Sharing practical tips on Weibo operations: How to quickly increase followers in a pleasing way?

As an important part of new media and social media , Sina Weibo has over 100 million users , and its strong commercial value has also attracted many companies and individuals to open accounts on the platform. Soon, the operations staff discovered that it was easy to open an account on Sina Weibo, but daily operations were a real headache! After operating Weibo for several months, the number of fans has not increased much, and no one reads the content posted every day, let alone user interaction. The monthly KPI cannot be completed normally. Not only has my confidence been undermined, but it is also difficult to report to my superiors.

In fact, there are skills to operating Weibo. If we master this skill, we can save our working time to a great extent and improve our work efficiency. What we are going to introduce below is how to use Weibo Activity Plaza in a pleasing way to increase the number of fans.

Introduction to Weibo Activity Plaza

It can be said that Sina Weibo's activity square includes four types of gameplay, namely, rewarded forwarding, limited-time grab, rewarded solicitation, and free trial. It is these four types of gameplay that have attracted many companies and users to participate. Because it is the second-level entrance of Sina Weibo, the user traffic here is huge. As long as our activity methods and content can win the users' favor, it will attract many users to participate and interact.

1. Topic Design

There is no activity without topics. From our many operational experiences, we know that the design of topics should weaken the commercial attributes and take light-hearted and interesting content as the theme. This is a great test for our planners, who must consider both the user's feelings and the product. Only when the two are perfectly integrated can they attract more Weibo users. Here is a simple example!

This is a reward-based forwarding activity for a new product launch. At the same time, there is also a Weibo forwarding activity for another product launch. During the activity, the two activities attracted a total of 5,287 users to participate, with 62,000 readings, 959 comments, and 1,510 new fans. There is no harm without comparison. If you feel that this activity is good, let’s take a look at the following activity.

This is a Weibo event that takes advantage of industry hot spots. The event started at 11:05 on July 30. By 4:00 p.m. on the 31st, more than 1,000 people participated, the number of reads reached 12,000, and it was forwarded more than 1,400 times. By 8:00 a.m. on August 1, the number of participants was nearly 3,600, the number of reads reached 25,000, and it was forwarded nearly 4,000 times. As of the end of the event on August 2, it attracted 8,573 users to participate, with 65,000 reads and 8,797 reposts. The number of fans increased by 7,181 during the event.

Comparing these two events, apart from the three factors of release time, forwarding account, and prize setting, we would rather believe that the difference in the effects of the three events comes from the setting of the topic content. From the planning of the topic content, we can actually see that the topic content of the second activity cleverly leverages the situation, has a more relaxed style, and does not have an obvious commercial flavor, while the first topic reveals the brand too much, which also weakens the user's enthusiasm for participation.

Based on our experience in planning multiple events , we adopted the same topic involvement approach when doing a Weibo topic event for another client. The final result was 1.971 million views, 325 comments, and 10,225 new fans.

2. Prize Setting

Using prizes and things that users like to attract users to participate in activities is a common practice for many companies when doing activities. The key is how to achieve better results at low cost, so I won’t go into details here. But what is certain is that the prizes for each of the activities in the above cases are in the range of RMB 400-500, and the specific implementation can be determined based on your actual situation.

3. Poster Design

There is no need to say much about the poster design. If the poster needs to bear the heavy responsibility of attracting traffic , it is not recommended to embed a QR code or contact information on the picture, because this will not pass the Weibo review. It is recommended that we guide users with words, such as the picture below.

4. Large size selection

During each event, we will select about 2 large accounts for push, leveraging the power of large Weibo accounts to increase user engagement and use this to divert traffic. From our current operational experience, the effect is quite good.

5. Sending time

Because there are many factors that affect the effectiveness of Weibo activities, there is currently no direct evidence to show the impact of publishing time on the effectiveness of Weibo activities. However, based on previous operating experience and by observing the daily active time of Weibo users, we prefer to choose the publishing time of all Weibo activities between 4pm and 6pm.

6. Effect Evaluation

As an experienced Weibo operator, I am often asked by colleagues or customers about the authenticity of activity effects. Here, we have two points of our own experience, for your reference only. If you have more effective means of effect evaluation, you are welcome to discuss and communicate with us.

Evaluation method 1: Use Weibo user data report to detect the effect. Use the fan analysis in Weibo Data Assistant to conduct evaluation. Fan analysis is mainly conducted from the dimensions of fan gender, number of fans, fan source, fan type, fan gender and age, fan regional distribution, and fan zodiac sign. Of course, if you need more accuracy, you can purchase Weibo's paid module to view fan data;

Evaluation method 2: Sampling test method. Click to download the list of users participating in the event, select a certain sample, and randomly check the actual situation of individual fans for testing, so that you can get the results.

7. Weibo Operation Voiceover

Regarding Weibo activities and operations, I personally recommend that business operators should look at and pay more attention to data.

Through my analysis of an operating account, I found that among accounts with more than 100,000 followers, certified users accounted for 0.8%. This also means that nearly 1,000 users are high-quality users certified by the Sina Weibo platform. This type of users will be the focus of our future operations. In addition, the platform also supports the export of authenticated user data, which makes it very convenient for operators to focus on them. If we observe carefully, we will easily find that the users who frequently interact with us are actually a fixed group of people. If we can lock in this group of people and mobilize the enthusiasm of other high-quality users through interaction, our subsequent work will become easier and more valuable.

8. Final Thoughts

As planners of a professional online integrated marketing company, we have had in-depth communication and cooperation with marketing and market personnel of more than hundreds of companies in the past few years. In this process, we also found that not every small and medium-sized enterprise is able to invest more material and human resources in Weibo and WeChat operations . Therefore, this requires the company's new media operators to master these operational skills. Only in this way can they cooperate with other departments of the company to do a good job in new media operations and contribute to the company's brand, reputation and business!