Facebook works as a social network site (SNS) that gives people ways to communicate. I login Facebook every day and I found I would possibly miss “something” if I don’t surf Facebook day by day. Although Facebook is so popular nowadays, I discovered there is another SNS which could fight against it.
I recently found that Hong Kong artists love to use “Weibo” as their SNS. It is a channel for them to express feelings, share experience and photos, communicate with fans and so on and the functions are multiple. The reason why I knew these people like to surf Weibo is that the reporters of magazines and newspapers usually quote some posts uploaded by these artists from their Weibo other than Facebook. The reporters often wrote like this, “Angelababy wrote in Weibo and said she loves sponge cake… ”, “Andy Lau said in Weibo he was having live concert in Beijing…” I see the trend of having a Weibo account among the artists in Hong Kong.
In my point of view, this becomes a trend is due to the disconnection of Facebook in mainland China. People living in China basically couldn’t surf Facebook, and they even couldn’t get a Facebook account in China because the internet servers of China block the connection of the website of Facebook. I am not going to talk about the specific meaning for internet servers of China to block Facebook.com here, but I would like to share my opinion about Hong Kong artists prefer using Weibo rather than Facebook to communicate with their friends or followers.
In fact, People in China are not hundred percent prohibited to access Facebook unless they install a program like “Cracker” in their computers in order to get over the fire wall so that they could browse Facebook.com. I think it is rather troublesome and problematic for majority of people to do so. As most of the people in China couldn’t surf Facebook in their country, they use Weibo instead. China is the world's most populous country which has over 1.3 billion people while the world's population is approximately 6.7 billion. We can easily imagine that there is a huge number of people might be using Weibo in China as their SNS, like people using Facebook in Hong Kong. And therefore, Weibo can definitely help those artists (Weibo users) attract more potential fans in China and maintain relationship with existing fans in China who are having Weibo accounts.
Actually, I don’t use Weibo as my SNS, so I am not quite familiar with its functions. Nevertheless, I guess it is a very functional SNS for people (especially people in China) to communicate due to its popularity within these years.
Quoted from Wikipedia:
Sina Weibo is a Chinese microblo site, similar to Twitter, launched by Sina corporation, China's biggest web portal, in August 2009. According to Sina, the microblog site remains in beta, though it has more than 100 million users and millions of posts per day, and is adding 10 million new users per month. The company also said it now has more than 60,000 verified accounts, consisting of celebrities, sports stars and other VIPs. The top 100 users now have over 180 million followers. Furthermore, Sina said that more than 5,000 companies and 2,700 media organizations in China are currently using Weibo. The site is maintained by a growing microblogging department of 200 employees responsible for technology, design, operations, and marketing. The site is currently available in both simplified and traditional Chinese characters.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sina_Weibo
