Shanghai's microblog 'most influential'

For the past two months, the Shanghai municipal government's four official microblogs have been far more influential than those of any other government organization in the nation, suggests new data from the country's largest microblog service provider.

Not yet three months old, the city's microblog operated by Shanghai's government press office has accumulated some 750,000 followers on China's answer to Twitter, Sina Weibo, since setting up an official online mouthpiece through the service provider last year, according to the Sina Weibo report released on the weekend. 

The city government's three other microblogs on competing online Chinese platforms collectively boast another 1.07 million followers. 

The city government had released some 1,600 posts via its microblogs as of Sunday, with online users forwarding its notices some 543,000 times and responding with some 133,000 comments. 

Despite the city's subway operator attracting some 1.44 million followers on Sina Weibo - a crowd gained over the last nearly 20 months - it placed second in the ranking, while microblogs for the Chengdu government and Nanjing traffic police also proved less influential on Sina Weibo than that of the Shanghai government's.

"The Shanghai government microblog has been at the top of the most influential list of Weibo government organizations for the past 79 days," Sina Weibo, which was founded in 2009, said Saturday in a written statement. 

The influential power of a Weibo account, determined by assessing the effectiveness and popularity of a microblog based on a complex calculation, the statement added, is "no longer determined solely by its number of followers, [but] a comprehensive evaluation based on posts, comments and the sum total of active followers."

Among the top 100 influential government organization microblogs, meanwhile, Shanghai's tourism bureau ranked 24th and its police bureau 47th. The city's communist youth league committee, railway police bureau, youth volunteer association and railway station administration also made the list. 

Success from the city government's microblogs stems from well-managed operations, said social sciences expert Xie Yungeng. 

"It has a clear mandate to serve the public, and does this with clever posts and timely interaction with followers," the deputy dean of Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Institute of Arts and Humanities, told the Global Times Sunday. 

The value attached to being in-the-know about the governmental affairs carried out by the country's most international metropolis further brings considerable advantages for the city's microblog, he said.