I hope it doesn’t sound too crazy, but Weibo isn’t just for marketing – it can be used for sales, too. And I’m not talking about posting a sales link for e-commerce.
It’s about finding contacts. Why on Weibo? Because it’s so popular and practically used in the business world. Where there are people, there is business.
There are 3 basic ways to find people on Weibo:
- Tags. Weibo users describe themselves with tags. Search with the keywords that you think would describe these people or businesses you want to find. Try as many relevant keywords as possible and different combinations.
- Topics. The topics being discussed on Weibo are shown by #topic#. Search for these relevant topics to your business and see who are talking about them. For example, if you are a sports brand, search for #NBA#, #football#, #Olympic Games#, etc..
- Weibo Groups. Weibo users also create and join groups for a certain type of interest or topic. If you find the right groups, you find the right people.
Of course, there are things you can do to filter and select the best quality contacts for your business after you find tons of people by searching.
First of all, take a glance at a person/company’s Weibo homepage, read into his/her/the company’s profile and a few posts to understand what he/she/the company does. Follow their business links. Some people even put their business titles in the profile. Pick and choose what you want.
Secondly, active accounts are always better than inactive ones. You can tell by how often this person/company posts and if he/she/the company responds to other people’s comments.
Lastly, you want to keep the verified accounts. Because verified accounts are real and usually more active. Weibo users need to fill in a form about themselves or their business when they apply for the verification. So no doubt you would be able to find more information for verified accounts, such as a person’s job and title.
After all this work, you are good to reach out to these potential customers or cooperative contacts, either on Weibo or not – some people leave their email or phone number in the profile.
I understand you may question this approach: isn’t Weibo for business a new generation of marketing, a good representative of inbound marketing? Well, yes. But especially for overseas businesses that are looking to get into Chinese market for the first time, finding the important contacts to see if it’s even possible to explore this market is crucial to them at this very early stage. And Weibo is a great place to start because everyone is using it. After the business is established and when you feel more ready, more investment can be put into Weibo marketing. And that’s when you start building up followers.