The Use of Sina Weibo in the Travel Industry
Sina Weibo launched a campaign called “Travel with Weibo” recently and had 100 million participants in three weeks. The campaign partners/sponsors include Chinese tourism board in different cities, airlines,hotels ,travel agencies etc and became viral in no time. In this campaign Weibo users are encouraged to share photos of their journeys to enter a prize draw to win international/domestic travel tickets, hotels, tourist attraction entry ticket etc.
90% of the tourism boards from different countries in the world have set up Sina Weibo accounts (by their embassies in China) to promote their countrie’s travel industry in China. According to Sina official Statics, VisitBritain’s Weibo account is the second most influential oversea tourism account just after that of Singapore one of whoes official languages is Mandarin. However, Britain is the most talked about–68.2 million people – oversea tourist destination for the Chinese Weibo users in 2012 followed closely by America according to the statistics in 2012.
So how can the companies in the British travel industry utilise the Weibo platform to communicate the potential Chinese travelers and engage with the them? Where to Start?
Getting an official Weibo account is definitely the first step to establish the official and yet friendly presence to the 500 million Chinese Weibo users. Sina Weibo also launched a Weibo Advertising Product where companies are able to select target audience precisely by their age, gender, interest , tags , location,etc . There are two ways of pricing system CPM (cost per Mille) and CPE (cost per engagement) where advertise fees is charged only when the message reached its target audience or the target audience interacts with the advertiser. This very sophisticated marketing tool has seen great success in China.
Get in touch with Simply Mandarin (Sina Weibo UK agent) to discuss how we can help you establish your presence on Weibo and promote your products and services to the Chinese travellers.
