Weibo, literally microblog, launched in August 2009, by the biggest online portal in China, Sina.  Weibo has now become amazingly popular in China.  One of the reasons is that Weibo is used by many celebrities in China, fans can easily get updates of their favorite celebrities instantly.  Sina’s most followed microblogger, Chinese actress Yao Chen bounds over Obama and Britney Spears to become 3rd most popular microblogger this week, with over 7 million followers.

It was reported that Weibo had more than 80 million registered users in January 2011, while Twitter had 175 million registered users.  Marketers have to pay attention to the trends for their online marketing strategy to ensure they reach their Chinese audience cause Facebook and Twitter were blocked here.

While Weibo functionally similar to Twitter, there are a few advantage for online marketing:

1)Embedded picture and video attachments. By clicking on thumbnails that can be easily added to any Weibo tweet, pictures or video can be viewed without leaving the page. And, follower can re-tweet it to share the stuff. This provides opportunities for online marketing, as brands can more easily associate visuals with tweet.  Below is a screen shot of Mcdonald’s Weibo tweet,  introducing their new Happy Meals with Rio promotional items.

2)Automatic URL shortener. Regardless length of URL, Weibo will automatically shorten it to something like http://t.cn/hrn21k

3)New feature of “poll”. Any user can specify subject, options, single or multiple choice, expire date and time to create a poll. Marketers can make use of this tool to better engage its targeted audience.  A magazine started a poll for “Cover of Next Month” as below:

4)Events/Activities. User can also plan online or offline events with Weibo. When the other one join the event, Weibo will automatically generate a tweet for the participant.

5)Ads Placement. There is a flash banner under the neath of entry box,  now  it just for hot topics and featured news but might open to advertisers in the future.  From last month,  user sometimes see recommended business account or events at the right side of Weibo, Sina seems to being testing ads placement these days.

Origins of Group buying can be traced to China, where the popularity of the strategy in China is often attributed to the Chinese tradition of bargaining for the purchase of goods of all types. In recent time, Group buying websites have emerged as a major player in online shopping business. Typically, these websites feature a deal-of-the-day,  offering  products and services at significantly reduced prices on the condition that a minimum number of buyers would make the purchase.  Buyers then print off a voucher to claim their discount at the retailer. Groupon.com is one of the most famous deal-of-the-day websites. Launched in November 2008, the first market for Groupon was Chicago.

Group Buying In China

Group buying, or Tuangou in Chinese, is wildly popular across China now.  There are over a thousand local websites offer similar services to attract  China’s 140 million online shoppers, especially the young generation. Groupon has launched their Chinese site Gaopeng.com this year by partership with Tencent, one of the biggest internet companies  in China that offers services including entertainment, e-commerce and famous for the chatting software QQ.

Sites like Dianping,  Lashou,  Meituan,  Ftuan and Nuomi  are selling everything from  home furnishings, movie tickets,  massage,  tourism services,  dancing classes, foods, cosmetics, brand hand bag to hotel rooms in bulk.

There are nearly 20 million regular group buying customers among China’s 160 million e-commerce consumers, according to the China Internet Network Information Center, indicating plenty of room to grow. China’s overall e-commerce activity rose 22 percent last year.

Social Network Boost Group Buying

There were 420 million Chinese netizen as of June, 2010, according to CINIC and they spend a lot of time on internet forums, chatting with others who are interested in the same issues or products. For example, 700,000 people talking about cars in online car-related communities; they post 13 million comments about cars each month, according to CIC Data, an Internet consulting firm. Microblogging is the new network which is becoming an immensely popular way to get in touch with others, people also share the great deal info  in their own network for example Weibo.com. Almost all of the deal-of-the-day websites update deal info. in their microblog and fans can easily share the info by retweet. This has been a popular method of online marketing campaign in China now.

New Foreign Brands Joined The Market

As long as you can offer a good deal, you can sell your products or services  online with this, you even no need to have a website or web-store. Some of the new foreign companies  are trying to promote their products, such as wine, beauty salon by group buying.

Sina Drops Google Search

Sina, one of the biggest web portal in China has switched from Google’s search technology to its own search engine due to the end of its contract with Google, according to the Chinese company’s marketing department vice general manager, Liu Qi.

New Search Engine In China

The Chinese government has launched a new search engine called Panguso which is a joint venture of the state-owned mobile operator China Mobile and Xinhua news agency. China Mobile is the leading carrier in the country with 70 percent market share, we might see a mobile friendly search service or mobile Internet search engine.

Panguso is not the 1st state-owned SE in China. In December 2010, the official newspaper for the Communist Party in China, launched Goso to break Baidu‘s monopoly.

TV audience will always change channels during the lengthy commercial break, so, how on earth could the internet make people accept commercial information willingly? Internet marketing expert Liu Dongming has once stated that China’s internet marketing was lack of various modes, but now, things are changing silently.

Suddenly, internet ads become not so hateful.” Bian Zeheng, 28, working in Beijing, is a loyal user of online video and usually enjoys music video on major video websites. She said, “One year ago, when I watched online videos, I had to spend 10-odd minutes on waiting for the cinema advertising to pass, but now, on most online video websites, only when you pause the video will the ad appear.”

More importantly, thanks to the rapid development of internet technologies, the value of internet marketing is now improving, so users can have comparatively good using experience and accept the internet marketing in an undisturbed condition.” On the other hand, enterprises could evaluate their products and the future purchasing trend of consumers with new marketing methods like internet survey and online data analysis. Because of the huge cost advantage compared with the traditional offline methods, these new marketing methods become popular with more and more enterprises.

Large companies: Online marketing is still making progress

The “online torch relay” jointly launched by Coca Cola and Tencent was seen as one of the most successful internet marketing cases. Once the user won the qualification of online torch relay, an unlightened icon will appear beside their QQ faces. If they successfully invited other users to participate in the activity, the icon will be lightened. In a short period of 40 days since March 2008, the activity attracted 40 million people to attend, 120,000 people per second in average.

Same with Coca Cola, the internet marketing has now become the new battle field of brand development of many large companies. Compared with the single product sales, they prefer to improve their brand reputation and realize long-lasting customer relationship with internet transmission methods. Considering that in the Chinese netizen age structure, people from 18 to 24 take up the largest proportion (till the end of June 2008, and the proportion is 30.3 percent), creativity and interactivity have become the key words of the internet marketing implementation of large companies. They carry out product placement marketing with games and videos, or interactive marketing with community websites.

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