WeChat Official Accounts and marketers

WeChat , the most popular instant message app in China, just like snapchat in America, but WeChat is more powerful in the aspect of changing people's life.The first reason is that Chinese markets have more users, and the second reason is that instead of only attracting young people, WeChat also possesses a large number of middle-age fans.Maybe Chinese have no habbits to check their emails everyday like western people, so WeChat just takes the places of email and QQ ,and it is showed that in China, a lot of companies use WeChat to co-work, leaving message and allocating individuals' assignments . In 2014 , Tencent's figures showed that WeChat now has 438 million monthly active users.

But WeChat is  more than  a IM app. I believe people who use WeChat must be very familiar with WeChat official accounts, or WeChat platforms.One of the function of WeChat is that you can follow public accounts that will periodically send you information. These accounts can be companies, brands, bars, nightclubs, hotels or publications.The two types of account have differences in set up and usage. But from a marketing perspective they are a way to find brand advocates and to get information to people about your products and services.

There are two types of accounts you can follow: Service Accounts and Subscription Accounts.

Subscription Accounts are much more prevalent than Service Accounts. Subscription Accounts that I followed range from local bars to national restaurants, from local music promoters to international tech publications.The great thing with the Subscription Account is that when there is a new notification, it  will not only shows within the app, but does pop up on your phone as a push notification.

It transcends the social network spectrum in a way that is sometimes difficult to assess.Firstly, WeChat platform is a perfect place to do advertisements.Because WeChat users are so dependent on this IM app to contact with their friends or co-workers, any advertisements in there can be more powerful than any kinds of ads in other social medias.Of course, these ads in platforms are packaged elaborately : some of them embed with beautiful articles, others may be show with charming pictures.

There are so many species of WeChat platforms, some of them are totally commercial as they are  controlled by corresponding companies and work for their companies; others may have less commercial intention ,like some official accounts only share good articles and comments of books; there are also some personal platforms with no commercial intention at first, they are called "we-media".Just like blogs, owners of we- media can share everything they want and share the updates in "moments ".  After becoming  popular, we-media can also make money ,and some of them can build  their own companies.

For example, Rishiji， a young we-media which mainly making cooking video ，firstly only be known by little people, but now is well-known and also share videos in other hot social media like youtube .This video group firstly only have 4 people, and now it employed tens of co-workers to adapt the development of their studio.

For myself , I nearly take WeChat as a new type of e-magazines, which include all kind of information and I can follow or unfollow them in a second.Some of them share nice videos to amuse me and other s can share link to buy particular products I want to buy, which is convenient and quick.Moreover ,I can share the good article with my friend in "moments",and when we chat below the moment, it is a new way for advertising.