Sina Weibo Campaign Critique
Sina Weibo, China’s biggest social media network, was launched on August 14th, 2009. Over the past eight years, Weibo has transformed from a Chinese version Twitter to a comprehensive platform that incorporates the multiple media channels like Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. As of 2018, Sina Weibo has active users more than four hundred million. One of the biggest goals for an online community is to provide positive interactions with its users. Being an active user for Weibo for over 6 years, I state a critique on Weibo by analyzing both the advantages and disadvantages of the platform to engage with newcomers based on the book of Robert Kraut and Paul Resnick named Building Successful Online Communities.
Weibo, an abbreviation for MicroBlog, is one of the top social networking sites in China with over 300 million monthly active users. Its founders, Sina Corp, created the new platform in order to allow users to get the latest news and upload pictures and videos for instant sharing. Moreover, users can directly add comments, pictures, and videos under others’ comment sections. Weibo is a socializing platform built up based on interpersonal relationships to create, disseminate, and obtain information. As of 2019, thousands of celebrities and government departments have created an account on Weibo to publish important announcements.
Weibo Advantages
Over so many years, Weibo is still the most popular media platform in China. Due to the fact, it is undoubted that Sina does a good job to operate the community through four aspects of newcomers recruitment, retainment, socialization, and moderation.
First, Sina put lots of efforts to propaganda Weibo and attract new users after it launched in 2009. The strategy Sina used was to invite hundreds of popular celebrities to participate in Weibo. Connecting with six principles of persuasion by Dr. Robert B. Cialdini, authority played an important role for people to make a decision. At this point, authoritative people was an effective motivation to persuade others to create own accounts on Weibo. As more people joined in, Weibo started to become more popular. Kraut said before word-of-mouth recruiting was substantially more powerful than impersonal advertising. Namely, the ‘advertising’ words spoken by existing users helped Weibo recruit newcomers. Besides targeting fans of celebrities, Weibo could share content with friends as well. Each user on Weibo could easily click on ‘sharing’ bottom to send out the content to different media sites. As Kraut claimed, making it easy for users to share content from a community site with their friends increased the visibility of the community as well as increased the likelihood of them joining. The ‘liking’ principle by Cialdini also supported the point. People preferred to say yes to those they like. The sharing content from friends could highly motivate potential users to join in the community.
Second, Weibo designed a simple click to allow old users to seek out friends through their address books, and interests for retention.
The designed bottom benefited users’ social interactions. Weibo would automatically exam out user friends’ accounts and recommend them to you. Plenty of lost friends could be found here. Additionally, Weibo encouraged newcomers to choose 3–4 interested fields when they first logged in. The system kept the data users selected and analyzed the content they clicked later. Weibo would recommend a few related news and accounts to each user based on the data they collected. Connecting with Kraut’s words, encouraging newcomers to reveal themselves publicly in profiles increased interaction between oldtimers and newcomers. Weibo applied Kraut’s statement since newcomers were easy to find the same interests old users and start interactions with them.
Third, according to Kraut, an online community needed to socialize the newcomers and teach them how to behave in appropriate ways to the group. Weibo offered an easy manual to each newcomer when they initially joined in. Instead of providing a reading manual, Weibo made a straightforward version by using ‘arrows’ to direct users. As a newbie on Weibo, the system would guide you go through with all the foundational steps including searching, adding, commenting, retweeting, and liking. Although Aronson and Mills stated that users underwent a severe initiation would perceive the group more attractive than those did not undergo, many users of Weibo liked the simple way of the tutorial since it was faster and easier.
Last but not least, Weibo had a strict moderation system to control the published content. Users had rights to report any inappropriate content including fake, defraud, pornographic information to the community servers. Once the reported contents had been verified, the contents would be deleted forever. Also, an account published numerous advertisements, followed largely unfamiliar accounts, and switched client-sides would be at a greater risk to block. As Kraut said, moderation systems which degraded, labeled, moved or removed unsuitable messages decreased the damage those messages caused. Weibo designed a systematically reporting system to manage the online community.
Weibo Disadvantages
Even though Weibo is popularity, it still has a few problems inherently existed. First, users’ privacies had not been protected well. In order to benefit users’ retention, Weibo designed a function to help users find familiar friends. Although this manipulation provided more interactions between users, it required users’ more privacies simultaneously. Users’ privacies would be easy to reveal due to the condition. In addition, even though Weibo could help users find their lost friends, users might not want those friends to view their Weibo. Unlike Instagram, Weibo provided no choice with users to make their account private. If people knew your username, people could search your account and go over with all the content you published. What is more, users had no way to know who had visited their accounts before. The public setting provided no sense of security toward majority users. People around me always complained about the setting. The function of finding lost friends was not as attractive as before.
Moreover, Weibo was designed as Micro-blog, which only allowed users to publish contexts under 140 words or 9 pictures. Although this design provided users concise contents to read, sometimes the post theses were unclear. For the majority, it’s hard to comprise all ideas into a few sentences below 140 words. Users often needed to deal with misunderstanding sentences and poor grammar. Also, the standard of 140 words made part of users lose patience to read long contents. Relatively speaking, the content value had decreased due to the word restriction, and the content illustrations were unsharp. On the other hand, the nature of Weibo had transformed from a sharing site to a commercial site. As of 2018 August, Weibo had over eight hundreds million earnings from commercials. Plenty of advertisements were filled with users’ pages. The intrinsic motivation of users to socialize on Weibo had decreased sharply.
The last disadvantage of Weibo was the low-efficiency reporting system. One anonymous user published a post saying that I had used Weibo for six years, but I never reported a damaged content successfully. Even though the amounts of reporting contents were numerous, the efficiency of the moderation team strongly influenced users’ experience. Also, Weibo did not do a good job to list out the whole process of moderation systems to newbies. People had to figure out all the steps by themselves or interact with old users. Additionally, another problem of reporting was mentioned many times on Weibo’s FAQs sections. Lots of users did not know whether their reports were the real-name system or not. Weibo should clarify the administrator explicitly knew each informer’s information on the beginning manual and added the reporting process to the manual. The other shortcoming of moderation on Weibo was that users could not report a personal attack for other people. Simply saying, only the person being abused on Weibo could report the situation. This function made lots of users feel uncomfortable. One of the users said that I saw someone abused my favorite celebrity hugely, but Weibo refused all my reports. Those rules bother users a lot. Although Weibo made a useful manual for newcomers about basic manipulation processes, they did not clarify the moderation system well.
Conclusion
Sina Weibo was one of the most popular media networking in China. Sina did a successful work to manage the online community by providing extra social interactions, simple working manual, and contents sharing. However, users’ privacies needed to be protected better, and the moderation systems had to be improved. As a newcomer on Weibo, it’s easy for you to find familiar friends, interested topics, and fresh contents here. Nonetheless, newcomers had to have strong literal abilities to interpret posting contents. Also, newcomers needed to have a consciousness to protect personal privacies while illustrating publishing contents. Generally speaking, Weibo did a good job to bond online users and update the latest information around the world, but some functions are still needed to modify in the future.
