WeChat is the most popular social media application in Asia, connecting over a billion people via calls, texts, and other social communication channels. Like WhatsApp, but offering many more features, WeChat is often called China’s “app for everything.” Because of its astonishingly broad range of functionality, it is also frequently described as a “super app.”
Besides enabling users to send texts and share chats, photos, and videos, WeChat serves as a payment gateway that many Chinese use to complete day-to-day business transactions online, such as paying utility bills and purchasing rail tickets. Indeed, WeChat enables users to engage in a wide variety of commercially oriented tasks and activities, from social sharing, money transfers and video calls through ordering food, booking taxis, reading the news, making doctor’s appointments, and playing games, to name only a few. WeChat’s procurement and payment capabilities in particular are making it an integral part of many aspects of everyday Chinese life. An unusual yet telling example is that in some major urban centers even panhandlers have begun using it to accept mobile payments.
The country’s most important social networking platform, WeChat has in effect evolved into a comprehensive virtual environment, a do-everything application that both encompasses and also displaces the functionality of Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, which are not available in China. It is a mega app that reaches into users’ daily lives by offering one-stop access to entertainment, news, and commerce. As such, it is a powerful and dynamic marketing tool that Chinese companies have employed with impressive results. It is also one whose potential Western marketers are at last beginning to investigate and exploit in earnest.
Please look for my next post, which will explore what WeChat offers to help market your business in China.
Shirley Zhang, Social Media and Asia-Pacific Marketing Practice Director — Gilbért, Flossmann & Zhang Worldwide, Shanghai
