What you can do with China's "App For Everything" ?

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If you ever have any Chinese friend or plan to work/travel/start a business in China, there is no doubt that you heard of WeChat. But do you know what WeChat is capable of or how you can use it to promote your business or yourself?

WeChat (known as Weixin in China), as a multi-purpose social media application, was first released in 2011. By the end of 2016, WeChat reported having 889 million users in total, over one billion monthly active users, and 902 million daily active users. On average, every user spends nearly an hour on WeChat every day.

(One Day of WeChat, by WeChat)

WeChat is a single platform that combines Facebook, Instagram, Paypal, WhatsApp, ApplePay, Tinder, YouTube, and many other services. It could be divided into five main sections: Chats, Subscriptions, Moments, Mini Programs, and Wallet. Chats allow you not only to chat with friends, but make a video/voice call among multiple users. In addition, you can search users nearby, which helps users make more friends. Subscriptions allow users or businesses to create their own channels that can easily send latest messages to all the users who subscribe the channel. Moments give users the chance to upload their status, photos, videos, and literally anything they want, which are only available for friends to see, like, and comment on. Mini Programs consist of thousands of programs, including games, shops, navigations, useful tips and so on, which enriches users spare time. Wallet, as its name suggests, allows you to add cards and then pay or accept money. It also offers some exclusive coupons and let you send red packets to friends.

After you have the general understanding of what WeChat is and how it works, it’s time to learn from successful WeChat campaigns on how to promote your events or brands.

Connect with your audience

Due to WeChat’s privacy policy, your brands’ articles, messages, and Moments will never be shown to users who don’t follow you, which is a huge problem for businesses to connect with their audience. To solve this problem, Uniqlo launched a large 020 (Online to Offline) campaign called “Style your life” in 2014. This campaign allowed consumers to try on clothes in stores and then stood in front of monitors equipped with cameras to take pictures of themselves with different featured backgrounds such as New-York, Tokyo, or London. If consumers wanted the photos, they could just simply follow Uniqlo on WeChat and the photos would be sent to them through WeChat, which can also be shared in Moments. Adopted zealously by the Chinese audience, the brand’s followers grew from 400,000 to 1 million six months later. Uniqlo’s WeChat audience currently is more than 2 million. From Uniqlo’s case, the importance of connecting audience from offline to online is obvious. So increasing the number of your online followers by offering some benefits offline is actually a good idea.

Interact with your audience

Users may follow many channels and official accounts, but do they really pay attention? To keep your audience impressed and engaged in, you have to interact with them. Starbucks launched their first “mood” campaign on WeChat in 2012. Based on the emoji you sent to Starbucks, it would reply with a song reflecting your mood. With around 22,000 messages every day, the campaign was a success. Two years later, Starbucks used the infamous QR code to create dialogue with customers, using the same strategy of interaction as they did previously. It’s essential to increase the number of your followers. True. But it is even more important to keep them in touch and let them be aware of your brands. So try to engage with your audience and pretend to be a “normal real friend”.

Surprise your audience

People nowadays are tired of seeing plain articles or advertisements. If you can’t catch their eyes in 5 seconds, you are out. So you have to find a way to impress them and attract them to

read more. When the Forbidden City, along with Tencent team, tried to promote Next Idea

a creativity competition in 2016, they uploaded a video online, in which Zhu Yuanzhang, the emperor of Ming Dynasty, comes to life from an ancient painting and starts singing rap, taking funny selfies, and posting on his WeChat Moments. It attracted audience successfully, with the emoji mentioned during the campaign hit 800 million downloads within just two days. Knowing they should target creative and younger generations, the Forbidden City found the best way to impress the audience. So next time when you’re going (scan in WeChat to watch the video)

to launch a campaign on WeChat, define your target audience and try your best to surprise them.

WeChat is a great social network with great features.It gives brands a great way to promote themselves and to engage directly with their audience. There is no doubt that in the future, WeChat will become even better-known and more useful to businesses. I have the conviction that no matter what your business is, WeChat will help you push it forward, so it’s better for us, as PR practitioners, to get familiar with WeChat, learn from successful campaigns in the past, and get ourselves ready for the future of technology.