With more than 300 million daily active users, Weibo can be a great platform to start your social media marketing activities. To make things simple for you, we have compiled a list of Weibo marketing (adstochina.westwin.com/weibo-marketing) vital steps to initiate social media marketing.

Select a Direction

The first step is defining your business objectives. Before creating a Weibo account, you need to be clear about your target audience, business, and communication objectives. For example, your aim could be increasing your product sales by 30% in Tier 1 cities in China.

Depending on your business objectives, you need to develop a different customer engagement strategy. For example, you need a different customer engagement strategy for gaining new customers and a totally different strategy for loyal customers. This will help you develop a clear and concise Weibo marketing strategy.

Explore Your Company’s Potential

This strategy allows businesses to review the environment and audiences inside and outside your organization. You can create four groups like the target audience, the company’s employees, the company’s direct competitors, and everyone else and analyze their communication and response to your social media marketing campaign.

You can build an online polling system where customers from all groups can register their preferences.  Also, you can hold live events where customers can give their comments and talk about their preferences in real-time. Understanding customers’ preferences would help in meeting communication and marketing goals.  

Set Smart Goals

You should follow a smart goals strategy in Weibo marketing. In simple words, the goals should be specific, time-bound, relevant, and attainable. Your company should set achievable performance metrics.  Though the number of followers can be easily ascertained, you need to define active followers differently.

Activity differs with followers. Some share or comment on content thrice or more in a week while some share once in a month. It is necessary to decide performance metrics at an initial stage for easy comparison. When you set performance indicators, ranking quality should be more important than quantity.

If a Weibo account with 2 million followers gets only one or two comments on a Weibo stream, the relationship between the Weibo stream and its followers is weak. You need to focus on the accumulation of high-quality followers that would help content go viral. However, you should not expect success overnight as building trust and relationships take time.

Build Presence and Design Your Strategy

Building the right brand presence on Weibo is the key to success. You can have multiple Weibo accounts, and it is entirely on your organization how to manage them. Once you have defined communication objectives and determined performance indicators, the next step is designing your social media marketing strategy.

You can adopt a centralized or co-ordinated approach or go for spoke or multiple hub approach. No matter what approach you select, your social media marketing strategy should include the following things.

Follow – The strategy should clearly mention who the Weibo stream should follow and what type of followers it should attract. You can announce a program where brand advocates are rewarded for interactions and engaging with the company’s Weibo content

Content– A strong content strategy needs to be put in place that will ensure the right content is published through Weibo streams at the right time. While developing a Weibo content strategy, you can focus on helpful information, tips for users, and social news and events.

The 1/3 Principle – You should divide the content into three main areas- engagement, value-added, and promotional content.

Posting– Think about the best time to post content on Weibo streams. Depending on your business needs, you can develop a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly posting calendar.

Define Process for Engagement– Clearly define the process for customer engagement in Weibo marketing. The goal of this process is to decide when to respond to the user or re-tweet any content posted by the user. This will ensure your organization is in compliance with legal and marketing rules in China.

Reporting – The company should collect important data through monitoring and analyze data for recommendations and insights. It is necessary to develop a reporting system that is aligned with your performance indicators.

These are the vital steps in Weibo marketing to initiate social media marketing.