Weibo takes a page out of Twitter’s book with the beta launch of its TV ratings service

Weibo, the Chinese microblogging service commonly known as ‘China’s Twitter,’ has followed in its counterpart’s footsteps after it announced the beta launch of its TV ratings service. In the announcement, Weibo said that its service was adopted from the Nielsen-Twitter TV ratings and localized according to Chinese TV programs.

The Twitter TV ratings service launched in the US in 2012 in collaboration with Nielsen, and the first report went live in October last year. The service adds a range of Twitter-related metrics related to TV shows to existing broadcast ratings data, making it easier for advertisers and ad agencies to follow conversations related to such programs.

Twitter recently announced plans to expand its TV ratings service globally to the Nordics, Russia, parts of Africa and Southeast Asia — on top of the UK and Spain. The global rollout of the ratings service, however, will be done in conjunction with Kantar — linked to the company Weibo has also tied up with.

Weibo’s plans to develop its TV ratings service were revealed in January, when a product known as Weibo TV Ratings Indexes was launched in conjunction with CSM Media, which is a joint venture company between Kantar and CTR Market Research. The Indexes would help to standardize the analysis of social media discussion around TV programs in terms of both users and volumes, in order to provide a more systematic evaluation of how TV shows are being talked about on Weibo.

The two companies said that the aim was to “provide an industry standard for China’s media industry to measure TV-related social conversations on Weibo.”

Now the results of that measurement system are being showcased with the TV ratings service up and running. It reveals information including how many people read Weibo postings about a particular TV show (for a time span of 24 hours starting from six hours before the show), and how many mentions were made on Weibo about that program.

By emphasizing first on Twitter TV ratings and getting advertisers interested in the metric, the social network then went on to launch TV ad targeting and TV conversation targeting for advertisers to zone in on chatter around TV shows. It seems likely that Weibo might just go down that route too, with TV starting to play a larger role in its advertising strategy eventually.

Headline image via Lionel Bonaventure/AFP/Getty Images