Weibo’s Chance in the Field of Online Travel

Recent news is about Weibo moving into the field of travelling. With the more and more choices about travelling for users, as the biggest social media in China, it can use its content aggregation, sharing, communication advantages to involve into the travel industry.

How Weibo nuggets online travel?

Online travel chain is very long, covers food, accommodation, tour and entertainment. Combining these points, I think Weibo can nuggets online travel through the following aspects.

1.Structured information processing

Weibo naturally carries a lot of travel information, but it is still need to be improved. So far, the information is not processed structurally, if it can support users in multiple dimensions, it will be quite valuable. 

2.Social Marketing

One of Weibo’s big advantage is establishing a social model for travelers. It is not just a simple brand page, but also can build a fans group, use marketing tools, directly link the official product service and so on.
Another advantage is the tourism talent. We can clearly see that Weibo increased the support to the tourism talent. As the proportion of O2O mode in users’ behaviors ascends, the ability of connection has become the key to the travel industry. The account of travel agencies and talents can actually be the link between tourists and destinations. Weibo now is the only one platform can connect tourists, tourism enthusiasts, talents of tourists, tourist destination and related industry chains of tourism industries.

3.Accurately locate the user

The most valuable resource of Weibo is the massive amounts of user data. Through a lot of historical date, you can draw out the outline of the personal information of user clearly. Therefore, Weibo can accurately locate the potential users of online travel or through the cooperation with online travel agencies or promoting products all by itself. It is feasible to take a share under the situation of the high price and in the continuously expanding online travel market. 

The product characteristics determine business model
QQ in early period did not determine the profitable model, but later learning from the South Korean internet industry and combining its features, QQ started to focus on virtual value-added services and games, and finally achieved a great success.

Back to Weibo, Weibo is a typical SNS, so advertising become the main source of income. On the way to explore more profit pattern, Weibo should still expand with its social attribute.

First of all, for tourist destination, attracting users to travel process needs a lot of long-term rendering, but the spread of Weibi properties is suitable for establishing goodwill and conversing into trip through long-term “information bombardment”.  

Secondly, for the online travel agencies, under the situation of serious products homogeneity, Weibo needs to find an appropriate way to get to the users’ point. Meanwhile, it is what Weibo is good at.

Finally, for ordinary travel lovers, open micro blogging platform is still the best choice for searching information, writing the strategies and sharing. 

In a word, for tourism enterprises, the value of Weibo is better connecting users. For tourists, the value of Weibo is giving better travel reference and sharing. For Weibo itself, it can combine product features with the online travel business model and further explore the market potentials with partners.