Countries Not on Weibo Hurting Themselves

While other countries’ tourism boards are busy promoting their must-see sceneries, must-try dishes and so on, there are still some countries promoting their tourism the old-fashioned way, despite the fact that they are on China’s 2014 list of favorite outbound tourism destinations. Let’s have a peek of who is still secluded from Weibo.

Indonesia

Vietnam

Russia

Some of the countries above have realized the importance of social commerce and therefore have created and developed stunning Twitter accounts, full of intriguing pictures with interesting descriptions, trying to attract tourists from around the world to spend some days exploring their countries. Be that as it may, these countries’ tourism boards completely forgot that one of their biggest market are the Mainland Chinese who can’t access Twitter but have their own version in the microblogging site Weibo.

It is obviously a big loss for these countries who are still not aware of Weibo’s marketing capability. Without Weibo, your country is under the radar of 2.5 billion people. USA’s Weibo account has successfully gained the attention of nearly 600K people in a short two years. And in 2014 alone, there were 2.2 million Chinese tourists who traveled to the States.

Similarly, China’s neighbouring country, Japan, sports 300K followers on its Weibo account, which has been a top advertising platform for the country’s DMO’s. The success of these efforts are reflected by Japan welcoming 2.4 million Chinese visitors last year.

All in all, creating and maintaining a tourism Weibo account is a small investment that can promise a big return and is something that all DMO’s should focus on.