User engagement to its maximum
And what's on Chinese social media?
Every day, 230 million people are active on Weibo. This is more than daily active users on Twitter, with all countries combined. Weibo substantially penetrated Chinese population. Its user base is bigger in one country than Twitter's in 200 countries and territories.
Both are micro-blogging platforms with features of posting, reposting and commenting. Any user can follow any other users and add comments to a feed.
The difference lies in user demographics.
On Twitter, around 60% of users are below 35 years old. Males users are twice as much as females;
On Weibo, almost 80% are below 31 years old. Female users and male users are equivalent.
Unlike their elders, the young generation grew up in the best period of Chinese history. There was no war, revolution or extreme resource scarcity. No need to save up money out of fear for an expected future. Young people are ready to be vocal on what they believe, and spend money on what they like.
Sweet for Weibo. :) But to squeeze the most out of them, Weibo had to answer three questions that every social media has:
What do their users like?
How to monetise?
And how to retain their users?
Take Instagram’s answers for an example.
Instagram is a photo sharing platform. Users like fashion and inspiring lifestyle
To monetize, Instagram allows brands to do targeted advertisements. Brands can also put buying link under ads to enable seamless shopping experience
Instagram incubates a group of users to become “influencers”. They build a group of followers around themselves, then inspire their actions. When they recommend a product or a certain lifestyle, followers adhere. Instagram initiates buying, and that's one of the reasons why users stick.
But influencers are different from celebrities. Influencers are more like Key Opinion Leaders. They have a direct influence on consuming behavior, and this is exactly what brands want. Celebrities, though, are much more visible. We see them not only on social media, but also in other channels like TV, big screen and music.
What about combining the two? What if celebrities also take the role of influencers? And, what if the combination also increases user engagement on social media?
Here comes weibo's genius innovation: it creates a new genre of celebrity on its platform - “traffic stars” (in Chinese: 流量明星). Stars with huge traffic on Weibo that generate trends and steer discussion. They appear in films, TV, music shows, but also have a strong influence on consumption. But their fame is fluctuated by the huge content created by their fans - users on Weibo.
But how?
First, you need a platform to discuss the star. Not on Weibo feed, or under a trend hashtag. That's too messy. You need a real community platform where every member in this community is a fan of this star.
This is the “Super Topic” feature created by Weibo. It's independent from the Weibo feed, and has all the features of a community app.
Imagine this: You are checking Kendall Jenner's twitter. On her profile page, there's a portal to her "Super Topic" community. And BOOM, you are on the sub-reddit r/kendalljenner. Now you can discuss with people like you, fans of Kendall Jenner.
It has:
Separate feeds
Members of the "Super Topic" can choose to post only in the community, and the post won’t appear in Weibo Feed
User-friendly community design
Fan gamification
Next level of user engagement
OK, right now the users are engaged on an individual level. They post, repost and comment to have a higher fan level within the “Super Topic” community. But how to engage users even more? These tasks might seem interesting at first, but will soon become boring for most users.
To fight against "laziness" or inertia, you need to create common goals. A transition from “I” to “We”, competition between community and community. In Weibo's language, competition between one "Super Topic" and another "Super Topic" -- ranking of stars.
Everyday, Weibo publishes a daily chart of all stars. The chart then evolves to weekly and monthly ranking. This sounds a lot like Billboard. But difference is that the rules are designed to increase user engagement. The competition is less for the stars, but more for the fan community under them.
The ranking depends on 5 elements with same weight:
Number of views of the star’s “Super Topic”
Number of interaction (inclu. reposting, commenting, likes, and interactions under comments)
Influence power: number of posts mentioning the star
Level of love: number of “flowers” received (You can send at most 3 flowers per day. But to do that, you need to buy Weibo premium)
Positive Power: interaction with propaganda posts
When capital steps in
The sad truth for these "traffic stars" is that they actually need high ranking on Weibo charts. Their works are only media to enhance their appearance in public. They are highly disposable commodities in the entertainment industry. The only chance to win is to get support from fans, who produce fame for them, yet artificially or not.
And the fans know it too. These "traffic stars" are investment stocks for fans. Fans will do everything to keep the price high. In return, these celebrities are no longer distant and unapproachable. They are what their fans made them, their work of art.
This interdependent relationship sparks a weird sense of gamification. Fans create different accounts to dump massive content on Weibo. The amount of traffic created on Weibo convince other users the popularity of the star. This adds up more to the star's popularity, and the loop keeps running.
But all this fame can be just bluffing. How can fans prove that their investment has real value, instead of just being a bubble?
Brands step in at this moment. In the entertainment, brand sponsorship is like a platinum card of validation. Every celebrity wants it. And every fan wants it for their celebrities.
For brands, they search for stars that fit their brand image. More precisely, stars with influence power on consumption.
For fans, they want to prove to brands that their star is the right stock to invest in. Plus, brand sponsors add more value to the star, justifying fans' investment.
Both sides now need a dedicated buying link under the star's name. Fans want to make sure that they contribute to the right person, not another spokesperson. For brands, all the easier to do attribution analysis.
Last year, HP signed Cai Xukun as spokesperson, the #2 “traffic star” on “Super Topic” ranking. From the dedicated link, real-time sales report is made to test his influence power.
After 3 hours the link is live, more than 5,000 HP computers were sold with a total sales of more than $ 5 million!
Live e-commerce seizes the opportunity, too. Brands invite "traffic stars" to live platform to ramp up sales. Whenever a “traffic star” goes on live show, sales increase, and traffic Weibo peaks. I also wrote a blogpost about Chinese live e-commerce industry, check more details!
Chinese devotion
China is the most developed country in consumer technology. The internet arrived when the country was just about to develop. For Chinese, the internet is not the devil that steals everyone’s job (there was no job before!). Everyone loves the convenience of Internet.
According to the Chinese "Teenager blueprint" statistics, 99,2% of minors are using Internet. 78% of them started before 10 years old. Teens not only grow up with Internet. Weibo and other social media become their reality, the society they live in.
In this society, fancy and beautiful figures attract them more than everything. Naturally, communities emerge. Remember in school, we used to form groups around pretty peacock girls or popular guys? Same thing goes to Weibo. Fans form fan groups, then become larger communities. This is where young individuals find a sense of belonging and their identity.
"Is it worth it?" you may ask, "To spend so much money, worse, your best time on people who don't even know you?" But for fans, nothing is more rewarding than building a golden palace of "fame" for their stars. They feel a mixed feeling of admiration, protection, daydreaming, gamification, belonging, and fulfillment.
They need their stars. This is their game, their struggle of self-achievement, but manifested on someone else. Someone like a symbol, a perfection, an incarnation of everything worth fighting for. In the end, what is easier to pursue in real life?
Reality vs. virtual world
Whenever a new technology hits our world, we panic. Today, everyone criticises how social media is designed to attack human's short attention span. That it's making us addicted, and depressing our young generation.
But for Chinese teens, what's their alternative? It's torture to spend 10 hours studying everyday and be a study machine. (Trust me, I've been through it!) Young people couldn't relate to what's available on their textbook, and I can’t really blame them. Who cares which emperor died in which year, or how to interpret an old poem into modern mandarin? Just find the answer on Internet!
Problem is, parents gain life experience in a world without Internet. They see through the world in a completely different angle, and they forced their kids to do the same. The real world is carved out by adults, who believe that any new technology arriving after THEIR 20s is anti-nature. That social media is the blame of all, and that the young generation is doomed.
But life isn't the magic wonderland for most people. Only very few of us are lucky enough to have an exiting life. With interesting people to talk to, pretty dates to go out with, exiting events going on. That's NOT the case for most people. The vast majority live in a dull and routine life. They have no choice but to connect themselves to a much bigger world. A world with richer content, stimulating, and rewarding.
Plus, compared to the "real" world, the online world is much faster to improve. It took us a few hundred years to build the basic infrastructure for the world we are living in today. But Internet is only with us for a few decades. Smartphone and social media? Only around ten to twenty years.
With the same effort, it makes more sense to improve the online world than the "real" one. Instead of complaining about social media and internet, we should make it better. The internet might be a Pandora's box, but there's no way back. There's no world of pre-internet and post-internet. This IS our world.
Chinese young people might be escapists or fantasizers. But the online world is our future, whether we like it or not. Covid may accelerate this transition. But can you imagine doing lockdown twenty years ago, without internet or smartphone? We came all way along to make progress, to improve. There's nothing for us behind us. All that exists is what's ahead. And we should always look into the future.
Apparently the celebrity list has been removed by Weibo (I assume what you wrote about is the same thing?) https://latestpagenews.com/technology/weibo-deletes-celebrity-lists-as-china-criticizes-irrational-fan-culture/