As the GM of the Business Unit of Tencent Weibo, Xing Hongyu shared with us at the ChinaBang 2013 his views on the micro-blogging market and how Tencent’s going to move on as China’s social media guru. We’re all ears.
I think in the past year the most hotly debated topic about Weibo is the Infobesity it has brought to us. Some complained that they have been fed with too much negative news or hypocritical quotes which they found to be quite annoying. Some even suggested that Weixin could have just totally replaced the model of micro-blogging.
Well to me, it’s just a natural process to meet the adjustment period or we can say the bottleneck after two or three years’ fast growing, which does not necessarily imply any fatal weakness of the product itself. I think that to judge the future development of a product should usually base on its essential core competence rather than the comments or opinions from users. Currently we believe that Weibo has its unique value in which the information communication on an open social platform is needed and there has been no substitute for this by now. So basically Weibo still has it to last the vitality, how come we are facing so many doubts now? Probably it’s owing to the poor handling of some issues emerged in the developing process.
I’d like to share some points on how Tencent Weibo tries to change in the future. First, the efficiency of accessing information needs improving rapidly, so that our users can literally enjoy some “quality time” on Weibo. Second, we found out that the current contents focus on Weibo is too monotonous. We aim to build up a more diversified ecosystem covering life, society and people in addition to the celebrity speech only ground. And we will start the changes by solving the existed defects we have:
The basic form of Weibo has been evolving with the promotion of rich media, and later on possibly more innovative forms are to be seen. For instance the rich media form has naturally enable users to read longer blogs.
As to the poor management of information flow on Weibo, we will soon launch a product called Wei Circle which could help you to better classify the readers of your published contents. The whole process will be realized without any actual operating, because it’s based on the history data of your interested topics or posts. Another new service Weibo Keeper allows users to filter ad spams or harassing information. The ultimate goal of all these moves is to serve our users with more valuable contents, thus saving their time and energy to enjoy efficient and joyful reading experience.
Moreover, most users’ news feeds have been flooded with celebrity posts or some official accounts which we would like to change. Apart form the hot social issues, we hope more useful information on life services could be involved too. Wei Channel, another new product is designed to focus on some more in-depth contents, so that more users can actually read and even consume the related services.
We are excited to offer cooperation opportunities for developers on the aspects I have mentioned above. On the basic form exploration, Wei Channel, and other new products, 3rd party developers are always welcome.