Tencent’s Short Video App WeShow Added Sina Weibo Support

WeShow, Tencent’s Vine-like short video sharing app launched two months ago, released an update that, surprisingly, supports Sina Weibo connection and sharing onto the latter. It’s the first time I can recall that Tencent’s service supports a third-party social service. What’s more is it’s Sina Weibo, Tencent Weibo’s long-time direct competitor.

WeShow users now can invite friends on Sina Weibo and Tencent’s social services, social network Q-zone, mobile messaging app WeChat and microblogging service Tencent Weibo, to join it and share video clips to those platforms (see the screenshot below).

WeShow Supports Sina Weibo And Tencent’s Social Services

New features with the update also include that users can opt in to automatically sharing videos to WeChat’s sharing platform Moment, share videos with selected contacts, save videos as draft, among others.

What’s also interesting is Tencent obviously drew lessons from the failure in the competition with Sina Weibo. A couple of years ago Sina Weibo got much traction quickly and left Tencent Weibo far behind thanks to the strategy of having celebrities, opinion leaders and the like on board so as to attract their fans and the audiences to join Weibo. Now WeShow has successfully had some celebrities and content contributors to publish videos recorded by themselves or other contents like movie trailers.

Sina must be well aware of that. Sina Weibo app added a short video feature one month earlier than WeShow’s launch. The company also has started promoting WeMeet, a WeChat-like mobile messaging app launched in the same month with the video sharing feature.