Sticking to the “big V” route, how much commercial imagination does Weibo’s KOL ecosystem have?

In the digital age, the influence of social media cannot be underestimated, especially when it is combined with global events such as the Olympics. Weibo, as one of the largest social media platforms in China, not only witnessed the craze of the Paris Olympics, but also demonstrated its huge potential in content dissemination and commercial value with its unique content ecology and big V strategy.

The Paris Olympics has closed, but the attention and discussion about this event continues.

As a major sports event IP, the influence of this year's Olympics is extremely significant, and it has also become a new variable for content platforms to increase their own scale.

According to data released by Weibo, during the Olympic Games, more than 93% of the participating athletes opened accounts on Weibo, with a total of 230 million fans; the 166 Weibo posts sent by KOLs had a reading volume of 479 billion. These figures fully demonstrate the influence of this event on the whole nation.

As one of the earliest content platforms to rise and go through cycles, Weibo still has sufficiently distinctive features to focus users' attention, which is not an easy task.

In the first half of the content industry, Weibo relied on entertainment and hot topics to win the favor of users, creators and advertisers. But the other side of the story is that this unique and hard-to-replicate content ecosystem once caused Weibo to suffer "growing pains", making it difficult to expand its vertical content ecosystem and limiting its commercial imagination.

Today, Weibo has successfully broken through its limitations and entered the second half of the competition. At the recent 2024 Weibo Super Red Star Festival, Cao Zenghui, Weibo's senior vice president of operations, emphasized that "Weibo has been able to accumulate user consumption through a vertical content ecosystem."

He mentioned that Weibo's current content ecology is composed of three parts: the IP ecology composed of entertainment, ACG, and sports, the hot spot ecology composed of media and social celebrities, and the vertical content ecology composed of many fields.

All this stems from Weibo’s proactive adjustments in the past year. From sorting out the content ecology to in-depth vertical category construction, it has gradually found a commercial solution that is different from other platforms.

1. Is Weibo doing the right thing by firmly following the “big V” route?

In the Internet market of the stock era, it is increasingly important to rely on content to drive existing users and relative growth. From e-commerce, short videos to social platforms, they all aspire to become the source of hot topics, hot topics, and popular content, and to attract users' attention to a great extent in the current information explosion.

Hot topics that attract users can be current events such as the much-anticipated Paris Olympics and the globally popular game "Black Myth: Wukong", or celebrity entertainment topics such as Jia Ling losing 100 pounds for the movie "Hot and Spicy".

Among all social content platforms, Weibo has always been at the center of Internet traffic thanks to its unique hot spot effect: regardless of whether the hot spot starts on Weibo, once it becomes a platform hot spot, it will quickly produce social effects, truly reflecting the mainstream consensus and collective feelings of the current public.

Wu Mo, Vice President of Marketing at Weibo, also talked about this at the conference, "Social issues raised on Weibo will attract more attention from users and will continue to trigger subsequent social chain reactions."

For example, during the Paris Olympics, Weibo users' discussions were no longer focused solely on gold medals, but more on the athletes' "sense of relaxation" - a large number of "complaint" videos by swimmer Pan Zhanle attracted a large number of netizens to spread and watch on Weibo.

The spread and fermentation of hot topics are inseparable from the content output and influence spread of Weibo celebrities. During the Paris Olympics, Weibo formed a public opinion field composed of users, celebrities, and athletes (parties involved), realizing interaction between different roles and multi-directional communication feedback. Based on the characteristics of Weibo's public opinion field and with the support of athletes' social interaction, the professional content produced by Weibo celebrities and their own influence can be further amplified.

According to data provided by Weibo, during the Olympics, more than 93% of participating athletes opened accounts on Weibo, with a total number of fans reaching 230 million; Weibo big V and gold V users sent a total of 166 Weibo posts, and the number of Olympic-related readings reached 479 billion.

Behind the 479 billion readings is the fact that Weibo has provided more possibilities for creators by streamlining its content ecosystem and strengthening the big V route over the past year.

In April 2023, the launch of the Golden Orange V author operation system was a landmark move by Weibo to make ecological changes. Nearly a year after the launch of the new system, a clear trend can be seen: high-quality content produced by big Vs appears in front of users, while low-quality accounts gradually sink to the bottom.

On the one hand, Weibo encourages big Vs to produce professional and high-quality content, and increases the distribution of content produced by professional bloggers through the top recommendations and hot searches on the Weibo homepage. On the other hand, Weibo has stricter management of accounts with high followers but low quality and fake interactions, and has continuously raised the standard threshold based on the real follower rate.

As of June, the number of Gold Vs on Weibo platform reached 18,000, an increase of half year-on-year; the number of Orange Vs reached 66,000, an increase of 70% year-on-year.

It is worth noting that in order to encourage creators to produce more high-quality content, Weibo has comprehensively upgraded the profit-sharing mechanism of the advertising sharing plan, from a profit-sharing model centered on traffic to an incentive mechanism centered on content and hot spots. At the same time, it is more precise and specific in content incentives, encouraging the production of more high-quality positive content.

Data shows that in the first half of 2024, Weibo allocated 150 million in revenue for the traffic contribution of Golden Orange V creators through the advertising sharing plan.

More high-quality accounts are pushed and more low-quality accounts are removed. Weibo encourages creators to output high-quality content from the source, thereby gathering tens of millions of users, driving the popularity of the entire platform, and deepening Weibo's influence as an all-encompassing, high-quality and efficient public opinion field.

2. The cross-field production of Weibo influencers: richer personalities, more commercial possibilities

On Weibo, big Vs are influencers of hot topics and pioneers of cross-circle communication.

As the efficiency of the Internet increases and algorithm technology becomes more advanced, the difficulty of crossing circles is also gradually increasing. A major feature of the Internet field is the circle-based trend of online communities, which leads to the limited information received by netizens under the separation of circles, and they are inevitably trapped in the "information cocoon".

Whether users, creators or brands, they all hope to cross barriers and reach a wider range of more diverse people. Weibo's communication network has the unique characteristics of interweaving and overlapping, and is one of the few social platforms suitable for cross-domain production and extension.

Chen Zhen, who has nearly 10 million fans on the Internet, is one of the most influential car reviewers today. However, his influence does not only come from his identities as a car reviewer, driver, and car expert. As the content of his account gradually extends to multiple tracks such as sports, food, and travel, the structure of his fans has also become more diverse.

Under the hashtag #微博旅行家#, Chen Zhen shared his daily business trips from a first-person perspective, such as "immersive business trip diary", "paying the bill for a free meal abroad a year later", and "mobile phone Internet access plans for overseas trips". He was nicknamed "business trip blogger" by netizens and gained wider attention. According to data released by Weibo, Chen Zhen's account achieved a 332% increase in cross-domain reading volume and a 167% increase in cross-domain interaction.

Image source: Chen Zhen's Weibo

Over the past period of time, more Weibo influencers have found a "second track" and have achieved great results in expanding their fan base and voice. Car blogger Chu Xiaomin has expanded into multiple tracks such as fashion and beauty, diversifying her identity labels; Dr. Zhang Yu is not limited to publishing medical popular science content, but has also established a second persona through sports and fitness, fashion and dressing content.

The success of "big Vs" in cross-circle communication is also due to the platform's far-reaching strategic considerations and its promotion behind the scenes. Since May this year, Weibo has tried to run the "cross-domain blogger" plan to point out the direction for creators.

In addition to extending to six cross-domain tracks such as fashion and apparel, beauty and skin care, sports and health, Weibo has also refined the secondary classifications, giving creators more options.

At the same time, from a distribution perspective, Weibo conveys high-quality content to interested groups, helping creators expand their interest groups across fields, break through the circle and increase fans, and then convert high-quality loyal fans.

From the platform perspective, Weibo can replicate the advantages of "big V" to different vertical fields, enabling the platform to achieve "one gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, and three gives birth to all things" in enriching the vertical content ecology.

Data shows that in the past year, Weibo's vertical ecosystem has added 2,600 Gold V accounts, an increase of 54%, a significant increase in scale, catching up with the growth rate of IP ecosystem and hot spot ecosystem.

In addition, vertical fields can easily attract users' attention and consumption, and for brands, choosing to cooperate with cross-domain bloggers can more easily bring them influence across various fields.

The data of Weibo's industry customers can prove this trend: with the deepening of cross-circle operations, different vertical categories can drive each other's purchases. For example, the purchases of mobile phone industry customers have driven the purchases of bloggers in the surrounding photography and Internet fields. According to the data released by Weibo, the revenue growth rate of games, automobiles, digital, and medical vertical categories exceeded 50% in the past year.

In other words, by leveraging cross-domain development and achieving a diversified fan base, the brand carrying capacity of big Vs can be enhanced and the industry breadth of commercial cooperation can be broadened.

Cao Zenghui emphasized that in the future he will firmly promote the development of big Vs in vertical fields.

Looking back over the past year, Weibo has implemented the Golden Orange V operating system, intending to adjust the platform's content ecology, and through cross-domain strategies, deepened the construction of vertical field ecology, and increased the commercial participation opportunities of big Vs.

While this action has been effective, it has also given Weibo more confidence in the future. He predicts that "in 2024, the annual income of Weibo authors will reach 1.7 billion, a record high."

3. In the battle for minds, how do influencers help brands convey their value?

For any advertiser, Weibo's two major goals of promoting the big V route and vertical category construction, as well as its approach to comprehensive governance of the content ecosystem, also provide solutions for advertising placement from the underlying logic.

In the second half of the Internet advertising era, competition for advertising has become fierce. Advertisers have clear goals and hope to create buzz through accurate advertising, thereby bringing growth and high premiums to their brands and increasing profits and market competitiveness.

As a public opinion platform, Weibo can transform hot topics into mental consensus and even consumption trends, helping brands to shape their "roles".

Among them, a large number of mentally attractive KOLs on the Weibo platform and the high-quality vertical content they produce have had a great impact on user cognition and public opinion discussions.

Image source: Weibo

Wu Mo mentioned that KOLs on Weibo are participants and influencers of hot topics. Users can form an objective understanding of brands through the professional knowledge of KOLs, and high-quality content is the key to brand mind competition. On Weibo, the value of KOLs is more focused on influencing consumer minds by producing original content.

This content marketing strategy has also been well received by advertisers. According to data released by Weibo, advertisers with content marketing needs currently account for 67.5% of the total advertisers on the platform.

However, the direction of public opinion is always changing, and consumer demand has become more granular, which increases the difficulty for brands to build minds. But on the other hand, the opportunity for brands to seek incremental growth lies in capturing some granularity. In fact, Weibo has formed a complete KOL integrated service system that can solve most of the details of mind marketing and replicate it in multiple vertical fields.

For example, in the gaming sector, in a marketing collaboration with the mobile derivative game PX5, Weibo accurately perceived that one of the main challenges facing PX5 was that the popularity of the IP in the console gaming field alone could not reach a wider range of players.

To this end, Weibo has designed differentiated hot content for different groups of people, such as console game players, mobile game players, and high-profile content among these groups, providing content support points for brand actions.

Currently, this model can also be replicated to vertical fields such as beauty, food, sports, and medical care, helping brands achieve precise matching and high-frequency reach effect upgrades.

It can be said that no matter how the economic cycle changes, the mature commercial delivery system that Weibo has built over the past decade is sufficient to cope with the fiercely competitive red ocean war in the Internet advertising market.

The premise of everything is a "good ecosystem". An ecosystem with a large number of creators, a long-term stable user base, and a long-term output of high-quality content provides a key force for Weibo to continue to break through the circle. Weibo's adherence to the high-quality development strategy will also give it more chips in the next cycle.

Editor/Ziye This article is written by the author of Operation School [Jide], WeChat public account: [Connect Insight], original/authorized to be published in Operation School, and any reproduction without permission is prohibited.

The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.