WeChat has surpassed 1.1 billion monthly active users. And it has certainly made the world turn heads. Who uses WeChat? More men (67.5%) than women (although this may reflect the fact that China has more men than women in its population!). People with a stable income such as corporate workers account for more than 40% of users – generally considered to be those who have more purchasing power for shopping and enjoyment. 65% of monthly active users are of a younger demographic (born in the 1980s and 1990s). WeChat official accounts are divided into three flavours: Service Account, Subscription Account and Enterprise Account where you have three solid options to choose from. But it all starts with how you assess your marketing plan. And identifying the goals you have for the platform. Please take below points as your consideration to purchase an account: If you want to engage your brand with your consumers through posts and articles, a subscription account is the best way to go. A service account allows you to generate sales from your service account efficiently. An enterprise account plays a huge part in business internal communication and office efficiency. Among these three accounts, we strongly recommend a Service account if you are new in WeChat Marketing as it allows greater functionality and higher article open rates. The visibility of a service account is higher than the rest as WeChat posts will pop on the top appearance message area of the main messaging app that your target audience is using. In fact, WeChat might be the only messaging app in China most of them are using everyday. WeChat Marketing is so much more powerful than a post on Facebook, which is likely to just get buried in Facebook’s algorithmic feed. Content Marketing is very impactful to make great use of WeChat. If your content is highly relative to your target readers, you are able to expect open rates on WeChat to be pretty good. We expect open rates in the range of 10–30% for our work. This result we created is actually higher than industry average stats, which are under 5%. Amongst the users that open articles, a good expectation for share rates is about 20%. Users can share a WeChat article on their feed (called Moments), by sending a direct message to a friend or other methods too. A great WeChat article is the one that grabs the reader’s attention and pulls them along smoothly. It should be educational and relevant to your brand, but also easy to read. We tend to use a style that uses: short blocks of text, images, short videos (sometimes) and, ample design elements. Getting us to write great articles is the key to keeping your followers interested. This brings us to the next point—how do you even get followers to begin with? HOW TO ATTRACT THE FIRST 200 WECHAT FOLLOWERS IN YOUR WECHAT ACCOUNTS? Hosting an event to promote your official accounts while holding events to attract media attention. A Lucky Draw works effectively to attract followers at the beginning stage or you might consider hosting a special event for example the campaign held by Burberry for Chinese New Year, the brand invited its Wechat followers to send a special scarf through a little animated image with a personalized message. How to Scan QR code & How to Generate QR code on WeChat ? Following steps below to scan a QR Code: On the Home screen, click on “Discover” at the bottom menu. Click “Scan”. Point your camera on the QR Code. WeChat will detect the code and direct you to your desired landing page . If you are looking to Create a QR Code for your personal profile or your company’s account for free, follow the procedure below to access WeChat QR Code Generator. Enter the Official account. Click the person icon in the upper right-hand corner. Click on “All Articles” or “All Messages”. Click the three dots in the upper right-hand corner. Click on the menu “Copy Link” (this action will copy the link of the Official Account). Open a free QR Code generator. Paste the link in the tab and press enter. Your QR Code will be generated and you can now download it and start using it. How to share your WeChat account to increase your business exposure? It has become common in China for people to scan each others’ WeChat QR codes to keep in contact. This way you can follow each others’ posts and keep in touch. Here are some ways to get started for free: Put the QR code on your website. Use the QR code in physical marketing materials (conferences for example). Let potential leads connect via WeChat. Share with your contacts. Chinese spend a large amount of time connected to their WeChat app. Accenture found that 70% of Chinese who are born after 1995 will turn to social media to directly purchase products as opposed to other channels – compare this with the global average of 44%. In 2017 Chinese app users spent around 225 billion hours in apps, which is 4.5 times longer than the second-highest markets such as India. This is where KOLs come in and foster highly engaged followers, going above and beyond to provide a higher level of content, and building personal relationships with their fans. Chinese consumers rely heavily on the opinions of KOLs as well as their own social networks. However, WeChat won’t replace your other marketing channels. You will still need to run a search campaign or do outbound sales or collaborate with media in your industry. To promote our client’s business via social marketing, we helped generate article content on WeChat accounts and worked closely with KOLs. We found a bunch of potential KOL accounts to work with, narrowed them down, created the content and shared it. This drove massive amounts of new followers to our client’s accounts, which were well-targeted people with the buying power.
