Sina Weibo zombie accounts account for a small number of active users

According to foreign media reports, a study conducted by University of Hong Kong researchers showed that Sina Weibo registered users "puffiness", more than half of the users have never posted posts.      Research shows that 57% of Sina Weibo user accounts have no posts in the timeline, indicating that accounts are inactive accounts or so-called zombie accounts created by marketing companies. By studying the accounts in some 12,000 timeline posts, the researchers found that 86.9% of users in 7 days did not post original posts and 88.9% did not respond to other users ' posts.     Posting more than 20 users accounted for 0.5%, and another 0.5% users posted more than 40. Researchers at the University of Hong Kong, who conducted the study, said the study was conducted for 2012 years.     The measures that Sina has taken since then, such as the real-name registration and enhanced regulation, may change the behavior of the user to some extent.     Sina said at the end of last year's earnings analyst conference call, the microblogging day active users of 46.2 million, which means that a large number of active users did not publish or forward messages, just "diving." Sina Weibo's situation is similar to Twitter's, where the number of active users is much lower than that of registered users. Semiocast, a market-research firm, estimated last summer that Twitter registered about 500 million subscribers, including 170 million active users.     Twitter, a 2011 blog post, said 40% of active users were diving.     According to research, fewer than 5% of users of non-zombie Weibo users posted posts with user replies or were forwarded, suggesting that a handful of influential users are driving the popularity of Weibo. More than One-fourth of the 12,000 Weibo users are from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangdong, which account for only 9% of the total number of Chinese Internet users.     The study also found that Sina Weibo is more popular in the Eastern rich regions. While the research conducted by the University of Hong Kong does not weaken the value of Sina's microblogging service, it shows that the views, desires and interests expressed on Sina Weibo are not representative of most Chinese netizens. Sun)