In China, social marketing began in 2010, when Sina Weibo users hit 200 million. First, Sina Weibo platform had been developed for a while then, and a lot of enterprises were willing to enter the platform. Second, Sina Weibo opened its API (Application Program Interface) to third-parties, and they could develop Weibo apps.
As for B2B enterprises, they also need to communicate with its target customers, thus they will need social marketing to get to their audiences directly.
How to Target B2B Audiences On Weibo?
- The content produced on Weibo needs to be targeted to reach audiences. If a person re-post a post about your product, he or she could be the target user, and his or her followers could also be the target audience.
- You could analyse the tags and social network behaviors to identify target audiences
- Enterprises could hold large meetings to reach customers. Offline marketing is very targeted, but effective communication may hard to reach with crowds of thousands of participants.
Under these circumstances, social marketing becomes very important. All people present could make contacts with your enterprise through Weibo, Wechat and other social media. A lot of interactions could happen on the meetings, such as vote, content downloading, lecturers information and even asking questions. These online communications would leave large effective customer data, you could keep on tracking and interacting after the meetings.
Core of Soical Marketing
The core values of social marketing are the management of process and data. Social data means nothing if you don’t analyse and make use of it. For example, if one of your Weibo post gets 10,000 reposts, you have to find out who are these people and communicate with them and make effective recommendations for them.
Social data has a few features:
- People expose their data voluntarily all the time. They love to post about where they are and what they like. In the future, there are a lot to analyse, such as locations where they take photos, what kinds of photos they like, etc.
- Network of users and actions. By analyzing data, we can get a social map of user behaviour. A user’s action is part of its social network. When we get the social network map, we would know more precisely the need of customers. It is yet to be developed.
