Tencent is aggressively fighting with Sina in the Weibo race. Growing at break-neck speed, Tencent has now has over 100 million registered users which took only 10 months compared with Sina which took 18 months. Even Twitter took about 2 years to get to 100 million.
But Sina is not backing down easily in the micro-blog space, after it officially migrated to weibo.com. It’s almost like Google becoming an official word in the dictionary for the meaning of internet search.
As of September 30 the active QQ IM user accounts was 637 million, making it the world’s largest online community. This represents a large ready pool of users to tap into. Although Sina has captured much of the celebrity users which people naturally like to follow, QQ’s user base still dominates the ‘normal’ population of users. To demonstrate this, when TechNode posts on Sina Weibo we get many more re-posts but very few on Tencent Weibo – the user base is different. However in a defensive attack, Tencent is also trying to use the magnetic power of celebrities to promote Tencent QQ with Liu Xiang and Karen Mok.
Fang Li, the head of Tencent’s Weibo said that in QQ’s first stage of development; they’ll be focusing on media applications and maintaining a strategy similar to their competitors’. In stage two, they will turn to focusing on making full use of the interaction between users.
So although for now Sina is the leader when it comes to the micro-blogesphere, Tencent is ready to dual and this will be one major fight to watch.