Yesterday, Weidong “Jim” Zhang wrote a guest blog (over 300 views in less than 24 hours) for FastPivot which featured a list of the most popular Americans on the trendy Chinese social media site, Weibo. In this blog, we’ll take a look at how those Americans who are so popular in China compare on Twitter:
- Tom Cruise is doing the Mission Impossible on Weibo with 2, 813, 978 followers. On Twitter, Cruise has only attracted 1,982,920 followers. Now we see why Hollywood is targeting China! Just as Weidong noted that Cruise has a China agent handling his Weibo account, it seems he has one in the U.S. managing his Twitter as well–the real question is how many more followers would Cruise have if he were actually Tweeting himself.
- Bill Gates might be popular on Weibo with 1,904,363 followers, but he’s about twice as celebrated on Twitter with 3,499, 037 followers. Does this mean the Chinese are more into movie stars than tech. inventing nerds?
The NBA has also built quite a following on Weibo, but have they been equally as successful with three pointers on Twitter?
- Andrew Bynum has 1,057, 757 followers on Weibo, but only 76, 971 on his Twitter.
- Ron Artest has 946, 641 followers on Weibo but only 4131 on Twitter.
- Tracy McGrady has 830,686 followers on Weibo and only 58,325 on Twitter.
- Kevin Garnett has 732,906 followers on Weibo and 9,934 on Twitter.
OK, so the Chinese clearly drool over NBA basketball stars too, but where’s the follow-love in the USA? According to Weidong’s research, many of the above Weibo users aren’t even keeping up with their accounts, compared to the fairly active Twitter feeds we are seeing NBA stars working.
- Michael Phelps, the American Olympic swimming idol has made a big splash in China with 352,173 followers on Weibo, which makes his 91,950 on Twitter seem like a baby wave. Of course, he did win 8 medals at the Beijing Olympic Games in China in 2008, which heavily contributed to his instant Weibo fame in the PRC.
- Michael J. Sandel, a popular Harvard Univ. poli. sci. prof., is quite the phenom on Weibo with 17,384 followers, while he seems to be a virtual unknown on Twitter with a paltry 33 followers (and that’s with 700 tweets and him following 38 people). It is obviously possible to become famous in China while staying under the radar back in the U.S.. Sandal was levering his China account (with only 19 posts) for a book promotion this summer–but now he is no longer updating his Weibo (according to Weidong’s blog).
- Dr. Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital has 14, 213 followers on Weibo and only 5,079 on Twitter. With nearly treble fold followers on Weibo, one has to wonder whether Chinese investors are making it thrice as worth his time to manage the international presence?
From this quick summary comparison analysis “follow” numbers seem to flow much more readily in China, but we can’t yet make the assumption that those on Weibo are seeing proportionate return from their Chinese marketing efforts. Let us know, by comment, how Weibo is making the efforts worth your time. Until then, we’ll have to assume that Weibo’s nest is a lot fuller than America’s Twitter…what’s hatching, in terms of ROI, is anybody’s guess at this point.
Disclaimer: It’s important to note that all Twitter data was retrieved on 9.20.11 and Weibo data over the last week– if you’re reading this blog beyond that time frame, figures are likely to be highly inaccurate. Also, we did our best to identify official Twitter accounts associated with the users mentioned above, but some mistakes could have been made in the research process.
