European Business Schools and Chinese Social Media

By QS Contributor Updated Jun 15, 2014

Save

Introduction
European business schools need to embrace Sina Weibo

European Business Schools and Chinese Social Media main image

Andrew Collins

As China continues to develop and integrate itself into global society, more and more Chinese students are able and interested in studying abroad. European business schools are a particular hub for Chinese study abroad students, but the relative freshness of studying abroad has created an information and communication gap between prospective students and institutions.

Prospective MBA applicants struggle throughout the entire process, from finding potential European business schools at which they could study in the first place to understanding the requirements, while business schools struggle to find and correctly engage with the right demographic.

European business schools need to embrace Sina Weibo

A main factor in this disconnect is the lack of fit between the existing recruiting model and today’s needs. Though businesses and schools are slowly starting to understand that importance of integrating social media into their traditional repertoire, China’s social media landscape is a whole new ball game. With several of the biggest Western social media platforms- Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to name a few- blocked in China, Chinese netizens have turned to alternate platforms. Sina Weibo, a Twitter-esque microblogging platform launched in 2009, has been responsible for making a number of news articles, pictures, and videos go viral in China.

Despite the widespread popularity and use of Sina Weibo- with members reaching 503 million by the end of 2012- a report from KAWO (an online tool that syncs Facebook and Twitter accounts into Chinese social media) on European Business School social media engagement in China analyzed the FT’s top 20 European MBA programs on Sina Weibo. The results revealed that only 15 of these schools had legitimate accounts, less than half had over 1000 followers, and just a handful of them operated with a consistent and successful strategy.

The team behind KAWO aim to provide critical data for European business schools to understand their digital strengths and weaknesses in China – focusing on the use of Chinese social media. In addition to simply measuring followers, which can present a misleading representation of community interaction, the report also measured their digital performance across engagement and activity.

As the numbers of qualified Chinese students who want to study abroad continue to rise, European business schools – and those from other regions – need to find a way to measure the impact of their communication strategies in order to maintain competitive in today’s quick-moving and global environment.

Read the full report

Andrew Collins is the CEO of multi-award winning social media and technology company Mailman Group. KAWO is a product of Mailman and solves the need to open up Chinese social media channels to the World. Andrew was featured as the top entrepreneur under 30 in Australia in 2008 and continues to grow an extensive network of online media assets.