How Is Weibo Influencing the Entertainment Industry in China

In my last two blogs, I discussed the topic about how companies are using social media for marketing and the advantages and disadvantages of social media marketing. In this blog, I will enter a specific business world – entertainment industry, and mainly talk about social media’s impact on this promising industry in China, where I grew up and experienced the social media significant impact on the business world.

A Quick look at the Entertainment Industry in China

Unlike the entertainment industry in America, the entertainment industry in China was far from mature and growing slowly in the last three decades. The last golden era of Chinese entertainment industry have to date back to 1980s, during which Hong Kong movies and music were booming across Asia and even the world. After that, Chinese entertainment industry had been depressed for a long time. In recent year, however, the situation seems have changed as a result of social media’s prevalence, particularly the advent of Chinese Twitter – Weibo.

A Brief Introduction about Weibo

As Wikipedia defines “Weibo is the Chinese word for “micoblog”, it refers to mini-blogging services in China, including social chat sites and platform sharing”. Actually, Weibo is often used generally to refer to Sina Weibo, which created by the leading Chinese online company, Sina.  Because it is the most visited sites and it has the most users. According to Sina Corporation, Sina Weibo has 368 million registered users as of mid-2012 and above 100 million messages are posted each day.

The New Logo of Sina Weibo

How Is Weibo Changing the Entertainment Industry in China

Since Weibo has such an enormous number of users, all the entertainment companies really don’t want to loss this great opportunity to generate more revenues by expanding public awareness of those celebrities, movie and music stars they have signed with. So what did those entertainment companies do to achieve their goals through social media?

Expand Company's Presence on Social Media Platform

Like many other business, entertainment companies open their own account on Weibo, QQ, the Chinese MSN and Weixin, the Chinese KIK. But since they are entertainment companies, they know better about how to do a marketing campaign and take advantage of the hype for their products and signed artists. For example, film companies may use the photo of the most popular star in their companies as a profile picture. They could also release the preview of the movie by sharing a video on Weibo and encourage their followers to share it by saying that “This is the first kissing movie of Jackie Chan, please stay tuned. And it will be coming soon on June 1^st.”

Help Signed Artists to Have and Manage Their Own Weibo Accounts

It is fair to say that entertainment stars benefit the most from the Weibo’s prevalence. Believe it or not, the top ten persons who have the most followers on Weibo are all from entertainment industry. They are actors/actresses, singers and talk-show hosts. The No.1 is Yaochen, an actress mainly for TV drama, who has 4,430,000 fans on Weibo, followed by Xu Xidi and Cai Kangyong, two hosts of a popular talk show called Kang Xi is coming. This number means if Yaochen post a status, more than 40 million people are available to see it. To some degree, her Weibo's power even more than some TV channels, though sometimes she even let somebody else help her to manage the account. In the social media world, everyone itself is a media. So entertainment stars could simply post information about their new films or music and the result may be even much better than an official press release. By using social media platform, there is a win-win result for both the entertainment stars and companies. Entertainment Stars can expand their public awareness and attract more fans. As a result, entertainment companies reach more target market and generate more revenues.

Encourage Fans to Create a fans’ Club on Social Media

For any kind of business, customer is always the king. For entertainment business, the customers are mostly fans. Thus, entertainment business have to try their best to maximize the benefit from the fans of their signed artists. What they have done is to encourage fans to create a fans' club on Weibo and other social media, such as Jackie Chan’s Community and Andy world club. Through the fans' club, entertainment companies can discuss with fans and answer their questions, sometimes maybe stars would answer questions themselves. Another advantage of having a fan’s club is that fans themselves would try their best to expand their idols’ public awareness and new works. Most importantly, entertainment companies are able to know the comments and evaluation of their products by using the data from the fan’s club as an sample.

Jackie Chan Fans' Club on Weibo

Most importantly, don’t forget to notice that all these three ways could have a mixed effect, which will have a more powerful influence on their products. The company’s Weibo can share what its signed artists post. The fans' club Weibo can share what its idols’ comments and so on and so forth. From this specific example, we should understand that social media has a big impact on entertainment industry and nowadays companies could not neglect this fact. What they all need to do is to find out their own strategies on social media.

The Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing

In my last blog, I discussed about how companies are using social media for marketing and how social media are changing the business world. As we known, any coin has two sides. There is no doubt that social media marketing has a lot of advantages that traditional media marketing may not have. However, social media marketing also has some disadvantages which could result in a devastating blow on business. So what are the advantages of social media marketing? The answer to this question could also explain why social media is so important for companies’ business strategies. Meanwhile, what are the disadvantages of social media marketing that companies may neglect? Here I would like to share my opinion on the main pros and cons of social media marketing:  

The Pros of Social Media Marketing

Brand Awareness – As you create your own account on social media platform, which has an enormous number of users in the network, more people will recognize your company name, logo, products, the link to your website and other information related to your company. Therefore, you establish more brand awareness among your tremendous potential client base.

Building Community – Unlike traditional media, such as newspaper and TV, social media has network effect, which would benefit the company significantly. Social media platform offers a unique opportunity for the company to participate in discussion, answer questions and provide customer services at any time of the day. This keep the user engaged and build an exclusive community for you and your customer day by day.

Cost Effectiveness – This is the main advantage of social media marketing. Most of social media sites are free to access, join and post information. Those who are interested in your company could easily follow you by a click. This means you could reach your target market without spending lots of money. As we known, in the business world, cash is a critical asset for companies to run their businesses. By using social media marketing, there is nearly no cash investment and companies could use those cash to invest in other area, such as R&D.

Market Research – People called the 21^st century is the information era, where information maters a lot for business. Companies could benefit from social media for market research in two respects. First, companies are able to access competitor’s presence in social media and know their business strategies, especially marketing strategies. Therefore, they could adjust their strategies and maximize their competitive advantages. Second, it is easy for company to track customers’ behavior through social media. Companies are able to know customers’ preference and evaluation about their products and services by analyzing their comments. With the powerful social media, companies would save a lot on market research since they don’t need to pay for the information. 

The Cons of Social Media Marketing

Time Consuming – From my personal experience, getting involved with social media is really time-consuming. So you can imagine that how much time and work a company should commit to. Usually, a senior people with knowledge about the company and products should take in charge of the social media presence. Customers may ask tons of questions on your Facebook page and these questions could probably be a social concern about your company. As a responsible company, you need to answer them quickly and appropriately. Otherwise, customers may leave your page and even leave your products or services. This is one of the reasons why few small companies choose to have social media presence since social media platform is easy to create but it is hard to maintain. So, the cost in time means that social media for marketing is not completely free.

Hidden Risk – Social media carries some hidden risk that potentially could ruin a company’s reputation and therefore their business. As we know, all the comments of your customers and employees are public and everyone is accessible to them. If someone posts a breaking bad news or comment, before the company even don’t recognize, the news could spread to millions of people in a very short period of time. As the good news can benefit your company, bad news can go viral as easily as good news and can do your business irreparable harm. For example, imagine that one employee of food company post a status on the company’s page saying “People add some unknown chemicals to the product of my company in order to make it more colorful”. Even this new may not be true, but since it is released by the employee, people may share this news crazily and it could ruin the reputation of the company. 

As a Chinese saying goes, anything could be a double-edged sword. Social media marketing is not an exception. It has its own advantage over traditional media, such a bigger user base. In the same time, it could also ruin a company in a short time by just a piece of news. Overall, the advantages of social media marketing weigh more than disadvantage. If a company devotes time and effort on social media marketing, its payoff could be far beyond your expectation.