Weibo takes 60,000 car orders in 2 weeks

The Chinese microblogging service drew in more than $1.5bn of orders during a promotion

More than 30 domestic and foreign brands took place in a cut-price promotional exercise between August and September, when they listed more than 100 different models for sale on Weibo, a popular web service.

While the end of summer is typically a slow season for car sales, the online campaign clearly caught the interest of China’s netizens.

The Weibo promotion page claimed more than 16.97m visitors and the topic had over 1.24bn views in total.

Crowds were enticed with cash back, prize draws and limited time only offers on brands like BMW and Mercedes Benz, who also took part.

Weibo’s monthly active users surged 30% year-on-year to 156.5m in June.