Launched in 2009, Sina Weibo has long been an important channel for student recruitment in China. Historically one of the most welcoming Chinese sites for international organizations, the platform quickly established itself as the ideal starting point for schools looking to connect with prospective students online.
While the increasing popularity of WeChat has caused Weibo’s influence to wane in recent years, it remains a valuable tool for schools. The site has almost 300 million monthly active users. It offers several unique options for schools looking to raise awareness of their brands, build targeted ad campaigns, and increase engagement with potential leads.
Read on to discover why Weibo could be more important than ever to your Chinese student recruitment efforts.
The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Weibo: An Overview for Recruitment Pros
Often called the ‘Twitter of China,’ Sina Weibo emerged almost immediately after internationally popular sites like Facebook and Twitter exited the Chinese market for regulatory reasons. While Weibo cooperated with the Chinese government to comply with its strict censorship laws, it quickly became a popular public forum.
By 2013, the site has amassed an estimated 600 million users. Not only that, but many Western companies, celebrities, and universities established a presence on the site, encouraged by its brand-friendly philosophy and the fact that an official account could be set up without a Chinese business license, which was often demanded on other sites.
However, WeChat’s entry into the market caused a massive shift in the Chinese social media landscape. The newcomer’s more wide-ranging functionality attracted millions of users from Weibo and other historically popular sites like RenRen. By 2016, Weibo’s user base had dwindled to just 176 million.
However, while the likes of RenRen faded into the background, Weibo adapted to remain relevant. The site carved out a niche as the go-to social network for breaking news and entertainment stories, added new features, and monetized more effectively by offering excellent brand value. Within a year, it had regained over 100 million users.
Ironically, for a site once dismissed as a Twitter clone, Weibo is now worth more than its Western counterpart and has arguably responded much more proactively than Twitter to the similar problems it has faced.
What Opportunities Does Weibo Offer for Student Recruitment in China?
While Weibo has a much smaller audience than WeChat, it offers strategic advantages over its competitors. For instance, a 2016 report released by Tencent’s Penguin Intelligence revealed that people who were active on both sites spent more of their social media time browsing on Weibo than anything else:
This suggests that, although WeChat has evolved from a messaging app into a more comprehensive social network, the Weibo platform still offers a preferable interface for users searching for and discovering new things; hence, student recruitment using Sina Weibo is a good idea.
Weibo’s user demographics are also favourable for schools. Weibo users are young, with 40% between 14 and 25 years old.
Indeed, there have been signs that teenagers are increasingly beginning to prefer Weibo. Many have adopted the site as an alternative social platform due to the increasing number of older users on WeChat, just as platforms like Snapchat and Instagram have taken younger users from Facebook.
Magnet CEO and Chinese social media expert Aw Guo noted that most teenagers’ “parents are all on WeChat (because WeChat is so popular), so they’d feel much “freer” on Weibo.” This means that Weibo could become even more important for schools, targeting the next generation of students in the coming years.
Another important advantage of promoting your school on Weibo is its historical reputation as a platform where international organizations have an established presence; therefore, using Sina Weibo to attract Chinese students is a favourable idea. Unlike WeChat, many top universities, language schools, and other institutions have been active on the site for many years, and prospective Chinese students are likely to make it one of their first ports of call when researching schools for that reason.
Unique Weibo Features that Schools Can Use to Recruit Students in China
Initially, Weibo’s format was virtually identical to Twitter’s. You could create 140-character posts, follow other users, and track trending topics using hashtags. Over time, however, the site has evolved and introduced several new features, making it a unique proposition.
First, Weibo tends to be a far more media-rich experience than Twitter. Video and photo sharing is more common, and the site also offers extra features like animated emoticons, music, and customizable page layouts that users can add to make their posts and pages more engaging.
Example: The University of New South Wales Weibo page uses animated emoticons, moving images, and embedded videos.
This contrasts its Twitter page, which, while effective, is far more formal and static. 
Weibo also removed the 140-character limit more than a year before Twitter did; long-form posts are more common and accepted on the site.
Example: The University of Michigan uses Weibo’s relaxed character limit to produce longer posts like this one.
Another feature that may be useful for schools looking to recruit students in China is the ability to create polls in your posts. While Twitter also offers polls, they are much more widely used on Weibo and tend to attract higher user engagement. Polls could be useful for schools looking to gauge prospective students’ interest in crucial motivating factors. For example, you could poll your Weibo followers to find out what areas of study they are most interested in or what is most important to them in an international study destination.
Weibo is also easier to navigate. While Twitter users have to browse ‘mentions’ to see replies to their Tweets, individual Weibo posts have tracked comments, much like Facebook or Instagram, making it easier for schools to start conversations among their online community.
Example: A comment thread on a Weibo post from the University of Liverpool. As you can see, it is structured similarly to Facebook’s comments section. This post has attracted 251 replies, which would be difficult to obtain on Twitter.
It’s also far easier for users to find trending topics on Weibo as it has a page known as the ‘Board of Fame’ listing the hottest trends. However, most of these are celebrity and entertainment-oriented and may not be useful to schools.
The site also has a feature called Micro Topics, which compiles all the posts related to a certain topic on one unique page to make it accessible to users. This can be a great way for schools to boost their visibility on the site, especially during key periods in their calendar, like the run-up to application deadlines or during graduation season.
Example: Weibo’s dedicated page for the micro topic ‘graduation season.’
Weibo also allows users to create private social groups and publish only visible posts. Schools could use this feature to send messages to small groups of prospective students, such as those attending an upcoming recruitment fair or open day, to engage them more personally.
In addition to these features, Weibo has kept an eye on the latest trends from other social networks worldwide and updated its functionality accordingly. Live streaming can be integrated into posts using the app Yizhibo. Earlier this year, the site launched Weibo Story, which functions the same way as the social media stories feature that has become popular on sites like Instagram and Snapchat.
Sina Weibo Advertising Options for Schools
Advertising on Weibo can also be a good option for student recruitment in China, allowing you to enhance your organic campaigns and build your visibility more quickly. The site offers a versatile and practical ad suite with plenty of different options to drive engagement and a variety of formats, including:
Fan Headline—This format resembles Facebook’s ‘boost post’ function. It places your post at the top of your followers’ or potential followers’ newsfeeds for 24 hours. The price of promoting your posts will depend on your number of followers.
Fan Tunnel– This is similar to Fan Headline but allows you to target a much wider range of users and can be used to promote individual posts, apps, or accounts. Fan Tunnel ads can be purchased either on a Cost-Per-Mille (CPM) or Cost-Per-Engagement (CPE) basis, meaning your school can choose the most effective option for reaching your goals.
Banner Ads—This display advertising option appears within the Weibo feed on its desktop and mobile sites. Schools that want to link to their website rather than their Weibo page may prefer this scheme.
Search Engine Promotion– Weibo also allows brands to display ads within their search feature, displaying the results similarly to paid search ads on Google. These ads can be targeted toward specific keywords. They could be a great way for schools to increase their visibility among prospective students searching for particular programs or study destinations.
Weibo offers a fairly comprehensive range of targeting options for its ads. You can build audiences based on age, gender, location, interests, device, and follower relationships. The platform also offers several options to make it easy to track the progress and results of your campaigns.
Measuring Student Recruitment Success on Weibo
The big part Weibo should play in your Chinese digital marketing depends largely on how much your target audience uses the platform. You should monitor your account and ad performance regularly. Weibo analytics used to be pretty rudimentary, but in 2015, the site launched a more comprehensive suite, Weibo Data Center, making it much easier to get a clear picture of your interactions, engagement, and ROI.
Despite some recent setbacks, the site has proved that it has real staying power in an uncertain digital market and has managed to carve out a niche that should ensure its relevance for years.
FAQ To Consider:
What is the difference between WeChat and Weibo?
While Weibo has a much smaller audience than WeChat, it offers strategic advantages over its competitors.
