Twitter Vs. Weibo
Sina weibo is currently the hottest microblogging service in China now. Sina weibo has grown rapidly in the last few years, growing its user bases from 0 to more than 140million users in the first 2 years, and it is keep growing. It’s becoming the must have social media tool for every web user.
I have been use sina weibo for almost 3 years, comparing with twitter; I find myself more satisfied with Sina Weibo more. I am glad that I am not the only one feel this way. Recently I have read a blog writing about 8 things that twitter can learn from sina weibo, and I found it very interesting. http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/things-twitter-can-learn-from-sina-weibo/
Also I am gonna talk about the things I personally like about Sina Weibo Rather than Twitter.
- Rich Media
One of the Sina weibo’s features that I love most is its ability to insert a wide variety of media.
Let’s take a look at the user interface for Sina weibo and Twitter When Twitter only allows you to insert pic and location, Sina weibo on the other hand enable you to insert emoji, pictures, videos, music, polls and even “long blog”. Long blog is where you can post blogger than is longer than 140 Chinese characters, and it will appear on the interface as a picture. Looking alone at the emotion feature, it has over 400 emotions for you to use! I find my self enjoy more looking through “twittes” with various media insert than simple words. With rich media insert available on sina weibo, it allows users to not only just twitted but also express themselves in different but unique ways; it also allows users who read through twitter feel more exited and interested.
2.Following Categorization
On sina weibo, you can manage your account by categorizing the people you following into different groups. It allows you to quickly locate the posts that you like to see without having all kinds of other posts’ interruption. I personally have different group categorization such as friends/ family/foodie/fashion/cosmetic etc. When I want to find more info about fashion, I just need to click the fashion category on the left side bar and then I could go through the related posts. It allows users to customize their weibo and build convenient user experience.
- “Hash tag” and hot topics
In sina weibo, we called hashtag as topics. What’s different from twitter is that sina weibo has a very detailed categorization of the hot topics. You could search for topics under several key categories like enter
tainment, sport, finance, tech, etc. This allows you to find interesting topics more convenient. That’s not all Sina weibo also have a weekly ranking chart of the hot topic depending on how many people are posting the hashtags. It also provide stat about the number of hashtag, number of weekly hashtag, and number of hashtags in 24 hours. This detailed information provide users more insights of the topic, marketers can also track the number of hashtags of their brands to gain deeper insights.
Right now Sina weibo is planning its English version platform to compete with twitter, even though it will be hard for sina since twitter has dominated the micro blogging service throughout the world, there is still opportunities for sina to grow. Twitter should be careful about sinna weibo, and probably learn from sina weibo to improve its user experience, or you never know when sina weibo may take over !