Micro-blogging Entrepreneurship: Keep account can make money third-party application development

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The business of keeping accounts

According to the reporter understand, Sina Weibo on the top 100 of the grassroots account (that is, not real name certification account), in addition to Faye Wong, such as a small number of deliberately not real-name Certification star characters, the other most are in the hands of micro-Bo marketing company.

In less than five months, the "Wine Red Ice Blue" Hand of the account number added up with 3 million fans. She said VC estimates of these accounts have reached tens of millions.

"Wine red Ice Blue" real name Xiaojunli. The housewife not only keeps a 17-year-old son, but also keeps a bunch of accounts--all kinds of micro blogs with a certain theme, such as street racket, beauty, car, constellation, emotion, English, etc.

Xiaojunli only went to high school, only a little work experience, all from the Internet--with children, she played a personal forum on the Internet, but also did Taobao guest (help Taobao sellers online marketing), son on high school boarding, she came out of the house, successively in a shoe company and stock trading software company, responsible for network sales, But it's not liking it.

September 2009, she became a "scarf control", the opening of Sina Weibo account to now, "Wine red ice blue" on average send nearly 60 micro-blog every day.

In early November last year, Xiaojunli in the support of friends, set up a company in Yangzhou, started "grassroots entrepreneurship", the direction of locking in the network marketing.

As soon as the company was established, Shaw set up the employees to "keep account". This type of account, can be understood as a small vertical field media, such as street Pat Weibo, is to constantly update foreign fashion sites on the latest and most popular celebrities and pedestrian street pat dress.

And these accounts accumulate the huge fan group, also has the extremely strong characteristic, for instance the street Pat account attracts most are the young girls who beauty.

by December or so, various types of advertisers have been through the "letters" to find these accounts. The street to take the account to attract, nature is the clothing enterprise or Taobao shop, and so on.

For Xiaojunli, just by posting a tweet with an ad link, you can earn two hundred or three hundred of the revenue. "Five ads a day, one months to thirty thousand or forty thousand revenue, the company's survival problem can be solved." ”

Also in this time, Shaw said, she has accumulated 200,000 fans of the English account, "not more than 500,000" price, sold to an education company.

The quick and effective economic feedback on Weibo has allowed Xiaojunli to decide to abandon earlier calculations such as helping traditional business agents such as online marketing, and concentrate on micro-blogging.

That is, in Xiaojunli grassroots entrepreneurship began to wind up, the original "entrepreneurial" executive editor Shenyin, the same micro-Bo marketing election for their own entrepreneurial first step.

Like Xiaojunli, Shenyin is also the first batch of Sina Weibo users. He said, "as a economic base is not strong, and do not want to accept early venture capital entrepreneurs, does not require a long investment period of microblogging marketing, is a ' rich way ' choice." ”

In his view, the network is a technical effort to achieve accurate marketing of the perfect platform, with a large number of user behavior data microblogging is more innate. Mining data, providing accurate marketing, is also the main road of foreign network marketing.

Shenyin the basis of this judgment is that since the end of last year, micro-bo in the domestic impact of the outbreak of growth, domestic enterprises are flooding into the micro-blog, to create new marketing positions.

At the end of last year, this point coincided with the transition that Li Kai, the marketing director of the network community, felt. Yes, yes. Network is one of the largest network marketing companies, plum Blossom customers are mainly some well-known brand enterprises.

Earlier in the year, they also had to be patient about what Weibo was, but this year she felt a strong sense of change: "Now all the clients are taking the initiative to Weibo, what happy Net, Renren, in their all out." ”

As for why the transition took place, she said, "the two major public events of the day--the Shanghai Jiaozhou Road Fire and the Wenzhou Qian event--are the main fermentation and propagation platforms." ”

It is under this trend that only after the spring festival one months, Xiaojunli received a large and small more than 80 customer enterprises consulting, and some directly from micro-bo, some from the traditional public relations company outsourcing, and her company has only 10 bearing limit, and this has to be quickly recruit to complete.

Xiaojunli also to the company set up two other business direction: one for the Enterprise agent official Weibo, the second is to plan and implement micro-blog marketing activities.

For advertisers, through the professional micro-Bo marketing Company's business agent, undoubtedly more efficient, because these marketing companies understand the Internet language, more easily win fans favor.

For example, the official microblog of a telecoms operator in an eastern province represented by the Xiaojunli company, affectionately referred to as "Pro" (This usage comes from Taobao Sellers ' nickname for buyers), on April Fool's Day, it also organizes "embarrassing things to send mobile phone" small activities, these and telecom operators this bloated large company usually gives the impression, In stark contrast.

And Xiaojunli usually keep those accounts, but also for the implementation of the two types of new business benefits-those who Baish fans number of accounts, each forwarding, can let these two types of marketing are widely or directional spread.

There are no authoritative statistics on how many entrepreneurs, such as Xiaojunli, are active in Weibo marketing.

According to reporters, Sina Weibo on the number of fans in the top 100 of the grassroots account (that is, not real name certification account), in addition to Faye Wong, such as a small number of deliberately not real-name Certification star characters, the majority of the other is in the hands of micro-Bo marketing company, and has been through a variety of direct and indirect marketing methods, to bring returns to the owner.

For example, Sina Weibo grassroots account number of fans ranked first "cold jokes selected" (2.8 million fans, Faye Wong ranked second), is subordinate to a Xiamen entrepreneurial team, the company has from the early roots of the grassroots owners of angel investors Cai wins, access to capital.

Developer: Standing on the shoulders of giants

There are 200,000 apps on Facebook, 150,000 on Twitter, 300,000 in Apple's App Store, 180,000 in Google's Android store, and more than 800 on Sina's platform.

The vast majority of developers of third-party apps on Weibo are still living in a chaotic period of investment, compared with marketers who are quick to make a profit.

To put it simply, Weibo third party application refers to the data interaction based on the Open interface of the microblogging system, the program developed and maintained by the third party, can be a small game, a client that logs on to Weibo, a blog or browser plugin, a reading tool, and so on. After the development of these products can also be directly on the microblogging platform to promote.

For individual developers and small start-up teams, the significance of the microblogging open platform is obvious--in the past to start a business, everything from scratch, now can stand on the platform of billions of users.

That's why, in last November, when Sina announced its open Platform Developer conference, Cai to developers that "this is our best chance."

To the domestic largest microblogging Third-party application products platform For example, Sina, from the end of last year's open platform to now, has been on the line of various Third-party application products more than 800.

The Xu Shiyan and his Weico team are one of the leading people who stumbled on the trip.

Weico is the iphone last browsing Sina Weibo client program, and the concise Sina official client is different, Weico can switch a variety of dazzling themes, but also support users to deal with the photos of old photos, stamps, artboards and other new effects upload.

Prior to the release of Weico, Xu Shiyan and his friends started a well-known UI (user experience design) company, which also served as the UI for a variety of products in Sina, including microblogging clients.

It was during the development of the microblogging client that some of their interesting design ideas could not be implemented on the official client. So they poured these ideas into a more personalized product, and Weico was born.

To the surprise of Xu Shiyan himself, the "amateurs" iphone Sina Weibo client was a red shot. "IPhone4 is still out of stock" in the case, now has accumulated 400,000 download users. In the iphone App Store, Weico has been in the forefront of downloading social apps, sometimes even ahead of the official client rankings.

In addition to Weico products such as micro-blogging, there are other relatively independent internet products, also through the micro-blogging platform, greatly broaden the audience.

At present already quite famous "sign in" website Street for example, according to its founder Ying introduced, the street has about 40% users bound Sina Weibo account number, nearly 30% of the traffic from Sina Weibo.

In turn, Weibo has become an important platform for measuring the activity of these third-party applications. Xu Shiyan and Ying, will be very concerned about the company's product features, each day by users to share the number of Weibo, compared with similar products, because this is its peers compared with the best channel of user activity.

However, even from the open platform of Sina last November, this area of life is only five months, in the Sina Weibo application channel more than 800 products, a large part of the interests of individual developers, many are only limited business value gadgets, games.

And Weico, the street and some have made some well-known developers, almost ready-made operating experience, relatively mature entrepreneurial team, just a quick ride on the Micro Bo open platform early bus.

If you compare foreign data, you can see that the development of this area is just beginning: Facebook has 200,000 apps, Twitter has 150,000 apps, Apple App Store has 300,000 apps, and Google's Android store has 180,000 apps.

Although Facebook, Apple and Google's Third-party developers have a lot of success stories, but this is not significant on Twitter, so many of the domestic entrepreneurial teams are still waiting to see.

But various venture capitalists are already betting on the treasure.

Last November Sina announced the United Sequoia Capital, IDG Capital, Innovation Workshop, Yunfeng Fund, DFJ Five top investment institutions, launched the Chinese Developer Innovation Fund, a period of 200 million yuan.

Angel investor Cai and so on, also in close contact with various kinds of developers. And the star product such as Weico, is the wind throws a flood.

Weibo sideline: Zombie economy

"A penny for one, 100 million to sell, live powder," a zombie seller so told the southern weekend correspondent.

In the microblogging community, not only is this the way to make money, zombie-selling zombies are becoming a micro-blogging sideline.

Zombie fans, is a manually manipulated way to register and update the microblog account.

"A penny for one, 100 million to sell, live powder." "A zombie seller told the Southern Weekend reporter so. These zombie fans "have Avatar, have posts, have their own fans," and will update once a week.

If the request is more active, the price is also more expensive, a piece of money five fans of the kind, or even do not regularly manually update more than 10 Weibo.

The seller is the beginning of this year began to do this business, his "studio", through a number of technical staff to write the program to register the number of accounts, and then through the program batch to these account posts and add fans, if you add money, you can also use these account manual comments and paste. This studio, a total of 9 people, make money everyone points, each month's income is about five thousand or six thousand yuan.

He told reporters, "Tencent fans want QQ number, very troublesome, now I only do sina."

A direct reason for the birth of zombie fans is that the more account fans, the higher the price of advertising. According to the current market, 300,000 fan account forwarding is five hundred or six hundred yuan, and 600,000 fan accounts, the price can be as high as 2000 yuan.

Reporter statistics of a number of sellers information, received feedback is that microblogging marketing companies, star brokerage companies and some enterprises are their main customer groups. Many of these sellers and buyers are through the past active in the Forum of the Navy manufacturers and users.

In fact, zombies are also related to the microblogging platform.

The first zombie, in fact, is due to the needs of the microblogging platform.

An internet industry veteran told Southern Weekend reporters when a large microblogging platform began to do microblogging, 3 companies dedicated to fans, wholesale sales of the microblogging platform, and finally injected into the account of celebrity Weibo, so that celebrities feel fans grow, increase their activity on the microblog. The company's microblog business grew, with more than 10 technology companies now giving it zombie fans.

To avoid being found to be a fan of zombies who don't say a word for half a year, the company will take the initiative to kill a bunch of zombie fans every once in a while, and then inject a new bunch of zombie fans into the loop.

Subsequently, the sale of zombie fans in the market has spawned a malformed "business".

Later, some of the platform's settings, more or less intentionally, gave the zombie producers fertile soil: the current approach to measuring the value and effectiveness of microblogging marketing is usually three items: the number of fans, the number of tweets and comments, which leads to the generation of zombies that are constantly mutating in these three directions (via manual or program-driven zombie forwarding and commenting).

The zombie business, which is increasingly booming for a variety of needs, is a worry for many. In fact, several portals are aware of the harmful effects of zombie fans on microblogs. Sina and Sohu both told Southern Weekend correspondents that their biggest rivals are the Navy and zombie accounts.