How do I get alerted when my brand or a keyword hits Weibo hot search?

The classic PR failure goes like this: a complaint about a drink brand reaches Weibo hot search at 11 pm, and the team learns about it from a journalist at 9 the next morning. A small job that checks the board every 10 minutes closes most of that gap. When the brand, a product or the CEO's name shows up, someone gets a message with the rank, the heat and the five loudest posts on the topic.

Two endpoints

1. Weibo hot search returns the whole board in one call: rank, topic, heat and a search link.
2. Weibo post search is called only when a topic matches. Sorted by hot, its first page of about 10 posts shows who is driving the topic and how many reposts they have.

What it costs

Setup	Calls	Cost
Board every 10 minutes, one day	144	$0.288
Board every 10 minutes, 30 days	4,320	$8.64
30 days plus 10 matches, 2 search pages each	4,320 + 20	{{cost:weibo.trends.list4320+weibo.posts.search20}}

The alert job

import json, os, requests

API = "https://api.okdata.online"
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['OKDATA_API_KEY']}"}
WATCH = ["山野咖啡", "椰云拿铁", "shanye"]          # brand, products, nicknames
SEEN = "alerted.json"

def call(path, **params):
    r = requests.get(API + path, headers=H, params=params, timeout=30).json()
    if r["code"] != "ok":
        raise RuntimeError(f"{r['code']}: {r['message']}")
    return r["data"]["items"]

seen = set(json.load(open(SEEN))) if os.path.exists(SEEN) else set()
for row in call("/v1/weibo/trends/list"):
    hit = any(w.lower() in row["name"].lower() for w in WATCH)
    if not hit or row["name"] in seen:
        continue
    posts = call("/v1/weibo/posts/search", query=row["name"], sort="hot",
                 fields="text,author.name,metrics.reposts")
    print(f"#{row['rank']} {row['name']} heat={row['heat']}")
    for p in posts[:5]:
        print("  ", p["author"]["name"], p["metrics"]["reposts"], p["text"][:80])
    seen.add(row["name"])
json.dump(sorted(seen), open(SEEN, "w"), ensure_ascii=False)

Swap the print lines for a post to your Slack, Feishu or WeCom webhook, and schedule the script every 10 minutes.

Where this falls short

• A topic about you can trend without your name in it, for example a store incident described by place and product. Keep the watch list broad, and run keyword monitoring on posts as well; hot search is only the loudest layer.
• At a 10-minute rate you can be up to 10 minutes late. Five minutes doubles the cost and rarely changes the outcome.
• Comments under the posts are not in the catalog. The alert tells you what is trending and who started it, and the comment threads are still read on Weibo.
• The board has no history. If the job was down, it cannot tell you what you missed.

Other routes

Social listening platforms offer the same alerting with sentiment charts and a support team, and suit a company that wants a dashboard and no code. On launch days, a person keeping the hot search page open is still the fastest reader there is. For a fuller playbook see word of mouth.