Ratio of Visits: Sina Weibo v.s. Twitter

Sina Weibo accounted for 1 in every 158 Internet visits in China last April. And, it’s growing very fast as shown above according to Hitwise data. This means that Sina Weibo accounted for about 1 in every 100 Internet visits in China, a platform marketers shouldn’t ignore in the overall digital marketing strategies.

Also check out top 10 retweeted users on Sina Weibo and Twitter, a study by HP.

Also read:: Sina Weibo Much More Dominant in China Internet Than Twitter in US

Weibo Private Posting

Sina Weibo has just launched a new feature to allow users to publish private posts. As shown in the above screen capture, users can either publish publicly or privately with a simple selection.

Users don’t have much control on this “privacy setting” as they either allow everything to see their posts or make it private and only owners or the posts can see.

Also read:: Sina Weibo Launched Analytics Tool

Beijing Municipal government announced Regulations of Microblog Development today. Micrblogging websites in Beijing city administrative area and their users should comply with the regulations.

The regulation requires microblog users to register their identities with authorities and forbids creating fake Weibo accounts.

Also read:: Sina Weibo Much More Dominant in China Internet Than Twitter in US

Time Spent in Different Media in China by Tiers

Starcom MediaVest Group’s recently conducted a study of users ages 13 to 45 in China and found that internet users aged 19 to 30 spent almost twice as much time online as watching TV.

Time Spent on TV and Video in China by Tiers

Watching videos on computers is the most popular, which accounted for the most time spent by Chinese users except for those in Tier 1 cities (Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou) where mobile devices are the most popular platform for video watching.

Clearly from this Starcom study, China internet users spend more time watching video on their mobile devices and computers than on TV. And, as advertising in TV dramas is banned in China, online video advertising and marketing presents a big opportunity.

Also read:: China to Have over 700 Million Online Video Users by 2015

Alibaba Testing Laiwang

A screenshot was leaked yesterday about a new social network, Laiwang.com that Alibaba is building and testing internally:

Laiwang.com

Referring to the leaked screen capture of Laiwang.com, it looks like Google+. It has also developed an Android app and iPhone App will come soon.

Also read:: TradeKey.com Another Alibaba in B2B Online Media?

Sina announced a milestone of 2 million users in Hong Kong at its official Weibo account this morning. And, Sina released an app for its users in Hong Kong using Facebook Connect to to share their presence at Sina Weibo with up to 15 Facebook friends per day.

Sina Weibo has made a custom design for Hong Kong users as well; if you visit hk.weibo.com, you will find a different homepage tailored for Hong Kong users’ taste.

Also read:: Active Facebook Users in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong

Demographic Profiles of China's Top SNS

Also read:: Chinese Social Networking Sites Dominated by Local Players

Image via Wikipedia.

Renren last week announced its unaudited Q3 financial results, who also made their first post-IPO strategic acquisition, 56.com in Q3, a leading Chinese user-generated-content focused video sharing site

Renren’s mobile penetration has reached over 35% of unique monthly log-in users with over half of their mobile users accessing their Renren accounts through smartphones. In addition, Renren’s LBS commercial platform is now running 30,000 promotions and deals from thousands of merchants.

The number of Renren’s activated users increased from about 103 million a year ago to about 137 million as of September 30, 2011. Monthly unique log-in users increased from approximately 24 million to 38 million.

Also read:: Renren Q2 Ad Revenue Up 93.8% with Over 124 Million Users

Sina and Tencent last week released in the Q3 financial results their latest number of microblogging (Weibo) users. We created a chart for a quick comparison of this two most popular Weibo platforms in China in the last three quarters.

Total No. of Weibo Users: Sina v.s. Tencent

Tencent Weibo is growing faster than Sina Weibo; the number of daily active users on Tencent Weibo has exceeded 50 million, which is twice of Sina Weibo.

Also read:: Sina Reports 200 Million Weibo Users

Sina Weibo has announced a total of 250 million users and 86 million daily posts being published. Yes; Weibo is no doubt very popular; information on Weibo and monitoring of the content published are helpful to companies to get insights into this market.

Let me share a few ways to search for content on Weibo platforms in real time.

Search and Monitor on Weibo

Sina Weibo Search SERP

On Weibo platforms like Sina Weibo, you can conduct a search on any page or go to a search page such as s.weibo.com. You can bookmark the search result page or “follow” the topic you searched for to create shortcuts. It’s nice and easy; but, you have to do it on all Weibo platforms.

Search Weibo with Panguso

Launched this February, Panguso is joint efforts by China Mobile and Xinhua News Agency.

Real-time Search with Tencent SoSo

Similar to Panguso real-time search, the results on SoSo search are also auto refreshed and include also microblog content.

Real-time Search with Youdao

Youdao is NetEase’s effort in Chinese search market. It’s the first search engine that launched real-time search feature and also my favorite real-time search engine.

Weibo Search on China Search

Zhongsou Weibo Search SERP

China Search, or Zhongsou, just launched Weibo search in November this year.

I like Youdao for real-time search because Youdao’s real-time search indexes not only microblogs but also forums and news. It’s a great tool, simple and free, for marketers to monitor the online conversation.

Also read:: Total Weibo Users: Sina v.s. Tencent

Select Digital Media Penetration by Age & City Tier, Q2 2011

According to Synovate’s study, almost half of Internet users between age 15 and 24 in China’s Tier 1 cities (45%) use Weibo and close to one third of China internet users in Tier 1 cities between age 25 and 44 (29%) use Weibo. The adoption of Weibo is more popular than mobile Internet (access via smartphone and tablets) and mobile apps.

Also read:: China Provinces by Tiers according to Internet Penetration Rate

Yang Lan, a journalist and entrepreneur who’s been called “the Oprah of China,” offers insight into the next generation of young Chinese citizens — urban, connected (via microblogs) and alert to injustice.

Also read:: Video – Kaiser Guo Brings you Closer to Chinese Netizens

Baidu's URL Shortening Service

Baidu is launching a URL shortening service dwz.cn. Users can type in a URL to have a shortened URL at dwz.cn or a custom shortened URL can be specified.

Users can retrieve the original URL with shortened URL; and, DWZ.cn provides API for URL shortening service.

This service is not accessible at the moment.

Shortened URLs in Weibo

Sina Weibo uses shortened “t.cn” URLs to replace all URLs on Weibo (except URLs starting with “http://weibo.com…”; Tencent Weibo uses “url.cn”, Sohu Weibo uses t.itc.cn, and Netease uses 163.fm.

Also read:: Baidu Shutting Down Its Weibo Service

Renren, China’s number one social networking website, reported total net revenues of US$30.4 million in the second quarter, a 53.2% increase from the corresponding period in 2010.

Renren’s online advertising revenues were US$16.9 million, representing an increase of 93.8% from the corresponding period in 2010.

The significant increase was attributable to the growth of Renren’s SNS platform and user base, as well as the increased adoption of SNS among advertisers in China as an effective advertising channel.

The number of Renren’s activated users increased from approximately 96.8 million as of June 30, 2010 to approximately 124.2 million as of June 30, 2011. Monthly unique log-in users increased from approximately 25.0 million in June 2010 to approximately 34.4 million in June 2011.

Also read:: Renren Q1 Revenue Up 46.6%

Sina Weibo

Sina announced its unaudited financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2011 on June 17, 2011.

Q2 net revenues grew 20% year over year to $119.0 million. Non-GAAP net revenues grew 21% year over year to $114.3 million. Its advertising revenues grew 26% year over year to a record $91.8 million. But, there was an increase in operating expenses was primarily due to increased marketing expenditures and personnel-related expenses related to Weibo.com.

“SINA’s brand advertising business was robust in the second quarter, despite growing on top of a large base, in part benefiting from the elevation of SINA’s media brand as the popularity of Weibo.com spread in China,” said Charles Chao, CEO of SINA, “Launched less than two years ago, Weibo.com has become an online phenomenon with registered accounts recently surpassing 200 million.”

Tencent also revealed last week their total Weibo users exceeded 233 million.

Also read:: Total Weibo Users: Sina v.s. Tencent

The top three most popular social bookmarking services are Jiathis, bShare and Passit. Let’s take a look at each of them in more details.

JiaThis

JiaThis.com Logo

JiaThis claims they’re the largest social bookmarking service provider in China (which I believe is true) and their social booking tools are implemented by over 310K websites including large sites like Sohu, China Yahoo, MSN China, Netease, ifeng.com, Baidu and Taobao.

JiaThis is easy to use and offers five types of button styles:

JiaThis Button Styles

Similar to AddThis (in fact Jia means “add” in Chinese), JiaThis comes with analytics data after registration to show usage of this tool and it also provides browser and CMS plugins.

bShare.cn

bShare is the second most popular bookmarking platform in China. Unlike AddThis whose offering is simple and easy, bShare adopts a much more complicated strategy.

bShare offers four types of services:

• Generic social bookmarking button, which is similar to what AddThis offers
• Photo sharing
• bShare Pro, which is more advanced tool at a monthly cost of over $7; it allows more customization and more in-depth data
• bShare Enterprise, even more advanced product for big enterprises and agencies

bShare offers almost everything AddThis does plus a lot more powerful features. For example, bShare provides a tool which can be used to share posts to 19 platforms easily. However, some webmasters report that bShare loads slower than JiaThis.

bShare provides more style options than AddThis:

bShare Floating Buttons

Both AddThis and bShare provide API and share social bookmarking data.

Passit.cn

To me, Passit does not stand out at all from features or button style perspective. You can also check out Baidu’s social bookmarking tool launched this June.

So far, I would recommend bShare and AddThis. Try them both and select one you love.

Also read:: Top Social Bookmarking Websites in July 2011

Tencent’s social media assets achieved a solid growth in the second quarter of 2011 according to its Q2 finance report.

At the end of the second quarter of 2011, active user accounts of Tencent IM platform amounted to 701.9 million, representing a quarter-on-quarter increase of 4.1%.

For Qzone, active user accounts increased by 5.1% on a quarter-on-quarter basis to 530.7 million, on the back of organic growth and improved functionalities.

For Pengyou, active user accounts amounted to 129.3 million at the end of the second quarter of 2011, representing a sequential growth of 27.5%.

Registered Tencent Weibo user accounts increased by 59.4% quarter-on-quarter to 233.0 million at the end of the second quarter of 2011, with improvements in user activeness and interaction.

Also read:: Sina Reports 200 Million Weibo Users

Top 10 Online Video Websites in China (Q2 2011)

According to iResearch, the top 10 online video websites in the second quarter by total daily reach:

1. Youku.com
2. Tudou.com
3. Xunlei.com
4. Qiyi.com (Baidu)
5. Ku6.com
6. 56.com
7. cntv.cn
8. pps.tv
9. pptv.com
10. joy.cn

Subscribe here to get China Internet Stats & Insights whtiepaper.

Also read:: Baidu Raises $60m to Expand into Online Video

There are rumors that Baidu is to acquire Tudou.com. According to a Securities Times reporter‘s source who’s close to Baidu senior management, Baidu has approached Tudou.com with two acquisition proposals.

One option is direct acquisition of Tudou.com by Baidu and Tudou will remain independent operation and focus on UGC and original production.  The other option is that Baidu increases its investment in Qiyi and Qiyi acquires and integrates Tudou.com.

According to iResearch’s data, by effective browsing time in the second quarter this year, YouKu, Tudou and Qiyi have market share of 39.3%, 20% and 17.2% respectively.

Also read:: Baidu to Launch Video Portal QiYi.com in March

Baidu Shutting Down Weibo-like Service Talk Bar

Baidu yesterday announced it’s shutting down its “Weibo” service, t.baidu.com, by 22 August.

Baidu’s Weibo service “Shuo Ba” (or “Talk Bar” in English) started in September last year with a real-name system requiring all registration to be verified via a mobile phone and photos.

Having gained no popularity with its real-name system, Baidu made it optional this mid-May with more Weibo look. In the same month, Shuo Ba paused registration, verification and real-time trends.

Baidu has shut down the post publishing today and will completely close this service on August 22.

verified i Post Bar account

Baidu’s attempt competing in microblogging market started in 2009 with an update to its popular Post Bar service. Some Weibo features were added with a new service called “i Post Bar”, which was a bit confusing to users.

With the launch of “Talk Bar”, Baidu has made it more confusing (more to itself) as “Talk Bar” and “i Post Bar” share duplicate features.

Shutting down of “Talk Bar” is absolutely not the end for Baidu’s attempt into microblogs. “i Post Bar” does have a good prospect to compete with other Weibo service with a right strategy and twist.

Also read:: Baidu Weibo Launched in Beta