Sina and Taobao's conspiracy to pre-sell movie tickets

Preface: In the past two days, Sina Entertainment, Weibo and Taobao Movies have started pre-selling movie tickets. The positioning of the three parties is very clear. Sina Entertainment relies on the influence of the portal to spread; Weibo uses celebrity resources and fission-style word-of-mouth to expand its voice and polish Weibo payment; Taobao invests in its own e-commerce resources. This method of pre-selling movie tickets clearly shows the social e-commerce model.

Whether in China or abroad, the use of social media platforms is growing rapidly. Super giants such as Facebook have emerged abroad, and there are also large social platforms such as Sina Weibo and WeChat in China. If the primary goal of the platform in the early stage of development is to gather popularity and increase interaction, after the "primitive accumulation" period, how to generate profits has become a topic that must be put on the table. This can be seen from the many attempts of WeChat and Weibo in self-media and e-commerce. In foreign countries, Facebook and Twitter are testing on-site shopping and exploring the gameplay of social e-commerce.

Sina, which owns portal business and Weibo, has been exploring the possibility of more commercial models. Take Sina Weibo as an example. When Weibo products such as NetEase and Sohu withdrew from the industry stage, Sina's Weibo business showed its efforts to explore commercial models from the launch of self-media platforms and fan service platforms. In the early days of the platform's development, grassroots big accounts made a lot of money by taking advantage of the policy gap; then Xiaomi, Meizu and others used Weibo to achieve good brand promotion effects, but in the end they were not the ones who made themselves famous. Objectively speaking, Weibo at that time was trapped by the immaturity of its own commercial products and the imperfection of its payment products. After cooperating with Alipay to launch Weibo payment, it realized the opening of the last channel in its own marketing closed loop construction, marking an important step for Weibo in its commercial exploration.

So the question is, how can Sina demonstrate its own advantages, grasp the industry's throat, and master social e-commerce?

Portal + Weibo + e-commerce ferments social e-commerce effect

Sina's recent approach has gradually begun to grasp the true meaning of social e-commerce. In November, Weibo, Taobao Movies, and Sina Entertainment jointly held a movie pre-sale event. More than 600,000 tickets were sold in a few days, with a box office of over 40 million yuan. Among them, "One Step Away" set a record of selling more than 160,000 tickets in a single day, locking in a box office of more than 12 million yuan, breaking the record of movie ticket pre-sales on domestic social platforms.

Sina has hit the key point of the pre-sale of movie tickets by exclusively cooperating with Taobao Movies. The main feature of this pre-sale is the ultra-low price, with two tickets available for as low as 19.8 yuan. Taobao Movies' support in terms of price has laid a solid foundation for the hot sales of the event. Secondly, Taobao Movies' offline channels are also key, covering almost all theaters in major markets across the country, and users in more regions can directly watch movies after purchasing movie tickets. Finally, Weibo Pay, launched in cooperation with Alipay, has also optimized the online purchase process to facilitate user purchases.

In addition, as one of the important platforms for the public to receive entertainment information, Sina Entertainment can also ensure the coverage of influence. It is precisely because of its strong media attributes that Sina is favored by film producers in film promotion, which is also the premise for Sina and Taobao to join hands in the field of film marketing.

Looking at Weibo, after years of intensive cultivation, it has accumulated the most opinions, celebrities, grassroots talents and enterprises, and is still the undisputed leader in terms of influence. Fully leveraging the value of social assets on Weibo and spreading it in a fission-like manner can help build word-of-mouth among ordinary audiences.

In fact, Sina is far from the first to try pre-sale of movie tickets. Many platforms such as Cinema.com, Douban, and Dianping have already started this business, and some of them are doing quite well. But in my opinion, perhaps in terms of ticket sales alone, Sina is not as good as professional sales platforms in the short term, but if we expand it to the entire film marketing, Sina portal + Weibo + Taobao is indeed the best platform for this.

In addition to the resource advantages of Taobao e-commerce, Sina platform has gathered a large number of social assets. The biggest feature of social relationships in the Internet era is the mobile nature. The great popularity of mobile devices such as smart phones has made social relationships "anytime" and "anywhere", which has greatly broken the limitations of time and space in the past. This has undoubtedly greatly expanded the depth of social e-commerce. In addition, the characteristics of offline social relationships such as "crowd effect" and "herd mentality" are also fully reflected on online social platforms.

Therefore, if you want to engage in social e-commerce, you must first look at the size of the social platform, that is, how many real human resources it has, especially people with voice and influence. Secondly, you must find a suitable way to convert them. The portal + Weibo + e-commerce model is a good choice.

The logic of marketing is more than just selling

At first glance, this pre-sale movie ticket event is just a "promotional event" based on Weibo, but in fact there are many differences in the details. It can be said that it fully demonstrates the advantages accumulated by the Weibo platform over the years.

First of all, in terms of "fan economy", preheating movies through Weibo may actually be more effective than the stars' continuous promotion of "horse race" offline. In the past, major crews actually paid great attention to this. The only difference is that in the past, it was a "spontaneous behavior" and played a more promotional effect. However, people have an "impulsive period" in consumption. If the promotion platform and the sales platform are separated, the loss rate in the conversion process cannot be underestimated. When the promotion platform and the sales platform are combined and become the "official behavior" of Weibo, both the resources mobilized and the conversion rate will definitely be greatly improved.

Take "Fleeting Time" as an example. A Weibo post by director Zhang Yibai triggered a repost by Faye Wong, and the total number of reposts reached 190,000. Later, the lead actor Wei Chen reposted it again, and the movie tickets were sold out in 10 minutes. Although it is not as amazing as Xiaomi's performance, it is enough to surprise other movie ticket sales platforms. This kind of gameplay is actually to make full use of the fans and connections accumulated by film-related personnel and detonate them through online social platforms. In essence, it is the "fan economy." Especially for fans of celebrities, a large number of them are very loyal. Using such resources to convert sales is equivalent to a precision-guided missile. It would be strange if it didn't work.

It is also worth mentioning that the author has followed the launch of "Pre-sale Movies" and "Ranking of Most Wanted Movies" on Weibo, through which one can timely understand the viewing focus and needs of user groups.

As mentioned above, one of Weibo's most powerful accumulations is "people". Especially for young people, Weibo is almost a "standard feature". Based on this accumulation, Weibo's ranking data generated by user clicks, voting, and browsing largely reflects the real viewing needs of offline groups. Such big data is the most essential gameplay of social e-commerce, and it can also give birth to many business models.

To put it simply, if the participation group of the ranking list is large enough, this data can be used to make movie scheduling decisions for theaters. Giving more schedules and better time for popular movies is actually a process of optimizing resource allocation. For example, in the future, it will be set up to organize the target customer group through social platforms before the filming of the movie to understand their demands, and it can even become a model of "movie crowdfunding". This kind of gameplay is impossible for traditional e-commerce, let alone offline. Once established, it will be the deepest moat of social platforms.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.