Recently Sina Weibo held an introduction and marketing event to promote its Weibo Promoted Post. This new form of marketing feature, similar to Facebook’s Promoted Posts, enable weibo posts to reach more Weibo users, showing up on top of Weibo users’ content stream.
Sina will charge advertisers based on the total impressions delivered (CPM model) or the CPE (cost per Engagement) including number of re-post, comments, clicks, likes and etc. CPM CPM bid starts at 5 yuan and CPE starts at 0.5 yuan. Advertisers are required to top up a minimum amount of 3,000 yuan for deposit when opening accounts.
The cost of Weibo Promoted Posts is acceptable to SMEs, compared to display ads on Weibo which usually costs at least a few thousand dollars.
It was officially unveiled on 18 March and disliked by some Weibo users. Most feedback received were negative. Some users even claimed that they will not log in Sina Weibo again if the advertising posts continue to show up.
In our opinion, the main reason for users’ disgust against this new form of ad is largely due to the irrelevancy and low quality of the promoted post content; Sina has a lot of catch up to do on accuracy of demographic targeting capabilities.Besides targeting accuracy, another concern advertisers may have is invalid clicks from people like competitors.
