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.