The Fuctionalities of Sina Weibo

Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, and Silvestre (2011) present fuctionalities of serveral sites, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, and Facebook.

Here based on mu understanding about the seven functions and Weibo, I present the functionalities of Weibo, with the darker color indicating the more Weibo emphasize.

Presence:
Using Weibo, people cannot know if other users are accessible.

Groups:

Weibo actually do not have any formal communities or subcommunities, if all of followers of a certain people are not accounted to be communities.

Relationships:

Weibo does not show someone you might know or be interested. But you could check followers of your followers and people you follow. And so it doe not so emphasize relationships as much as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Identity:

In Weibo, you could choose to show real names, genders, ages, and professions, and also request Weibo for identification, which is indicated by "v" besides your account names. However, it is not mandatory and most of Weibo users are not identified.

Reputation:

Reputation in Weibo are often identified by the number of followers. For example, celebrity often have millions of followers and thus you could identified the hottest super stars by checking the number of their followers. Also, the number of comments and likes are other indicators.

Conversation:

Of course, as a social media, Weibo foster conversation among users.

Sharing:

Different from LinkedIn and Facebook, users in Weibo often share photos, musics, videos, and products and services that they think to be good or bad. Interestingly, there are many Weibo accounts just use "sharing" to make money. For example, there are at least one Weibo in a city to be as a platform for all of Weiboers to post photos of restaurants and food as well as their comments, which is like Yelp.


Reference:
Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business horizons, 54(3), 241-251.