Weibo & Twitter III

This time I want to talk about the activities Weibo conducts to inspire their users to use it more often. From my point of view, Weibo does quite a good job in its diffusion to Chinese netizens as well as famous foreigners who want to keep and improve their Chinese marketings. Meanwhile, Weibo invents several smart little things which are different from its origin—Twitter to keep its users’ passions on tweeting and encourage its customers to get involved into activities conducted by official Weibo.

The first smart invention I want to mention is Weibo badge. Weibo badge is a kind of award Weibo system giving to the accounts which meet different requirements set by the official system. Some of the requirements are about the number or content of your tweets. For example, you can get a certain badge if you tweet original tweets continually in seven days (Figure 1). And some of the requirements are more like a kind of advertisements for certain brands, companies and organizations. For example, you can get a corresponding badge if you link your Weibo account to your MSN account (Figure 2). There are also some badges for Weibo official activies. For example, you can get a certain badge if you share music in the Weibo Music Box (Figure 3). Till now, there has been 49 Weibo badges for users to collect (Figure 4).

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

You may have noticed this: for every Weibo badge, there are several attributes, like “remaining days for collecting this badge”, “the number of this badge issued”, “to which group this badge issued”, “the rarity level of this badge”, “valid date” and so on. It makes using Weibo like playing games. And you need to finish various game tasks.

There is no doubt that this is really a good way to inspire users to tweet more often and spend more time on Weibo since quite many people have the habit to gather badges. It may sound stupid that trying so hard to increase your number of tweets or retweets or comments just because you want to get a virtual award, but such many users like it and spend time on it. Figure 5 is a Weibo account which has collected such many badges.

Figure 5