It's no coincidence that during this time the fast rise of domestic social media platforms truly kicked into gear, but Ken Hong, General Manager of Weibo Marketing Strategy, says it was just a contributing factor to its growth.
"Obviously from a competition perspective, when you have fewer competitors that is beneficial. But at the same time I think it's important to keep in mind that it's just one factor," he says.
Hong points to savvy marketing, incremental innovation and tailoring its offering to Chinese audience as the key tenets to Weibo's success.
"If you look back about five years ago, there really wasn't this kind of media. It's extremely accessible, an open platform and information can be shared and spread very quickly.
"That is something consumers needed and wanted in China and it resulted in an explosion of user growth - particularly at the grass roots level. I think our ability to leverage a lot of celebrities and key thought leaders really helped the platform to grow. They quickly moved onto the platform, they tend to have a lot of interesting things to say and obviously draw a lot of attention from regular consumers."
Weibo has excelled as a business because of its ability to adapt and introduce new features to the platform. Weibo was initially referred to as "Chinese Twitter" and criticised because of the vast similarities between the platforms. But Hong says this is no longer a fair label.
"Initially, we were pretty similar to Twitter in Western society, but today the platform has evolved tremendously and I really think we shouldn't call it Chinese Twitter anymore."
Social media is a fickle business and innovation is an essential component to maintaining relevance in the face of new competition. To that end, Weibo is investing significantly in research and development to stay ahead of the pack.
"We have a very large product team and a strong technology team. It's a combination of doing market research, trial and error, and a lot of testing," says Hong. "We had a lot of functionalities in Weibo that Twitter didn't even have until very recently, like pictures and pages. Weibo is really big and now quite different compared with Twitter, and a lot of those things we did that have made us successful were specifically designed for Chinese consumers."
The biggest battle for Weibo in the future will be public perception. Since its IPO and the increase in exposure through Western media, Weibo's policies around censorship have been under fire - with the clampdown during last year's unrest in Hong Kong a particular focal point.
Hong says the levels of attention and censorship discussion that Weibo generates is disproportionate to the reality of what is actually happening.
"A level of control and monitoring is pretty common to all internet platforms around the world and if you see Weibo, for the most part it's a pretty open platform. People are talking about a lot of things, but obviously there will be boundaries and there will be limits."
"What is really going on is not much different to a lot of other media platforms in China or in many other different parts of the world," says Hong. "A certain level of censorship will be needed in China, but I think overall the situation is not as significant as a lot of other people expect it to be.
"Obviously, there will be some inappropriate things that we have to censor, control and delete. Some of that involves excluding fake information and inappropriate content, but I think for the large part I don't see any key difference between what we have to do as a platform in this market," says Hong.
