KOL marketing in China for BLOCKCHAIN projects

KOL marketing in china is getting more and more popular than before, especially for some specific industries, for example, block chain.

Chinese social media influencers play an increasingly important role in China’s marketing industry, especially Weibo KOL. Due to the large number of users of Weibo platform, the exposure brought by industry leaders is quite amazing, which is ideal for enterprises that want to increase exposure and expand brand awareness.

As the block chain industry is a very sensitive and regulated industry in China, the promotion of blockchain on many platforms is blocked, and some platforms even prohibit completely the promotion of blockchain. In this case, Sina Weibo seems to be one of the fewer platforms with huge number of users that allows the promotion of blockchain.

In the past few years, NetFin Marketing team has helped many blockchain clients to promote their projects via Weibo KOL marketing. Based on previous experience, posts have high exposure (on average, more than half a million views for each posts), which is successful for brand awareness promotion. However, due to the Chinese government’s attention to this industry recently, Weibo have also strengthened their governance over KOL’s release of blockchain industry-related content.

This was the case with our recent blockchain post, for example.

We got the feedback from Weibo KOL that, when he posted, the blockchain theme failed to get the approval on the Micro-task platform* during this period of time.

(Micro-task platform* : For your reference, besides of the method of posting the content via blogger’s own personal page (like what we all do on the social account when posting contents), it’s a special channel KOLs usually use that allows more exposures and external link in the content)

This was because of President Xi Jinping’s speech about blockchain on October 25. Currently, blockchain is a hot topic in the industry.

Weibo has strengthened the content review of OVERSEA blockchain platforms which are without ICP Filling*, as shown in the figure below.

(ICP*: Internet Content Provider, for your reference, it is for validating website reality in China, it’s very important in China that all websites need to have ICP Filling done)

The blogger could not publish the content on the Micro-task platform, but he still could publish it via his personal page, and the content would be at risk of being blocked (404 page is shown).

It’s not what we would do for our clients.

Final solution?

To solve problems for the client, we reconnected with several Weibo influencers after searching for a variety of solutions, and released it successfully through another influencer! Therefore, it can be seen that there is a certain probability that the audit of KOL Posting fails, not that it is impossible to release.

The posts were so well received that we typically recorded 789,000 views in the week after posting. This block chain project has gained good publicity, once again proving that Weibo KOL promotion is a great marketing tool for the blockchain industry.