French luxury and fashion powerhouse Dior has become the first luxury brand in China to use the new Weibo Story feature to release social media content, according to the local Chinese site Social Beta.
Dior has already made sophisticated use of a similar feature on Instagram, one of the most popular social media apps and luxury marketing platforms in the West. In 2016, as a result of its use of Instagram Stories, the brand was ranked, along with Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana and Christian Louboutin, one of the top four fashion labels in terms of user engagement.
This time, Dior used this feature to advertise its Rouge 999 lipstick campaign on Weibo as a trial on September 9. Its debut use of the Chinese version is likely to signal the brand's aim to replicate that success with a Chinese audience.
Developed by one of the country's biggest social media platforms, Weibo, the company first launched the alpha version of the feature in April to test user sentiment with a limited number of select accounts.
The latest version of feature allows users to create short narratives with photos and videos that are only visible to their followers and that disappear after 24 hours. Creators can use a load of entertaining tools like stickers, filters and fonts to improve user engagement.
The birth of Weibo Story comes at a time when the Chinese have demonstrated intense interest in short online video content. And it's not only Weibo that's getting into the game. Tech giants including Tencent Holdings and Alibaba Group have also directed a significant amount of funding to the local video-streaming platform Kuaishou to develop its short video platform.
Notably, Instagram Stories has been widely adopted by luxury brands in the West as an effective tool for engaging with consumers in a highly exclusive and creative way.
“What Stories has really meant is that fashion is now able to be a little bit more authentic, a little bit more down to earth, funnier, scrappier,” Eva Chen, Instagram's head of fashion, told Business of Fashion about the success of the feature.
For luxury brands in China, Weibo Story has the potential to give them a similar boost with a Chinese audience if it's adopted appropriately. We will probably be seeing more luxury labels joining the list of users of the feature, but for now, Dior is something of a pioneer.