Since Jack Dorsey produced twitter back in 2006, it has enjoyed a meteoric rise to success, with fans now including such British luminaries as Lord Sugar and Stephen Fry – and with 52m accounts opened during the past 5 years, and 21m live accounts active each month, one might be forgiven for thinking that this phenomenon for micro-blogging was unprecedented.
Of course anyone familiar with the Chinese social media landscape would immediately refute that assumption with the mention of social media behemoth Weibo (which means microblogging). From its creation in 2007, Weibo has grown to boast a massive user base of 140m, translating to 50m monthly live accounts. They currently claim to be growing at an astonishing rate of 10m users per month – that is almost 1/6 of the current UK population.
The functionality of Weibo, whilst similar to twitter, does have some notable exceptions. For a start there is no character limitation on blogs (tweets are limited to 140 characters), and commentary is allowed. Weibo is also ahead of the game when it comes to monetisation – with more than 60,000 accounts being verified as belonging to major brands, celebrities and sports stars. Some people see Weibo as a kind of twitter – facebook hybrid, others argue that it is even better than either of them – it organises events based on cities and not just friends, and features the Google Hangout-like, multi-person video-conferencing tool.
The good news is that we Brits will soon be able to make our own minds up, as owner Sina Corp recently announced that they will be launching a Weibo English interface later this month. It will be very interesting to see how our old favourites facebook and twitter fare against newcomers Google+ and now Weibo.
Let the battle of the social-media super-brands commence!
