The most frequently asked questions I’ve come across on Weibo marketing:
- There’s very little reaction to my posts. What should I do to improve communication with my followers?
- What can Weibo marketing do? How can it help me with my business – sales or brand?
- How many followers should I aim for to see value?
We all know followers are important. There’s no result to Weibo marketing if you don’t know how to use the followers’ value. How many followers is enough? 5k, 10k, 2k, or 200k? Some Weibo accounts with 20k followers can generate good sales everyday. So the most important thing isn’t quantity. It’s about quality. The key is to dig out your followers’ value from a company marketing’s point of view. If not then you don’t get Weibo marketing.
Digging Value from Interacting with Followers
Social media marketing is getting to know your customers through interaction, getting them to know about your brand through interaction, establishing relationship, becoming friends and generating referrals. Interaction makes people feel you are a person with a personality, not a tool for pushing information. No interaction no value.
The indicators to show your progress in this is comments, forwards, private messages and participants in promotions. There are a few simple ways to initiate interaction.
- Weibo Content. Followers forward and comment on your posts because they are valuable. Your content should either be useful or interesting.
- Comments and Forwards. You should make your business equal as any of your followers. Talk to them and develop a relationship with them. Initiate comments, forward their interesting posts and reply to what they say.
- Promotion. Sina has promotion features for companies to give out gifts, hold competitions, start a voting, etc..
Get Sales and Branding out of Followers
The purpose, or say value of Weibo marketing can be traffic, sales, branding, public relationship, client relationship and so on. But not all the companies need to do all of them. Finding out what best fit your business is very crucial to your Weibo marketing’s success. No positioning, no goals, no strategy.
There’s a lot can be done through Weibo. If you think for your business, Weibo can be really effective for sales, then you should recommend your products on Weibo and follow your customers’ behavior. If you think Weibo is good for you to do branding, then you should do your best to get people to know about your brand. If you want to manage customer relationship, then you need to listen to your customers, know what they think, improve your service or product and make them happy. Again, knowing what’s the best to do on Weibo for your business is very important.
How to Dig
How to Convert. There are some commonly used ways to help trigger sales.
- Content with product introduction and a sales link.
- Discount for Weibo VIP users through Weibo promotion platform.
- Coupons through Weibo promotion platform.
How to Brand. Survey results suggest that followers want to read more about company history, culture, stories, teams, news, products and so on. Imagine if you have 100k followers, your second level followers (your followers’ followers) would be 30m. If your posts get forwarded 60 times each, you do the math. This is the exposure you would want to pay some decent money to get.
How to Manage Customer Relationship. Interaction, interaction, interaction!