The Ultimate Guide to Weibo in 2025: Account Registration, Post Publishing, Best Marketing Practices
If you live in China or visit from time to time, you have probably already heard of Sina Weibo. It is one of the biggest tools for digital social networking, interaction and entertainment, and is one of the main players in digital marketing in China. Hosting around 600 million monthly active users, Sina Weibo is celebrating it’s 16th year this year (2025). Some say the development was inspired by Twitter, but today it is more like a Chinese Facebook, featuring a personal feed, photo and video sharing.
Weibo – Userbase Demographics
In 2024, Weibo reached over 600 million monthly active users and 230 daily active users – numbers that rank it just above X (Twitter), its oft-cited counterpart.
Launched in 2009, Weibo is one of China’s older internet platforms that has continued to stay relevant and successful to this day. This is reflected in the age breakdown of users, as despite being too young when Weibo started growing, Zoomers make up the largest proportion of users on the site, with 35% of users being between the ages of 20 and 29. The next largest is the 30-39 age group, comprising 30% of users. In terms of gender, the userbase is evenly balanced, with men and women respectively making up 53% and 47% of the userbase.
The most popular industries on Weibo
Weibo is a platform that Chinese facing B2C companies of any size simply need to be on. The 10 biggest industries on Weibo are currently Entertainment & Media, E-commerce & Retail, Technology & Electronics, Automotive, Food & Beverage, Gaming & E-sports, Financial Services, Tourism & Hospitality, Sports, and Education.
Who posts on Weibo?
Weibo is an important platform for celebrities, with social networking greatly increasing revenue streams. Many brands have benefited enormously from highly influential celebrities mentioning products in their posts. Here is our updated list of the most followed people on Weibo:
The top 10 most-followed people on Weibo
- Xie Na 谢娜 – 126 million followers
- He Jiong 何炅 – 119 million followers
- Yang Mi 杨幂 – 112 million followers
- Angelababy 杨颖 – 105 million followers
- ChenKun 陈坤 – 93.5 million followers
- Zhao Liying 赵丽颖 – 90.4 million followers
- YiYangQianXi 易烊千玺– 89.7 million followers
- Wangyuan 王源 – 84.1 million followers
- Yaochen 姚晨 – 83.9 million followers
- Deng Chao 邓超 – 80.6 million followers
Given the huge potential of generating large numbers of followers, why not get started with your own page? Read on to find out how you can create a Weibo account for your brand.
How to Register a Corporate Account on Weibo in 2025
What’s the difference between a corporate and personal account?
Corporate accounts on Weibo are indicated with a badge next to their names, certifying that they have been officially verified by Weibo. Privileges given to corporate accounts that are not available to personal accounts include professional features such as fan service, event center, data center, and ad center. Other benefits include a personalized page display, data analysis tools, and CRM tools.
Third party support for registering a corporate account on Weibo
Please be aware that the process for registering a corporate account on Weibo varies depending on the status of your company. For example, if your company is registered in China, i.e. it has a Chinese business license, the registration process is fairly straightforward. However, for foreign companies based outside China, the process can be considerably more complex, as it normally requires the intervention of a specialized third party agent based in China.
As the rules and costs for registering a corporate account on Weibo are subject to change, we recommend contacting a specialist before starting your registration. Therefore, don’t hesitate to contact HI-COM, and we will put you in touch with one of our Chinese Digital Marketing experts, who will go through the registration process with you in plain English, and indicate the costs, time frame, and administrative documents required for registration.
How to Get a VIP Account on Weibo
After successfully registering as an official corporate account, you have the option of upgrading to a VIP account. While not a mandatory step, upgrading to a VIP account provides a variety of benefits:
- Freedom to edit posts after publication
- The right to pin a post to the top of the account profile
- The ability to customize the account cover image and layout
- Access to a dedicated service team
- Display of a golden crown badge next to your account name
How to Post on Weibo
As a microblogging platform, Weibo’s posting functionality operates much like Twitter, with a few minor differences. There are a few different ways to start posting:
Posting on Weibo from your Desktop:
Method 1:
At the top of your account’s feed, you will see a box for creating a post. When writing in the compose box, the top right corner will display the number of characters you have written. Although there is a 2,000-character limit, posts longer than 140 characters will be truncated in the feed and only visible in full when users click the 展开or “full text” button.
At the bottom of the post box, there are functions to include a variety of other media, such as 表情emoticons, 图片pictures, 视频video, 提到某人tagging, 话题hashtags, 头条文章articles, and 电影点评movie reviews. Clicking on the ‘meatballs’ menu icon provides further options such as 直播livestream, 地点location, 问答questionnaire, 新鲜事fresh topics, and 微评short reviews. Hashtag tagging functions can also be accessed by typing in the @ and # symbol respectively.
Before publishing, you can set a 时间发 post scheduler to post at a scheduled time. You can also set your post’s visibility options.
The default is for 公开 public release, but you have the option of setting your post to be visible to fans, friends, groups, or only yourself. After your post is complete, click the orange 发布 publish button to send out your post.
Method 2:
Another way to post from your desktop is to click the compose icon on the top right of your Weibo page. This opens up a simplified version of the post box from method 1.
While the emoticon, photo, video, and hashtag icons are present, the article function, meatballs menu and its associated functions will not appear here.
Posting from the Weibo Mobile App:
For foreign companies, the advantage of posting from a mobile phone is that the app language can be set to English according to your phone’s system language. To post, click on the orange + button and choose the type of post you want to create. Here you have the option of text, photo, video, review, or livestream. To add hashtags, just type in the # symbol for a list of the top hashtags or continue typing to create your own. And just like on the desktop app, you can tag other accounts with the @ symbol.
About Hashtags on Weibo:
When inserting hashtags, either by typing the # symbol (desktop and mobile) or clicking on the hashtag icon (desktop only), you will first see a selection of trending hashtags. Hashtags are sorted by category, such as food, fashion, pets, etc. The first tab shows the most recently used hashtags, the second tab shows trending hashtags, and the following tabs are various categories. Hashtags change every week, so these have been left untranslated.
Popular Marketing Practices on Weibo in 2025
KOL Marketing on Weibo
KOL marketing, or key opinion leader marketing, has become the new norm in digital marketing on Chinese social media platforms in the last few years, and Weibo is no exception.
By partnering with a KOL, brands are able to carry out more organic and engaging marketing campaigns. Finding a KOL with authority and influence over particular demographics allows brands to effectively leverage the KOL’s personal brand to engage target audiences. As one of the most effective digital marketing tools in a brand’s marketing arsenal in China, KOL marketing can complement other tools such as CRM marketing in developing an effective digital marketing strategy.
With the success of KOL marketing, the last few years have also seen an explosion in MCNs, or multi-channel networks, which are essentially KOL agencies. MCNs offer pre-screened KOLs with authentic followers and provide KOLs with the resources to further grow their reach. In 2025, working with a KOL usually requires going through an MCN.
Here is the list of the most followed KOLs on Weibo by industry in 2025:
Discover the most creative and influential KOLs in your industry on Weibo that are worth following!
Here is a recent list of popular KOLs who have the most followers on Weibo:
- Beauty: Vera Wang (王婉辰)
- Travel: YingGuo Baojie (英国报姐)
- Education: Zhang Xuefeng (张雪峰)
- Car: Han Lu (韩路)
- Science: Wuqiong Xiaoliang (张辰亮)
- Parenting: Wang Renping (王人平)
- Medicine: Zhang Wenhong (张文宏)
- Sport: Li Na (李娜)
- Law: Luo Xiang (罗翔)
Looking for KOLs to promote your brand? Check our other articles out!
Top 21 Chinese KOLs & Influencers in 2025
KOLs that sell products in minutes
Content Planning and Creation
Just like on any other social media platform, an effective digital marketing strategy on Weibo relies on quality and well-timed content.
While Weibo’s post character limit is quite high, its userbase is more receptive to shorter descriptive content (200 words max). Typically, posts with images, infographics, and videos are more popular. Avoid posts with longer written content as it’s just not suitable for the platform. Content such as full-length blogs and articles can be attached as a link, with posts serving to briefly describe highlighted content.
Depending on the type of company you run and the brand image you’re pursuing, the frequency of posts can vary. However, we recommend posting no less than twice a week to keep followers engaged. The Weibo algorithm will favour accounts that post more often.
Public Traffic Pools
Weibo is one of the leading social media platforms in China. Since the start of 2020, Weibo has been used by more than 50% of China’s internet population and now has over 600 million monthly active users. The platform connects users based on their focus and interests as opposed to relationships e.g. friends, colleagues and family.
Therefore all users on Weibo connect with each other without strong, pre-existing relationships, which makes it the largest social media platform of its kind with the highest volume of public traffic and resources.
Weibo helps brands and KOLs improve brand awareness and helps to create a high exposure rate allowing every message to be viewed in seconds.
Target Vertical Markets from a Wider User Base
Weibo categorizes content generated by its users into all types of industries, celebrities and interests. Today, there are over 700 thousand verified authors, 28 thousand celebrities, 3 thousand MCN brands, 500 TV shows, and 64 vertical fields on Weibo.
The age of Weibo users typically ranges from 20-35. The platform has established itself as the key newsfeed hub for Chinese users to search and view information about the hottest news, government updates, entertainment and fashion trends. It supports content creators and helps them to become KOLs in their specific field and helps brands identify themselves as industry leaders.
Collect market and consumer insights
Benefitting from its rule of unlimited posts, Weibo is a big database filled with customer behaviors and interests, delivering annual market reports for various industries. Brands with Weibo accounts will be able to understand the market and their customers more in depth and create a more successful marketing strategy with the insights provided by Weibo.
Connect Weibo with social e-commerce platforms: Weibo Mini-Store (微博小店）
Weibo has launched a tool called Weibo mini-store. It is a native, lightweight e-commerce feature fully integrated within the Weibo app. It allows creators, influencers (KOLs), and brands to open a shop directly on their Weibo profile to sell products and services without redirecting followers to external websites or apps like Taobao or JD.com.
The live-streaming content created on Taobao can be synced with Weibo to generate higher exposure rates. This feature has enabled Key Opinion Customers (KOCs) to support brands and convert their Weibo followers into customers via “shoppable” posts. The word-of-mouth marketing strategy, applied in private-traffic-based platforms e.g. Wechat, can also be applied on Weibo to support brands wanting to maximize the impact of an advertising campaign.
Advertising on Weibo
For brands just starting out on Weibo, paid ads can be a way to begin growing a following for strong organic reach down the road. With Weibo’s CRM system, advertisers can easily choose specific demographics to target through analytics. Weibo paid ads come in a few different types: splash page ads, in-feed ads, fan headlines, fan tunnels, and search engine ads.
- Splash page ads are ads that show up on the mobile app when users first open the app.
- In-feed ads or display ads show up as sponsored posts within a user’s feed.
- Fan headlines are ads that show up on the top of targeted user’s feeds for 24 hours.
- Fan tunnels are like fan headlines except they target the entire Weibo community.
- Search engine ads operate much like Google ads, appearing when users search for the relevant keywords or hashtags.
Searching in English on Weibo
It is not always easy to search in English on Weibo. Despite the platform constantly updating the algorithm to separate the searches from user names to pages and other search elements, it is still not particularly user friendly. The important thing to remember is that people go to Weibo to check for the latest social updates and entertainment, and not for searching brands, campaigns and products. So when you search in English on Weibo for “Mac Lipstick” for example, the platform will show all the latest posts that include this enquiry, but it might not actually include the brand’s page, or related campaigns.
Differences between Weibo and Facebook
Facebook is a social media platform based on close relationships such as families, co-workers, schoolmates and friends. Weibo however, is more focused on interests and open traffic.
One of the main differences between Facebook and Weibo is that Facebook is an online social networking platform with a social media function, whilst Weibo is a social media platform with interaction and messaging functions. This key difference means that:
- Users can only view the activities of people they are “friends” on Facebook, whilst on Weibo, users are able to view the activities of people they are not already connected with.
- Weibo is used as a newsfeed platform that allows users to search, view and collect key updates from governmental policies, entertainment, fashion and social events. This means that Weibo can provide key advertising products for brands whilst Facebook is more of a social networking platform keeping users updated on their friends’ activities.
- On Weibo, users may be drawn to a product or service as a result of a recommendation by a KOL. Whist the same marketing strategy can only be applied on Facebook when users are connected with the KOL, therefore brands have a better chance to become more visible on Weibo than on Facebook.
Compared to Weibo, Facebook is a giant influencer.
It has over 3 billion monthly active users whilst Weibo over 600 million.
Both Facebook and Weibo have entered the e-commerce market, however there are some minor differences of how these two platforms operate:
- Facebook plans to cooperate with existing main stream B2C e-commerce platforms, e.g. Amazon and Walmart
- The live-stream feature currently present on Weibo (syncing with other platforms) is not yet available on Facebook
- Facebook allows its users to create co-live-streaming with other users, whilst Weibo doesn’t
- The advertising programs on Facebook provide larger flexibility for brands. For example, Facebook charges advertising fees based on performance, including CPC, CPA, CPM and OCPM. Whilst Weibo charges are based on scope, targeted users with specific interests, age, location or industry
