United State can claim themselves to be the world’s largest economic power.  In 2015, China should be in the top position and it will remain for a very long time if not forever.  A strong online situation that explained why there is very high penetration of mobile devices, phones and tablets.  There are nearly 700 million Chinese are connected and 315 million of them do their shopping by online which is about a quarter of the population. 

Apart from the online shopping, there are over 500 million users were using Weibo to communicate with friends or others to share their comments on the items that they bought, what they have just ate in the restaurants or what happen or they saw a celebrity in their daily life etc.  The social network allows users to share any type of contents or discussion directly.  Indeed, since Twitter was forbidden to use in China, Weibo modernized itself to become an expression for Chinese people.

Due to the access issue, most of the western companies they would like to know more about this big gangs of people’s behavior in China.  Weibo’s platform attracted these companies to use Weibo to be their social media platform to provide service, to hold an event or establish a company blog to increase their brands’ awareness especially they can get more attention from those people or bloggers who are usually like to share comments in the blog.  In my opinion, I think this is a kind of a way out and which the western companies to broaden or enlarge their market share and scale in China.

In March 2011, a well-known foreign footwear brand Adidas collaborated with Weibo to organize a live broadcast event in the Weibo event page to promote their brand and Adidas fans base. The event called “Adidas is all in” which lined up with Lionel Messi, David Beckham, David Villa, NBA Derrick Rose, Dwight Howard, Caroline Wozniacki, Katy Perry, Jeremy Scott and Eason Chan the most popular celebrities, famous actors, sports players, DJ and singers to attend the events and promote their brand.  Event highlight can be found in http://events.sina.com.hk/adidasisallin.

In the Weibo live show event page, users can view the 2 hours live broadcasting.  With the hashtag #adidas is all in#, people can share the live video in Weibo discussion widget or different social media platform as well to alert more friends’ or other peers group to join this live music event and end up this event reached thousands of viewers during the night.

 

During the event, the Weibo live feed broadcasting screen also enhanced the interaction with audience in the party and create more noise after the show.

 

Conclusion

From the above social media case studies, I can see social media is the most powerful tools for a company or organizations to promote their marketing strategy and branding position.  If you know your brand well, you should know which social media can help you to reach your company goal or target of sales. 

 

Use “Hashtag” to link with your event

If you have used the hashtags in your Twitter, Google+, Instagram or Pinterest posts, it can be more easily to use the same hashtags in the Facebook page to locate your event as well.  You can save more time by posting the same content across several platforms.  People can simply search your hashtags in the Facebook.  If your event’s hashtag expect others use it in their Facebook, it should be simple and obvious.  As an effective hash tagging will grow your following and it will in turn improve your reach and buzz.  Hashtags are also a great way of finding your target audience. You can search for hashtags within the media platform that I stated above.  If you have took a cool picture or behind the scenes video to promote your event, post it to other social media platform as well so that it can have more audience or potential client they can reach your company.

 

Company should not too hard selling their products or promote to the bloggers or users.  Some suitable and up-to-date pictures can stimulate or refresh the user’s attention to those new products or events.   Companies also can try to use those social media platforms without cost to promote their brand, have a team to monitor the social media platform like the fashion and art community leader Kristen Joy Watts, she spotted the new trend from the networks. 

 

Bloggers, tasters and users’ comment are the most important asset to the company. We have to manage the interaction around their social media pages, check out consumers’ reactions so that can understand more about their point of views.  I also suggest the western companies can adapt their new strategies to Chinese users.  Design or customize their promotions to fit the consumers’ requirement.

 

Indeed, social media networks are the good ways that we can create a strong connection network with the potential clients or audiences. However, marketers often make the mistake of diving into social media without a clear plan.  At best, this is a waste of time – and at worst, it can lead to a PR disaster. To benefit from social media, I suggest the companies need to build a clear strategy that takes into account what they are trying to achieve, what kind of customers they are looking for and what are your competitors doing.  Therefore, company can gain more revenue and have high return on the new market investment.