Sina Weibo

Sina Weibo (新浪微博) (http://www.weibo.com/) was launched by SINA Cor-poration in 2009 and is currently one of the largest Chinese social media sites with 167 million monthly active users (September 2014) and total of well over 500 million users which is well over 30% of internet users in China (CIW Team, 2014; Yu et.al 2011). Nowadays China´s largest e-commerce company Alibaba owns 32% of Sina Weibo (Fannery, 2014). Sina Weibo is a microblogging site (weibo literally means microblog in Chinese) with similar traits to Twitter and Facebook. One could even say that Sina Weibo is a hybrid of these two popular social media sites. Users tend to refer Sina Weibo with only Weibo (microblog), which may cause some confusion, as there are also other microblogging sites (although not as popular) including Tencent Weibo, Sohu Weibo and NetEase Weibo. Sina Weibo had 56,5% of Chinas microblogging market (active users) and 86,6% (browsing time) compared to competitors like Tencent Weibo in 2011 (Resonance Team, 2011). Still there are some indications that all microblogging services have been losing interest among users lately. This has led to the users of Sina Weibo starting to become more inactive, maybe moving to some another services. This is shown as decreasing monthly active users. This might still be only passing phenomenon, but future will tell (Bei, 2014).

Sina Weibo is currently available for simplified and traditional Chinese characters. There are also versions for Hong Kong and Taiwan. The Chinese version that is currently available is restricted for Chinese users only, so one needs citizenship to use it. Users need to verify their identity with Chinese cell-phone number or with a valid Chinese citizen identification number. The main features of Sina Weibo are Twitter-like. Registered users may post messages limited to 140 characters on their profile (see example in FIGURE 4), which are then visible to all registered users, or to certain user group, if privacy settings of the post have been altered by the user. While Twitter tweets may only contain text and links, Sina Weibo allows messages to contain pictures and smileys or links to other sites or profiles (Yu et.al, 2011). Users can follow other users and their posts and get notifications when something new happens with the fol-lowed user/content. Users can mention other users similarly to twitter with

„@UserName‟, and add hashtags to their posts with „#HashName#‟. Reposting

works also similarly to twitters retweeting feature. Users can also put some us-ers or posts on their favorite list, which can be used to categorize the content the user is following.

Users own profile page (FIGURE 4) consists of information about the user and the information of the possible verification/identification (see below). This information such as the user´s name, short description about the user and re-cent activity is displayed. User profiles have Facebook-like features like the wall, where the posts of the said user are displayed in chronological order. There are also features for filtering content according to the release date. There are also statistics about the user‟s followers and who the user is following currently and how many posts the user has made so far. Under each post there are comments displayed and information about how many times the post has been liked, shared and reposted. So information displayed in the users profile page is more similar to Facebooks user profiles than Twitters. (Yu et.al, 2011)

FIGURE 4 Profile page of the user “This is Finland” (verified account of the department of communication and culture of the Finland‟s Ministry for Foreign Affairs)

Sina Weibo allows users to attach image, music or video files in every post which is somewhat similar to Facebooks status update. Users can also comment on every post made by other registered users and the comments are shown be-low the original post as list, not retweeted to folbe-lowers as in Twitter (Yu et.al, 2011). Unregistered users may only browse posts made by verified user

ac-counts (see below). Unverified acac-counts/posts and comments are not visible to visitors so to fully read all posts one must register to the service. Sina Weibo also has similar searching functions to Facebook, which helps users to find the users/information they are looking for easily. It is also available as mobile ap-plication for Android, Blackberry OS, iOS, Symbian S60, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone.

Sina Weibo has similar identification policy as Twitter to verify the ac-counts of famous users and organizations. When the account is verified, the username gets a colorful „V‟ as sign of verification. For people the „V‟ is orange and for organizations blue, as seen below in image captured from Finnair‟s Sina Weibo site (FIGURE 5). Addition to the „V‟ the account will get a graph and declaration that this account is verified one. There are different kinds of verifi-cation available for personal accounts, college/university accounts, organiza-tions and official accounts (e.g. governmental departments). Sina Weibo is the most used social media channel for Chinese celebrities and famous persons in China. The most famous verified ones have hundreds of millions of followers.

Also organizations use Sina Weibo for advertising and for customer service purposes.

FIGURE 5 Screenshot from Finnair‟s Sina Weibo page demonstrating the blue verification symbol 'V'

Sina Weibo has grown its user base exponentially, but is starting to slow.

Reason for that is that Sina Weibo is currently only available for Chinese users, there is still potential to grow within China, but one reason for slowing of the growth are the same firewalls that keep Facebook and Twitter out of Chinas internet, keep Sina Weibo and similar Chinese services in. Founders of Face-book and Sina Weibo, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Chao, met briefly last year and were talking about the possibilities to enter new markets; Facebook back to China and Sina Weibo to the rest of the global internet. But at the current time being Mr. Chao stated that Sina Weibo´s focus is still in Chinas internet. (Ep-stein, 2011; Bei, 2014)