How to Market to China With Sina Weibo Fensitong Advertising

When most people talk or think about Weibo in China, they think that it is a social media platform like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Weibo is not a social media platform in China.

I know you might be thinking to yourself “what?!!!!”, but it is true. Weibo in Chinese literally means “microblogs”, in fact, in China, there are about 5 different Weibo, all own by different companies such as Sina, Tencent, Baidu, Sohu, and Netease. However, when most people in China refer to Weibo, they actually mean Sina Weibo, and this is because it is the most popular Weibo platform in China with literally 86,6% market share.

Sina Weibo has such a dominance in China’s Microblogging scene that it has become the Google of search. What’s even more silly, is that even most Chinese people living in China are unaware of the fact that there are many different Weibo platforms.

Sina Weibo has such a powerful brand, it has created the Band-Aid effect. Most people don’t realize that band-aid is a brand, and the actually adhesive that you use to wrap around your wounds are call bandages and not band-aids.

Why Advertise on Sin Weibo?

Well, let’s see…

  • As of today, Sina Weibo has about 536m registered users, and each user has an average of 200 friends or connections.
  • There are more than 120 million daily active users.
  • An average user spends more than 60 minutes every day on Sina Weibo.
  • More than 1 million contents are published by KOL (key influencers)
  • 4 billion page views per day, every single day.

But most important of all, and the number that most advertiser and marketer cares about is Conversion and ROI. And I’m pleased to say that Sina Weibo has one of the best conversion rates even compare to Facebook.

How to advertise on Weibo?

Advertising on Sina Weibo is very interesting. There are actually 2 different types of advertising platform. Fensitong(粉丝通) and Sina Fuyi(新浪扶翼)

Since, Fensitong(粉丝通) is the more popular one of the two and the one most people use to advertise on Weibo. We’re not going to cover Sina Fuyi, as it is no

Targeting

Fensitong supports audience targeting base on demographic info, geographic, info, interest targeting (kind of like Facebook fan page targeting), fan page targeting, devices, and time frame.

Just like Faceeokb, Fensitong allows advertisers to combine two or more targetings to help narrow down your targeting for better accuracy and results.

Targeting fans of certain accounts (relationship targeting) are one of the unique features of Sina Weibo. Figuring out which account drives better engagement rate by testing one by one with a control group is one of the most important manners to optimize a  fensitong campaign.

Types of Promotions or Campaign

The format of Fensitong is similar to Facebook ads. There are usually 3 types of promotion: post promotion, App promotion, and account promotion.

Post promotion emphasizes heavily on creatives, and it suits for all businesses. Interaction rate is usually between 0.7%-2.5%, depends on the experience of advertiser and targeting.

App promotion is only available for application downloads (both Apple and Android). This is one of the most effective channels for businesses who want to boost downloads of their App.

Account promotion is a pursuit of exposure. It offers businesses the highest impressions among those ad formats, which means this is the best way to improve the brand awareness of a Weibo account;

Ad formats

Multiple images with simple text

Single image with text

Video with text

Big Strategy

Just like the most of digital medias, Sina Weibo offers CPM and CPE bidding methods. CPM focus on awareness as CPE emphasizes on conversion.

Quick Tips

  1. Like Facebook, Fensitong ads rely heavily on creatives and frequently testing various creatives will improve your performance.
  2. Customize the ads for different devices and launch them with a different time frame. Combine this with audience targeting will ultimately improve your overall accuracy and ROI
  3. As long as your creatives are not very controversial, always make sure the ads are open for discussion. Interacting with comments left from visitors is another way to engage them.

How to get started?

In order to register an ad account, Fensitong requires advertisers apply through certified agencies (Yes, many in China are like that for a reason). If you decided to market your business via this popular social media in China, do not hesitate to contact us for more info at hello@grizzlypandamarketing.com.

Do you want to sell your product or services to Chinese consumers?

At Simplify our mission is to help consumer-facing business and brand reach more Chinese consumers. My only question is, will it be yours?

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Comments (2)

Dear
Please let me know if we are the foreign company, We could approach China local customer by Account created by us in my country ?

Hey Frank, you should be ok with Weibo.

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