Twitter VS Weibo: Different Paths, Common Points.

With the thriving of groundswell and the popularity of social media, Twitter earned much success in this competition. In China, Weibo has been introduced to Internet users since 2010. Weibo originally adopt the pattern of twitter: every post is limited to 140 characters; easy registration process; allows anyone to follow anyone else. Weibo earns much popularity in China, the Internet slang words people use in Weibo also become hot issues. With its unique and attractive style, Weibo gets more attention than other social medias. It is no doubt that Weibo has become the most commonly used social media in China. By the end of 2010, there were over 2 hundred million Weibo posts in total.

Seven years have passed, the latest data shows that the revenue of Weibo in 2016 is more than 10 hundred million, which is an important milestone for Chinese social media. However, the profit is basically from commercials and sales revenue, which means lots of functions have been changed and the autonomy of users may be sacrificed in some way.

The most important thing is the classic function of Weibo has changed, each post can be over 140 characters now. Also, with the purchasing of membership, your posts can be shown in other's home page even though they do not follow you. Moreover, the trends can be bought in Weibo, so it is usually utilized as a marketing strategy for movies or TV shows.

With its changing functions, Weibo seems to lose its original features and become more commercialized. Lots of users complained that Weibo was a place for them to communicate with friends and get to know what was happening around the world. But with the developed function that users can limit the people who can comment on their posts, this function reduces the efficiency of communication. However, it is interesting that even though with so much complaint, the users in Weibo keeps increasing and the total users in Weibo have reached 313 million in 2016. How could it be?

One of the reasons is that business marketing has shifted to be more mobilized and socialized, Weibo utilized this trend and earned much benefit from it. Since it also reach well balance without losing supports, we can refer from that users would like to sacrifice a little as long as their needs for social media can be satisfied: owning the power to influence people and also can be surrounded by many influenced people. That is why even though Twitter and Weibo choose different paths, their users never left.