Sina Weibo, known as the Chinese twitter, is one of the most popular social media sites in China. With over 392 million monthly active users, it is the top social media platform Crayfish would recommend for your brand to start with.
What type of Weibo account should I get?
There are four different types of accounts on Weibo:
- Regular personal account
- Regular company account
- Verified personal account
- Verified company account
There’s also a VIP upgrade that can be purchased in addition to anyone of the 4 accounts above.
Crayfish suggests that all companies should aim to have a verified company account. The verified account means that your company has been vetted. It gives much more credibility to your account, which is especially important for consumers who can be skeptical dealing with businesses overseas. A verified account also comes with additional marketing features: e.g. access to the activity centre and launching reward winning activities to your followers (e.g. promotions and prizes).
What documents are required?
If you have a Chinese business license, you could register as a local Chinese company. The documents that you will need are straight forward:
- Most up to date information about the company, including official trading name of the business and contact email address;
- Detailed information of the business license (e.g. registration number);
- Scanned copy of business license and certificate of organization code.
There are two scenarios of how a corporate account can be verified if you are a foreign company without Chinese business license.
- Verifying an account via a dealer/distributor
If you have already registered your trademark in China, you can go with this option. You could verify your Weibo account via your distributor. Your distributor needs to prepare the following documents:
- Certificate of dealership to prove legitimacy of your dealer’s or distributor’s operations for your products in China;
- Chinese business license of your dealer or distributor.
- Verifying your account directly
If you are an overseas company and your trademark is not registered in China, you will need to follow this process. In addition, you will need to pay a fee based on your location. The documents that you need to prepare are listed below:
- Company’s registration documents and business licenses, together with their translations into Chinese;
- Application Covering Letter and Third-Party Authorization letter that should include the company’s seal and/or company director/chairman’s signature;
- Purchase Order Form;
- Official website URL;
- Detailed introduction to the company’s products and/or services;
- Operation contact person or team contact information.
What’s the next step?
All your submitted information will be carefully checked prior to final approval and they will ask for additional information if they are not clear about nature of your business. We would strongly suggest you to commission someone who is familiar with most updated information as well as living in the same time zone. China is 8 hours ahead of UK, having someone locally would significantly speed up the formality process.
Service provider and partners at Crayfish can help you with any questions, translating and notarising your documents, submission and the final verification for your Weibo account.
If you are interested, feel free to post a project on Crayfish.io now on https://test.crayfish.io/login/?path=/project/post/. We are also very happy to answer your questions. Please feel free to contact us.