# How do I monitor Weibo for new posts mentioning my brand?

> Watch Weibo for new posts that mention your brand: keyword search sorted by latest, keep only posts you have not seen, stop paging early. Daily cost and code.

Canonical page: https://okdata.online/answers/weibo-keyword-monitoring/

**Short answer: **Run Weibo post search with sort=latest for each brand keyword every hour, and stop paging as soon as you reach a post you already stored. A page holds about 10 posts and costs $0.002, so 3 keywords checked hourly at 2 pages each (144 calls) cost $0.288 a day.

Say you run social for a skincare brand. You want every new Weibo post that names the brand or its two best-selling products in one sheet each morning, with reposts and likes, so the team can thank fans, answer complaints and spot a problem early. That is a keyword search sorted by newest first, run on a schedule, that remembers what it has already seen.

## The endpoint

[Weibo post search](/apis/weibo/posts/search/) takes `query` and `sort`. With `sort=latest` you get the newest matching posts first, about 10 per page, each with text, time, author (ID, name, followers, verified), likes, comments, reposts, images and hashtags. Pass `page.next_cursor` back as `cursor` for the next page; each page is billed on its own.

## What a day costs

| Brand volume | Pages per keyword per hour | Calls a day (3 keywords) | Cost a day |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quiet | 1 | 72 | $0.144 |
| Typical | 2 | 144 | $0.288 |
| Busy launch week | 5 | 360 | $0.72 |

Most hours you stop after the first page, because the second page is already old news. The early stop is where the savings come from.

## The monitor

```python
import json, os, requests

URL = "https://api.okdata.online/v1/weibo/posts/search"
H = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['OKDATA_API_KEY']}"}
KEYWORDS = ["山野护肤", "山野精华", "山野防晒"]
MAX_PAGES = 5

seen = set(open("seen.txt").read().split()) if os.path.exists("seen.txt") else set()
new = []
for kw in KEYWORDS:
    cursor = None
    for _ in range(MAX_PAGES):
        params = {"query": kw, "sort": "latest", **({"cursor": cursor} if cursor else {})}
        r = requests.get(URL, headers=H, params=params, timeout=30).json()
        if r["code"] != "ok":
            print(kw, r["code"], r["message"]); break
        fresh = [p for p in r["data"]["items"] if p["id"] not in seen]
        new += fresh
        seen.update(p["id"] for p in fresh)
        if len(fresh) < len(r["data"]["items"]) or not r["page"]["has_more"]:
            break  # reached posts we already have
        cursor = r["page"]["next_cursor"]

with open("mentions.jsonl", "a", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    for p in new:
        f.write(json.dumps(p, ensure_ascii=False) + "\n")
open("seen.txt", "w").write("\n".join(seen))
```

## Limits worth knowing

- Search returns what Weibo's search chooses to show. Posts from restricted accounts, or posts Weibo hides from search, never appear, so treat this as a strong sample, not a complete record.
- Short brand names match inside unrelated words in Chinese. Add a product word to the query, or filter the results before anyone reads them.
- Long posts can come back cut short; with `view=full`, `ext.is_long_text` marks them. The catalog has no single-post lookup, so open the post's `url` to read the rest.
- Comments and a user's own timeline are not in the catalog. If you need the replies under a complaint, read them on Weibo.

## Other ways

Social listening platforms bundle this with sentiment dashboards and suit teams that want reports, not scripts. For a one-off deep crawl that includes comments, an open-source crawler such as MediaCrawler run with your own Weibo login does more, at the cost of maintaining the cookie. Under ten mentions a day, the Real-time tab of Weibo search read by hand is enough. More on the whole workflow: [word of mouth](/solutions/word-of-mouth/).

## Endpoints used

- [Weibo post search](https://okdata.online/apis/weibo/posts/search/) `weibo.posts.search`: $0.002 per call · about 10 posts per page

Updated 2026-11-12