We’ve been talking about Sina Weibo’s fast expanding to social games, eCommerce etc, you might be wondering what’s Tencent’s plan about it. Even with 310millions registered users (vs. Sina Weibo’s 250million users), Tencent would never get relaxed. Yesterday, Tencent made the first trial toward the monetization of its weibo platform, introducing eCommerce with partnership of B2C platforms such as OKBuy, 51Buy etc.
Similar to what Sina Weibo offers to 360buy, Tencent Weibo users can now visit companies like OKBuy’s official account page to browse the products. Once you pick the product, you will be redirected to OKBuy’s main site to make the purchase. Since Tencent Weibo could bring huge of exposure and traffic to the merchants, we would assume that Tencent could ask for revenue share or commission in future.
When eCommerce is on Weibo, it’s all about word of mouth. Tencent obviously understands it well and even develops an idea to make it more viral. Basically, given a limited time period, if the sale news got retweeted by one user, the price for that product will be cut down a bit (for the case of OKBuy, 0.1 yuan less per retweet). So if you want more discount, just get more friends to retweet the news and it may turn out you can get that product for free. Smart marketing idea!
Opp,Great deal and smart marketing idea.But Tencent weibo’s eCommerce compare with Sina’s eCommerce,which more compete?Tencent weibo have many registered users and It more than Sina weibo registered users .Let us wait and see what happens.
another idea cloned from overseas.
To me, it sounds very like what Groupon is doing now