Sina Weibo is closer to Facebook

[Core Tip] Sina Weibo in its Page products on the continuous force to make its product positioning gradually to media trends, and increasingly to the direction of social networks. Will Sina Weibo become China's Facebook?

If the microblogging compared to television, it now has only two units: a news station, a crosstalk platform. But if a television station only these two programs, then can not be long to do, there should be more food programs, music programs to join.

Lin Shuiyang, deputy general manager of Sina Weibo division, has made such a fairly precise analogy to Weibo, and has also shown the direction of Sina Weibo's efforts in the future of its products.

On the May 7 of this year's gmic conference, Sina Weibo officially released Page this product. Before Page appearance, each "person" on Sina Weibo is the information node, all information exchange activity is revolve around person. Page's launch changed the information dissemination mechanism that Sina Weibo has been continuing since its birth. According to Sina Weibo product manager bin, Page is a new way of aggregating information, and it can find more valuable information. Page is no longer a "person" from the point of view to convey information, but will be aggregated to a location, film, music and other "things" above. When the user sees the page, he sees information about everyone who is interested in it. Page put the original focus of the microblog on the properties of the object, and based on the information aggregation is the microblogging in the future really want to do things.

Lack of "users" Sina Weibo

According to the user activity data of the Market Research Institute Global WEB Index at the beginning of this year, the user activity of Sina Weibo declined by nearly 40% in the two quarter to four in 2012, and the number of users ' daily postings fell sharply compared with the previous peak period, and the overall flow of Sina Weibo was also declining. In fact, this situation is not difficult to understand, Sina Weibo since the launch of the celebrity strategy has been implemented, which helped Sina Weibo in the early accumulation of users and other similar products in the competition to gain advantage. But this strategy has made Sina Weibo a follower rather than a participant from the outset. Plus a lot of marketing accounts anonymously use other people to create high-quality content for their own profits, so that the original with a certain degree of participation and creativity of the "middle class" also gradually withdrew.

As the beginning of the article says, the demand for user-generated micro-blogging is compressed into news and jokes, but the two programs neither allow the user to participate in it, nor can it bring real business change to Sina Weibo. On the other hand, the high focus on political affairs also makes Sina Weibo run a high policy risk, and has to invest a lot of human resources for content review.

The commercialization attempt of Sina Weibo

Sina Weibo's huge volume of users and its highly asymmetric profitability has been a cause of criticism. Last April, Sina Weibo published a "2012 Q2 Sina Weibo quote" to show Sina Weibo began to start full commercial operation. But this is more like the traditional gateway to the Sina network directly selling the layout of the way, and Sina Weibo "socialization" identity is not so consistent. Two months later, Sina Weibo has launched its membership service, but the privileged points that members enjoy are not so good.

This year, Sina Weibo has launched the enterprise-oriented advertising tools, "Fan Tong", as well as the electric business shopping tool "Sina window", both in the user's information flow forced to insert ads, triggering a curse sound. But with the improvements in the algorithm behind Sina Weibo, I think the disruption of information flow advertising should be reduced gradually. According to the experience of Facebook Exchange, users have no particular aversion to interested ads.

From social media to social networking

At the end of April, Sina CEO Charles Chao announced that Sina and Ali were about to reach a strategic partnership: "Weibo is now a social media platform, and the future can also become a social business platform, that is a real biosphere." "As of now, the page of the key node, such as personal homepage, musician, writer, enterprise, media, LBS, book, Application and music, has been online, and it has been unified in the form and experience of the product." Page as the core carrier of the social business practice of Sina Weibo is proceeding methodically. However, Sina Weibo, which has been wavering between social media and social networks, seems to be showing its whereabouts, but not the former:

From the previous corporate, media microblog, and now page to the celebrity home page with more content types, Sina Weibo page is more and more like Facebook page and Renren's public homepage. Bin also revealed that they are indeed thinking about the future by introducing more third-party tools to help celebrities and artists tailor their more personalized home pages, such as holding fan events and selling tickets to concerts. This kind of operation has been a relatively successful practice in micro-topic.

Previously, the value of micro-bo mainly reflected in the information flow inside the dissemination of the message, and through the Page will be scattered personal information structured comb, can be based on each interest or object of information aggregation. For example, it is difficult to see what happened to a person yesterday in the information flow, but it can be found on the node of interest and object, which is tantamount to digging up the sunk information in another way. On this basis to attract users to access these nodes, and micro-blog through these nodes of the merchant claim and with blue V cooperation and other means to achieve commercialization.

Sina Weibo is trying to break the current status of the big V's monopoly of discourse, hope that more grassroots users to participate in the content production, there are two main aspects of the significance: one is to promote the diversity of micro-blogging, everyone in the information flow can see what their friends are doing recently, watching what movies, listening to what music, Rather than now full screen of Orange V, blue V and marketing numbers constantly send sensational news and jokes; On the other hand, only the user publishes enough content to interact with other users, micro-Bocai can get his point of interest, so as to accurately push ads to achieve their own commercial purposes.

Social business on the road

Although Sina Weibo is unwilling to easily replace the name of the media it has painstakingly built, but the introduction and evolution of Page has proved that Weibo is trying to get closer to the social network, to take more of the daily life and consumption scenes, and on this basis to carry out social business attempts such as data mining, interest recommendation and so on. This is also the traditional advertising, third-party developers are divided into more valuable and development potential of the business model. The key issue currently facing Sina Weibo is how to build the data infrastructure in a fragmented torrent of information, creating a variety of attractive and mature scenarios for users. It can be said that Page's success or failure directly related to Sina Weibo in the next few years to enter a benign growth of the commercial track.