How to make a weibo account
under the cut.
click the obnoxious green button, and it should open another tab that looks like this:
here are the first three fields. Make sure your username is available (it shows a green tick). You can use both Chinese and English here.
your gender. (男=male, 女=female).
the first drop-down menu asks for your location. It doesn't really matter where you put it, but the last option (其他) gives you the 'other' location.
The second bar asks for your school (学校), and is not mandatory to fill.
And the last part is just the usual verification that you're not a bot.
After clicking the next obnoxious green button, weibo sends a confirmation email, all you need to do is to click the link.
Voila, you have a weibo account!
But how do I use it?
Now, weibo will ask you to search for people to follow (otherwise your dash will be empty - it's not necessary to follow anyone though, you can just click the green button (not the one on the search bar.)
Let's try to find some people though.
Ok, I searched Zhou Mi (周觅) now, to see if there are any accounts that are related to my search
Looks like there are, let's follow a few of them.
进入下一步 (first button) - leads you to the next step of using your account
查看其他分类 (second button) lets you to search for more accounts to follow.
Now, this step allows you to find your friends' accounts, by searching their msn/email, or trying to find colleagues/school friends if you have selected a specific school. Let's just skip this part now, and click the weibo logo on the top of the page instead.
You can upload your avatar on the pop-up -window that weibo sends you, but let's look at some basic posting options~
(sorry my weibo dash is terribly light orz)
Either way, when you want to interact with other people, you get three options for every post.
转发 (the first link on the left of the high-lighted part) - allows you to 'reblog' stuff.
收藏 (2nd link) allows you to 'like' the post.
评论 (3rd link) allows you to comment on the post, without reblogging it.
the highlighted part shows the timestamp (when the post was created), and what kind of a device what used to create the post.
Let's search a bit around weibo. You can search posts of people you don't follow, too~ Basically like using tumblr's tags.
The first option on the drop-down search menu (搜 “始 源” 相关微博»), is to find posts related to my search (始 源 Siwon, in this case).
The second option on the drop-down search menu (搜 “始 源” 相关用户») is to find people with 始 源 on their username / they have set it as a related tag.
On the right, you can find all the account settings, template settings, which version of weibo you want to use etc etc this is basically all you need to modify your weibo as you wish.
You can ping people by putting @username on your weibo, and they will get a notification of it, etc basically a mix of twitter and tumblr in Chinese, really simple to use.
