About Wechat

I wanted to analyze more about Wechat in terms of Business benificial, because it is my first step for my FMP, and I have to introduce it to the people who did not know it before.

Most of us believe that mobile instant messaging (MIM) is the next big thing in digital media. However, many marketers may find it challenging to figure out the best possible ways to engage their customers through MIM. With the release ofWeChat in 2011, even small companies are now emerging as major market competitors.

With more than 300 million users, the mobile phone text and voice messaging communication service supports text and video chat, video calling, photo/video and location sharing, discovering new people, broadcasting messages, group messages and photo sharing. Many marketers find it a unique way to engage their customers and fans of their brands.

How to Use WeChat for Business

Use Verified Accounts

Individuals can follow verified brand accounts by either getting a member of their WeChat network to share their account or scanning a QR Code.

High quality creative content is key to attract audiences. The verified account allows a brand to post rich media content including audio messages, videos, photos and text to followers of their WeChat stream.

Use Membership Functions to Convert Followers

WeChat membership functions can actually convert your followers into members. The functions create loyalty programs where individuals can use their geo-localized membership cards to pair up with users by their WeChat ID or phone number. This allows brands to adapt their marketing content and highlight sales promotions to a certain section of consumers.

There are three typical ways to apply WeChat into your marketing activities:

• Issuing a virtual VIP card.

• Sending promotional offer notifications.

• Delivering e-coupons.

To initiate business interactions with your customers a welcome message is a crucial step, especially for newbies. You can also ask questions to convert inquiries to several sets of prescribed answers. To respond correctly to your customers, you can use five types of content including text, audio, visual, video and text+visual.

In addition, you can also choose to respond with a URL of a mobile-friendly site. Most importantly, the conversation remains confidential between you and your fans unless you or your fans wish to spread it out.

Use WeChat QR Codes to Promote Your Brand

You can actively convert fans through various means. One such means is to make your brand’s QR Code featured in all point of purchase materials. Always give your consumers a reason to scan your QR code. A few inducements, such as top up promotion for a purchase, discounts, lucky draws, souvenirs or a free WiFi pass code are always appreciated.

Additionally, adding your QR code on your packaging is another great alternative. The best tactics to consider are to either feature your brand’s WeChat QR code on your Weibo page or promote your WeChat activities through wall posts to grab the attention of audiences.

Share Your Brand Images

Brands can get their due attention by displaying their logos on the subscribers’ personal pages. This allows brand followers a way to show off their personal tastes and preferences and you can choose whether or not to showcase your logo.

Incentivize to Entice Followers

WeChat’s API allows you to integrate the services into mobile apps to entice followers. However, consumers who follow a business on WeChat should be given a motivation to sign up. Offer prizes, POS promotions, pictures or entertainment to optimize your conversion rate.

Create a Mini Website

Apart from conversation based on chats, WeChat enables brands to set up a full mini website to complete their brand experience. This website can be divided into two-level menus which can work as a series of marketing purposes. These two-level interacting menus are an important tool to better manage interaction with your fans. This can be set up on the WeChat account panel or with the help of third-party services.

WeChat is a marketing platform where brands can geo-target their community and specifically categorize people according to their gender and location.

From <http://smallbiztrends.com/2014/03/how-to-use-wechat-for-business.html>

Why WeChat Can Help Promote Social Business

by Steven Kwok August 12, 2013

WeChat is a mobile text and voice messaging communication service like WhatsApp, LINE, KakaoTalk and TalkBox. It’s developed by Tencent in China and provides multimedia communication with text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, photo/video sharing, location sharing, and contact information exchange. It is said that WeChat already has 400 million users worldwide (including 70 million users outside China) and will reach 500 million soon!

Like WhatsApp, LINE and other voice messengers, WeChat’s design is based on strong ties and it’s for communication among good friends, family members and colleagues. But what makes WeChat very special is that it opens its APIs to business owners and mobile application (both native application and generic application, can see the differences here.) developers. More specifically, for native application developers, they can enable the application’s users to share content to friends on WeChat through the API. (e.g. Pinterest users can share their pins to WeChat friends.) And for business owners, they can apply for an official WeChat account for their brands and easily execute marketing practices via WeChat Official Account Admin Platform or their official account management platform developed and customized by themselves.

So what do these mean for social business?

A large audience

WeChat has massive number of users especially in China, and the number is growing at a rapid speed. Also the users range widely, including people at different ages, in different professions and of different beliefs. It is a good place for business to enhance brand awareness and increase sales.

Voice messages & short videos make a big difference

Generally we communicate with others through text or pictures. Now the appearance of voice messages and short videos on WeChat makes us feel each other better. It helps a brand build a more amiable image and reduce the distance between a brand and a customer.

Efficient ways to get subscribers

There’re different ways for companies to get more subscribers on WeChat like: 1) Call on the followers/fans on existing social network to follow their official accounts on WeChat so as to get better services. 2) Offer some surprises to reward those who recommend the official accounts to their close friends on WeChat. 3) Besides sharing the account names and QR codes on other online networks and ads, also print the names and QR codes on offline marketing materials, in order to get subscribers both online and offline.

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A flexible and open marketing platform

WeChat itself has developed an official account admin platform for companies to do marketing. The platform provides a place for marketers to have one-to-one conversations with their subscribers, manage their subscribers & marketing material, broadcast messages to a large audience and configure Auto-Reply with basic settings. Additionally, the platform enables marketers to use the APIs to flexibly implement customized and advanced features such as subscriber retrieval, according to specific needs.

Low cost to create a mobile application

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/WeChat-Official-Accounts-179x300.jpg

official WeChat accounts

Traditionally if one wants to create a mobile application, it means that this application should be coded in various programming languages to apply to different mobile platforms like: Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry or Symbian; and we call this type of application “native mobile application”. It’s obvious that this will cost lots of time, manpower and money. However, with WeChat’s APIs, one can develop the application in HTML5 and a server language. We call this generic/lite mobile application, which doesn’t cost much time and money. This lite application is attached to the official account and runs on WeChat, users can use it directly – just click the account icon.

We can imagine that this will turn WeChat into an app store! In short, with the APIs, many people can start a business on WeChat, companies can provide better services and marketers can easily execute various interesting and powerful campaigns by creating lite mobile applications with low cost.

Extensive integration of social networks & other mobile apps

On the one hand, WeChat itself allows users to share content to some social networks (like FB) and native applications developed with WeChat’s APIs. On the other hand, more and more developers have integrate the WeChat Open Platform into their native applications to make users share interesting things to WeChat. All of these make WeChat more social and full of life.

**Note: The analyses above are based on the Chinese WeChat version, so some features may have not turned up on other versions. But it’s just a matter of time.

Epilogue

This article is not to ask you all to use WeChat or do marketing on WeChat, but to give you some enlightenment behind this application. Finally let’s think about the following issues:

• How will voice messages & short videos develop in social communication?

• What are the advantages and disadvantages of a native application and a generic/lite application? And when to develop a native one and a generic/lite one?

• How does a mobile application work in a marketing campaign?

• How to better integrate mobile marketing with offline business/marketing?

Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-business/why-wechat-can-help-promote-social-business-0581863#sbq0PSItaUtZeAJp.99

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