29 April 2015 at 9:00 am
WeChat – THE Chinese social media
When it comes to reaching a Chinese audience with your marketing, it is hard to look past the rapidly growing mobile text and voice messaging app, WeChat.
WeChat has become a default social networking tool for Chinese users.
WeChat is China’s version of WhatsApp or Viber but with many additional social networking features. Released in January 2011 it is the largest standalone messaging app with more than 500 million monthly active users of which 15% are based outside of China.
WeChat provides text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, sharing of photographs and videos, and location sharing. It is well integrated with other social networking services. Photographs can be enhanced with filters and captions, and an automated translation service is available.
To understand the scale of WeChat’s growth, the following statistics are interesting:
25% of users check WeChat more than 30 times a day Subscribers spent US$15.3B on mobile data using WeChat last year 86.2% of WeChat users are aged 18 to 36 WeChat users consume more content on WeChat than any other app.
When it comes to marketing, WeChat has a number of advantages;
Relationship building - WeChat acts like a customer relationship management (CRM) tool due its one to one communication, allowing a personal conversation between brands and followers.
Customer Feedback - Customers also use WeChat for collecting information, opinions and comments about products. It is a great platform to gauge consumer satisfaction and to collect followers’ feedback.
Education New Zealand’s WeChat platform was launched last August and has more than 2,500 followers. It is designed to enhance the awareness and understanding of New Zealand education among Chinese students and parents.
Alexandra Grace, Education Counsellor of the New Zealand Embassy Beijing said, “Through the New Zealand’s official Weibo and WeChat, we hope to engage more stakeholders in China about New Zealand’s quality education, encourage exchanges and interactions, promote and enhance cooperation in early, secondary, higher education, and vocational education between the two countries.”
If you are on WeChat, follow Education New Zealand and let us know how this new marketing tool is helping to grow awareness for your business.
