Daniel from EastWest Public Relations walks through Sina Weibo for B2B marketing in China. Weibo has 280 million users, half the country's internet population, with a young, educated audience. The guide covers account setup, content strategy (post 1-4 times daily at noon or 5 pm), interactive features like live streams and sponsored games, and a measurement framework tracking followers, leads, and cost-per-lead.
Hello everyone, my name is Daniel and I'm an associate at EastWest Public Relations in Beijing. So today I wanted to talk to you about how to use Sina Weibo to increase awareness of your organization on the Chinese internet. So this is just a brief overview of how Weibo can be used by B2B businesses, and for full details on the full version, please go to eastwestpr.com/weibo. So before we go any further, let's take a look at what Weibo is and why it's so popular on the Chinese internet. First of all, Weibo is a mashup of Twitter and Facebook. As you can see from this graphic, this is Dell's Twitter, Facebook, and Weibo page. And Weibo combines visual and functional aspects from these other social media platforms and streamlines them. Sina Weibo has over 280 million users at the moment, which is half of the Chinese internet population. Weibo— Sina Weibo also has 82% of its users that have a university education or above, and the demographics of the users of Sina Weibo are that 70% of total users are under 30 years old. Also, the average time spent on Weibo is 29 minutes, which is much longer than other information channels like different blogs or even email. So how does Weibo allow B2B businesses to achieve their goals? Let's let's take a look. You could start by identifying your business communication objectives for using Weibo. So you might want to use Weibo to aid in branding and awareness, build a community, provide customer service opportunities, allow research development and collaboration, offer direct sales opportunities. So no matter what you want to achieve. There's a way to achieve them. So now that we know what Weibo can do, let's see how you start a Weibo campaign. So this is a great example of a standard branded Weibo account for a business. It's of the company 21vianet.com, which is a data center service provider in China. This page shows many important examples of how to customize your Weibo page. The most important being becoming a verified business on Weibo, and once you do, you get this little blue sticker or button at the top right-hand corner which says that you're verified. Another very important milestone is to create a custom link to your profile. A normal link might be just random letters and numbers, but once you can get this custom link, it'll show your company's name in the link. And another might be getting tags so other people using Weibo can find you. There are also other tools on Weibo that allow you to directly interact with your audience, which might be polls, instant messaging, or private messages. Also, visual identity of your Weibo account is key. So as you can see from this account, they have a custom background. They also have a custom logo here in the top and some photos that might be coverage or other pictures from their organization. So now, if branding and visual aspects of an organization are the furnace, then content is the fuel. This might be an example of some content categories that could be used. So there are 3 frequencies of content that you want to post. One is regular, one is occasional, and the other is situational. For regular, you might want to post industry news scans, global news, or blog posts from your website. For occasional, you might want to post an infographic, listing of an event, or case studies of your organization. And for situational, you might want to post some product reviews, a survey and analysis of the survey, or even some speeches and presentations by your spokespeople. So this is just a brief breakdown of current Weibo users' online behavior. To generate the most interaction, what we found is the best time to post is around 12 PM or 5 PM when users are winding down at lunch or work, and to post 1 to 4 times a day. Any less than that and there's not enough comment— content to comment on. And any more means that you're saturating the users with content. So these are some examples of account trees on Weibo. First, there's a solo account which might be used by a smaller organization, which allows you to maintain the, the best communication and the best message through one account and manage it manage disseminating it. Another might be a multiple account tree where you have still the core account with different subaccounts that would cater to very specific needs like maybe customer service or a specialized type of your business. And the dual account is a little specialized case where someone from your organization already has a large enough Weibo following that once you create your corporate account, then you can link them to your person of interest's account and share their users and content. So here are just some examples of how to promote Weibo offline and online. So first, you might want to add a share button to to your website that users can click on and go to your Weibo. Another might be in a press release that you release, a Follow Us on Weibo button at the bottom, which allows users to, to go to your Weibo. And another might be printing QR codes on your business cards that link whoever uses those QR codes to your Weibo. So here are some examples of different features that can increase community interaction on Weibo. So the first is called a Weibo interview, where there's a designated spokesperson that interviews a person of interest about a specific hot topic. And on the side here, you notice that these people are commenters on this specific topic and they might watch it. Another might be sponsoring a game streamed online, so your company could show up that they are a sponsor and it's easier to get noticed by a wider audience. Another is this thing called a Weibo share screen, which is a big screen or TV at an event that shows a live stream from your Weibo about the event that's currently happening. Also, you could make a Weibo microsite, which might be an information hub about a certain event or something that's happening in, in your organization. So, here are some ways that we can measure how Weibo is affecting your business and your influence. So, you might want to first measure on a weekly basis the number of followers or posts or comments. And on a monthly measurement, you could measure how many leads you've gotten through Weibo or sales conversions or even social mentions. And for a quarterly measurement, you could measure the cost per lead or demographic analysis or brand conversions against competitors. So that's it for today, and thank you for watching this presentation on Weibo for B2B businesses. I hope you check us out, and please, if you'd like to download the full version of this presentation, Visit us at eastwestpr.com/weibo. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
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