Universities increasingly use Weibo social media to reach China students

By Yojana Sharma. Recent surveys of universities in the US, the UK and Australia have shown a rapid rise in the number of institutions using China’s most popular microblogging platform Sina Weibo to reach out to students in China and use social media as a tool for international recruitment.
Weibo, launched in 2009, now has some 400 million Chinese language users, according to statistics released in November by the company Sina, which operates the platform. This is a big jump from 300 million users in May 2012 and 200 million in August 2011.
Although it is not the only social media network in China – others are Renren and the less known Sohu and Tencent – Weibo is widely used in a country where media censorship is rife, and enables users to directly seek out information that may not be available publicly. Read more...