Building on my previous post, I want to stress once more how crucial WeChat is to effective marketing in China because of its 1 billion estimated active users and average daily usage rate of 4 hours per user. This is the sort of reach that no marketer can ignore, which helps explain why more and more non-Chinese companies are establishing official WeChat accounts and building their presences on this multifunctional and powerful social media platform.
Because WeChat provides media and e-commerce capabilities, Chinese regulations require that companies establishing official WeChat accounts have a Chinese business license or that they are represented on the platform by a licensed third-party China business agent. Once a company has put such licensing or representation in place, the next step is for its marketers to decide whether to obtain a Subscription Account or a Service Account. As I started to describe in my last post, the main differences between the two are that Subscription Accounts offer limited time-line prominence (i.e., stream or “Moments”) and few other visibility-enhancing features but have great “push” messaging capability (up to 30 outbound messages per month) whereas Service Accounts provide robust timeline prominence and a wide range of visibility-enhancing features but have more limited “push “ messaging capability (no more than 1 outbound message per week). This capabilities tradeoff makes Subscription Accounts most suitable for content companies (e.g., on-line publishers, blogs, and broadcasters) while Service Accounts are the better option for companies offering more concrete products or substantive services.
While both types of accounts allow basic functionality such as links to external company websites, automated chat response, and segmentation of user wif-fi data, Service Accounts furnish a great number of additional capabilities, such as e-commerce, Chinese-language voice-recognition/text translation, geo-location targeting, URL-shortening, and multiple QR-code generation for traffic source identification–to name only a few. These many broad-ranging features enable companies to design and deploy targeted, highly effective marketing strategies.
Look for my next post in which I will discuss how WeChat social sharing capabilities can help companies build familiarity and trust among Chinese prospects and customers, and why such trust building is particularly important in China’s markets.
Shirley Zhang, Social Media and Asia-Pacific Marketing Practice Director — Gilbért, Flossmann & Zhang Worldwide, Shanghai
Contact GF&Z at solutions@globalmarcomm.com