WeChat vs Weibo, Which One Is Better For Social Media Marketing In China?

Because of internet censorship, China has developed a unique internet environment with many different social media platforms from the mainstream of the world. WeChat and Weibo are the most representative among them. These two are chosen by most business and brands to do social media marketing. For the newcomers, which platform can bring more brand awareness and profit has become a question worth considering.

What is WeChat?

WeChat is a social media mobile app developed by Tencent, an IT company founded in China. It was first launched in 2011. And now it has become one of the most used mobile apps in China with over 963 million monthly active users by August 2017.

At the beginning, WeChat was only an instant message app allowing users to send text and voice messages to their friends. With the continuous improvement for the last few years, it has become a super mobile app which combines the functions of What’s App, Facebook, PayPal and other common social media apps. WeChat can probably be used to do anything that you can or cannot imagine.

What is Weibo?

Weibo, or specifically, Sina Weibo, is a Chinese social media platform similar as Twitter with over 360 million monthly active users as of 2017. It mainly provides microblogging service on website and mobile app. Users can post maximum 140 characters or words and share the idea to both friends and strangers. Launched in 2009, Sina Weibo is not only a popular social media platform, but also a long-lived one.

Which one is better for social media marketing in China?

From my opinion, it is hard to say which one is better or more effective. Both of them has their own benefits compared with each other. Let's then talk about highlights of both platforms as marketing tools.

Highlights of WeChat

First of all, the WeChat.

'Moments' of WeChat

Generally, users will acquire the marketing content via the shared posts on the 'Moments', the social networking feature of WeChat which is similar to Instagram and Facebook. Instead of searching and viewing strangers, most of the users can only add another contact by searching his WeChat ID or scanning QR code. So normally, the contacts are someone users familiar with such as friends, colleagues and family members. This leads to a relatively closed and private marketing environment, which can be an advantage when considering the concept of ‘Word-of-Mouth’ (WOM) and its extension 'electronic Word-of-Mouth' (eWOM). The definition of WOM given by Arndt (1967) is the 'oral, person to person communication between a receiver and a communicator whom the receiver perceives as non-commercial, concerning a brand, a product or a service'. When this extends to eWOM, the communication moved from reality to virtual world. The oral, face-to-face communication changed to online post sharing. Whether it’s WOM or eWOM, friend’s recommendation is always much more convincing than a stranger’s or advertisement (Cheong and Morrison, 2008). And except for friends, many WeChat users will add other professionals of their industry for job-related reasons. Therefore, for example, if a fashion editor shares the fashion-related content or promotions, it may attract more people who are more interested in fashion than a food editor as they may have very different social circles.

Advertising on Moments

Then, other than friends sharing, users now have to accept some advertisement when browsing the Moments. The advertisement feature was first launched in January 2015. Tencent has been controlling the quality of advertising and using big data to achieve precise advertising. As a user, I personally don’t feel annoyed as the distributed advertisement was quite attractive for me, whether the content or the form of presentation.

Official Account of Burberry on WeChat

What’s more important for brands is the ‘Official Accounts’ of WeChat. Users take the initiative to search and subscribe to accounts. In other words, only the customers who are interested in a certain brand will subscribe to brand’s official account. This feature enables marketers to push the articles and promotions to the subscribers, the potential customers. Brands can communicate with their target market one-to-one. Therefore, it results in a higher conversion rate from intention to actual buying behaviour.

Other than above features, the users are always the essential wealth of WeChat. They have not only the large amounts of active users, but also users from different generations. About 50 million monthly active users are senior users aged between 55 and 70 years old by Q3 2017.

Highlights of Weibo

Then what about Weibo?

On Weibo, users can view the information and posts from both strangers or friends, which is much different from WeChat. Compared to the closed environment on WeChat, Weibo provides a broader stage for marketers, even though it has relatively less monthly active users. Users can find the interesting bloggers to follow. The process of acquiring the information is more similar to reading news on a news media. Thus, it may result in a more difficult process than WeChat to reach the target market. But on the other hand, WeChat’s push service sometimes might make users annoyed if it’s too frequent.

At the beginning, the marketers are required to deliver the key content within 140 words with maximum 9 pictures. It used to be a disadvantage for Weibo compared with WeChat as brands can push long articles on WeChat. Marketers must present short but eye-catching content. Now, they can also write long articles or post videos on Weibo to market their brands.

Michael Kors' Brand Ambassador - Chinese Actress Yang Mi's Weibo Post

What's more, Weibo is one of the celebrities’ favourite social media in China. They use Weibo to share their life and engage with fans, then to market themselves. A large group of fans and followers were attracted to Weibo. For brands who adopt the celebrity endorsement strategy, it will immediately drive the attention from the public and increase brand awareness effectively after the stars post content about the brands. For example, Chinese actress Yang Mi shared her birthday party with her 72 million followers on Weibo and livestreaming site. This party was arranged by fashion brand Michael Kors for its brand ambassador Yang Mi according to digital agency L2. There were more than 12 million shares, comments and likes of this post. So we can see that how much brand awareness a brand can get from a post on Weibo of their celebrity brand ambassadors.

Conclusion

To sum up, it is essential to familiarize with both Weibo and WeChat when brands and business do social media marketing in China. Weibo is a good tool for increasing brand exposure, maintaining public relations and media relations, as well as develop potential customers. While WeChat would be a better platform to deliver the content and promotion directly to target markets, therefore, convert the purchase intention to the actual buying behaviour.

Will you choose WeChat or Weibo for marketing your business in China? Share your ideas in the comments!

References

Arndt, J. (1968) Selective Processes in Word of Mouth. Journal of Advertising Research, 8 (3), 19-22.

Cheong, H. and Morrison, M. (2008) Consumers’ Reliance on Product Information and Recommendations Found in UGC. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 8 (2), 38-49.