Weibo Marketing and WeChat Marketing are Adding Value for Brands

Sina Weibo is one of the most popular social media channels in China, with more than 130,000 brands active (at the end of Feburary, 2012) such as Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Durex and LVMH. These companies are motivated to adopt Weibo marketing presence given it reportedly has over 500 million users. With such significant numbers of Chinese users, this platform becomes the ultimate medium for introducing new products to their followers and additionally offering followers VIP programs, incentives and discounts.

Another important channel for online marketing using social media platform is Wechat marketing, Weibo is a platform best for mass broadcasting content and frequent updates, whereas WeChat is the opposite. WeChat is a gateway to bridge your customers between the offline and online world (marketers refer to this as O2O). Whether it is for long-term strategy or short-term tactics, it's a must to plan ahead and distinguish the roles between Weibo and WeChat to avoid duplicating marketing plans and to get the best benefit from these channels.

Evidently, Social media marketing becomes increasingly critical in China marketing plan for brands, mainly because the huge amount of social media users are leveraging social media status in Chinese all media domain. Unlike traditional Chinese media marketing channel of TV, radio and print, social media can help brand virally spread reputation with targeted marketing merits based on big data of users.

The need for agencies to help brands connect is more urgent with an online consumer community landscape that is more active, more complex and overall more evolved than the West. The state of China's online marketing landscape is indeed so. For the country, the internet has always been social, and internet communities have always existed in the mainstream. In short, in China, the 'future' is happening now.