Jan 14, 2013 04:46 AM EST By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

Sina Weibo, a micro blogging website is facilitating easy communication between Chinese students and U.S. education officials wanting to recruit students to their universities.

As popular social websites such as Face book and Twitter are banned in China, U.S. universities are registering themselves on this platform and widely publicizing their programs for international student recruitments.

Weibo is a widely used social network when compared to Sohu, Tencent and Renren, which are relatively unknown in foreign countries.

"Chinese students are an important part of the international student intake. A lot of universities are trying to reach Chinese students - and the best Chinese students," Nick Pearce, a teaching fellow at the University of Durham's Foundation Center, told University World News.

Sid Krommenhoek, founder of Zinch, a US-based education-oriented online social network told the newspaper that only a few U.S. universities were active participants on Weibo.

"This compares with 90 percent [of US institutions] on Facebook and Twitter," Krommenhoek said. He added that the number of institutions outside China on Weibo "could at least double or even treble this year."

American institutions with the highest number of Weibo followers are; Yale University with 30,400 followers, University of California, Berkeley with 11,740 followers and the University of Michigan, which has 5,000 followers.

"If you don't have a ranking as a university, you need a steady and consistent stream of information for this audience. You need to be active," Krommenhoek said.

Although social media websites such as Weibo are not a preferred option by many for administration processes, but it is a strategic tool to reach out to students in China.

"It is clear that some universities are putting a great deal of effort into it - the more an institution uses this site, with different kinds of content, the more followers they get," Pearce said."In terms of recruitment, if you get even one more student from China, [engagement on Weibo] will have paid for itself."

Around 80 percent of China's university students are active on Weibo and 42 percent of them use it every day.

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