Number of Businesses Leveraging Weibo Enterprise Accounts Grows by 35%

In China, the use of Weibo, a social media platform, is expanding. Not only are more users getting involved, more than 1.3 million enterprise accounts are on the channel, according to a new whitepaper published by Weibo Business Social Media School and Weibo Data Center (Note: Linked study is in Mandarin.).

Weibo, a micro-blogging platform often compared to Twitter, has more than 297 million users; 132 million of which are daily active users.

Businesses are seeing the value of Weibo, as evidenced by a 35 percent growth in the number of Weibo Enterprise Accounts between 2015 and 2016. The number of enterprise accounts now totals more than 1.3 million businesses.

The industries with the largest number of enterprise accounts fall into these three categories: IT/internet, clothing/outdoor gear, and industrial/agricultural/trade.

Enterprise accounts (in totality) have an audience (followers) of more than 590 million. The industries with the fastest growth in followers are IT, fashion/cosmetics, and life services (i.e. utilities, markets, etc.), the data shows.

Additionally, the report offered demographic data on the Weibo Enterprise Account audience. The majority (63.4 percent) of enterprise account followers are male and most are Millennials; only 22.8 percent of followers are over the age of 31. 

According to the report, Weibo is becoming more prevalent in third and fourth tier cities, in addition to its already strong user base in the more developed first and second tier cities.

The report also highlighted both the number of posts being pushed out by Weibo Enterprise Accounts – 114 million in 2016 – and noted that these posts were read more than 672 billion times. The posts from 66 enterprise accounts garnered more than 1 billion read posts.

31% of Weibo’s User Base are Loyal Users

A Penguin Intelligence study (published in fall 2016) gathered data on 8,373 internet users to uncover insights on Weibo user behavior.

The data shows 71.7 percent of those surveyed have used Weibo and 31.2 percent were loyal users. The study found interest in Weibo was growing: 11.6 percent were relatively new users, and about 29 percent had not continued to use Weibo on a regular basis.

In addition, the research found 41 percent of people spend the most time reading and viewing Weibo, indicating it’s a source of news and information for many users.