Liu Songling
Introduction
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets", and images.
Sina Weibo (Chinese: 新浪微博; literally "Sina microblogging") is a Chinese microblogging site. Akin to a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, it is one of the most popular sites in China, in use by well over 30% of internet users, it has a similar market penetration that Twitter has established in the USA.
Rapid Development
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July. Twitter rapidly gained worldwide popularity, with 200 million users as of 2011, generating over 200 million tweets and handling over 1.6 billion search queries per day. It is sometimes described as the "SMS of the Internet."
Sina Weibo was launched by SINA Corporation in August 2009, and now has more than 200 million registered users. A two-year-old block on Twitter setting being accessible in China has allowed Sina’s homegrown Weibo to flourish - and now it’s blossoming in to far more than a Twitter-style microblogging tool.
Social influence
a. Twitter
As one of the most popular social network sites in the world and with more than 10 languages in used, Twitter has an indisputable influence in both the daily life of humans and issues of the society.
Nowadays, people spend an increasing time chatting online or with cell-phones, with great interest in what their friends or some other famous people are doing. Thus as a convenient internet posing wall for users to update their moods, status just via text-based posts, twitter not only provides the commenting and chatting services like Facebook, but also let users become “followers”, which enable users know not only their friends’ status but also other famous people, their interested companies, organization and so on.
“Followers” in twitter, like fans or supporters, by leaving comments or reply to a status can somehow show their supports or arguments, and can even reflect the public opinion on a certain social event. For example, in August, 2009, when the opponents of Obama’s health care reform plan aggressed the National Health System (NHS) of UK, thousands of the users of NHS used the #welovetheNHS label in twitter to support NHS and refute the campaign of U.S.Right, winning the Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s support and respect.
b. Sina Weibo
Owning similar services with Twitter, Sina Weibo, though established only 2years ago, now also has a great influence in the society. Mainly used by people in China, the impact of Sina Weibo largely focuses on the care of the life of people. People in Sina Weibo not only share some advice and tips of daily life, but also warm-heartedly post some advertisement on emergent need of hospitals and disaster area. For instant, the reason why Yao Chen becomes the Queen of Weibo is not just the humor language she used in her post, but her consistent post for the people in urgent need for help. People love to see that famous Weibo owners take advantage of their large amount of fans to help others with widely advertising instead of promoting products.
Also, like news broadcasting, Weibo users report and describe the real situation of big events and disasters, enable people in the nation get the fastest information. For example, in the disaster of the train crash in Wenzhou China, on 23rd July, 2011, people post the condition of the crash and the people injured in Weibo, which was more informative and timely than TV news report.
Advertising effectiveness
a. Twitter
While hesitation over making purchases for products through the networking sites has abated, what along with the widely use of Twitter, of course, is the great profit from advertisements. While Facebook may take the lion's share of social media marketing budgets, Twitter is fast catching up and eMarketer has estimated that worldwide advertising revenues will rise by 210 per cent by the end of this year. This represents moving from $45 million (£28.7 million) earnings in 2010 to an expected $139.5 million (£88.9 million) by the end of 2011. The marketing analysts also forecast that Twitter's worldwide ad revenues will reach $400 million (£255 million) by 2013.
Also, economic advantages come from the cooperation between mobile phones and Twitter. For example, Samsung announced the launching of Galaxy S, a Smartphone manufactured by Samsung, in Korea in detail via the Twitter. Usages like these certainly helped people in terms of receiving information quickly. This not only enables people to use Twitter with smartphones at anytime in anywhere, but also decrease the cost of communication. It is estimated that over half of Twitter users use their webpage by mobile devices. While other online services such as blogs and MSN Messenger require people to be stationed, Twitter can be accessed while moving. Moreover, other online communication systems such as MSN Messenger ask users to sign in. This means that people have to stay in their seats in order to use the system, which is a huge inconvenience.
b. Sina Weibo
Via such kind of social network, not only companies advertise their products by posting ads, but users publicize the products they love by showing their pictures and comments. Recently, it has become a trend that users would love to post what they have bought and what they have eaten on Sina Weibo, which then cause a great popularity of the product or the restaurant that is appreciated and forwarded by many other users. Since people would rather believe what their peers and friends preferences, thus the effectiveness of such advertising may much more powerful than TV ads.
Conclusion
Though I just talk about the development, social influence and advertising effectiveness above, there are many other information and benefits of these two social networks. However, apart from their advantages, they also have their respective limitation. For instant, Twitter has no constant, long-term income source, which makes it hard to decide whether to choose the profit from companies’ advertisement or the users’ favors, as it may worsen the perception of users about twitter if it intentional creates a platform for advertisements. Also, Sina Weibo only has Chinese version which greatly limits its development and expansion.
Reference
No comments:
Post a Comment