In September 2022, Weibo Corporation reported to have 253 million of daily active users, up around five million from the corresponding quarter in the previous year. The microblogging company is one of the top social networking platforms in China with around 584 million monthly active users.

Weibo is very similar to Facebook. Users on Weibo are more focusing on following celebrity trends, entertainment news and hot topics. If your brand is working with celebrities or influencers in China, Weibo is a great platform to increase brand awareness. According to Weibo users report 2020, users on Weibo tend to be younger generation. People born after 90 and 00 accounts for 80%. More female users than male users. Users are active from 8:00am till midnight.

Weibo has a search bar, and it allows users to search the information they are after. Weibo accounts verified are considered as more authoritative. There are many key opinion leaders on Weibo. They can be considered as influencers on Instagram. They have many followers and brands can work with key opinion leaders to promote their services and products.

Star China is a full-service Weibo marketing agency. We provide services such as Weibo corporate account registration, day to day account management, community management, Weibo ads management et.al. We are a performance marketing agency that gets your marketing tasks done.

Weibo advertising formats

There are a wide range of Weibo advertisement formats. For organic post, you can boost the post like you do on Facebook or Instagram. This is called fans headlines. This means your post will be displayed in priority in your followers’ news feed interface. Sponsored posts budget can be as little as 20AUD and there is no upper limit for ad budget.

Alternatively, if you are thinking about a broader audience group, you can run a campaign and allocate certain budget and set a time frame. You can select your target audience profiles such as age, geo location, interests, and whether they follow a certain account.

Ad rates are in CPM or CPC. You can choose whichever you think meet your needs. Also, you can set a target CPA.

Weibo user engagements

In 2018, an average of 130 million words was published on the microblogging platform Sina Weibo in China every day. The overall user engagement of Sina Weibo showed a positive growth compared to the previous year, especially answering the questions on the platform.

How Australian business can utilise Weibo to target Chinese market?

To target Australia Chinese, we can run paid ads on Weibo and target users based in Australia. This means your post will be displayed in front of your target audience. When you select target audience profile, there will be an estimate of summary about how many people you can potentially reach.

You can also post organic post and then boost the post. This is called fans headline. It’s like when you boost your facebook post.

Weibo app has opening page ads. This is relatively expensive comparing with other ad options. But this guarantees your brand exposure. In  your campaign period, everyone who open Weibo app in Australia will see your ads. It’s expensive but it’s great for branding.

Key points summarised by Star China Weibo marketing team for you to take away.

• Weibo allows you to run paid ads in a very small amount of budget.
• Great for brand awareness and exposure.
• Weibo post views can easily reach 100k if you are running paid ads. But bear in mind for engagements and conversions. Better to lead traffic to a landing page where you can track campaign performance.
• This platform is suitable for medium to large companies.