Can WeChat Become A Major Advertising Platform?

With well over one billion users, China is the world’s largest mobile phone market. WeChat ( known as Weixin in China ) is similar to WhatApp that enables users to send free messages. However, WeChat has features similar to social media such as newsfeed (Facebook), short message (Twitter), video calling (Skype) and payment system, not to mention enabling users to participate in contests and paying mini-games.

A product of Tencent Holdings, China’s largest internet company. WeChat now has 300 million users. When combined with QQ(China’s other social internet platform), WeChat is set to overtake Facebook in terms of users numbers. Furthermore, it is aggressively growing from China market to non-Chinese speaking communities in Southeast Asia and India. The app is already available in other eight languages, including English, Russian, Indonesian, and Thai.

The platform has several features.

1. Payment Service:

Consumers can pay for services and content on their mobile phone through office accounts with on-click payment. This features has changed the way companies sell and display and deliver their products to customers.

2.  Public accounts:

Companies and organizations can create public accounts, similar to Facebook and Twitter’s company pages. WeChat users can subscribe to access information, discount code, and interact with other members.

3. Find your friend

Unlike some channels, most WeChat
users won’t find you through a search; it’s all about your QR Code. WeChat allows you
to simply create a QR Code allowing WeChatters to do a quick scan to become friends. This is smarter way to exchange contact details, which most of the Western messengers do not utilized.

3. Look around:

The “look-around” function allows you to scan other people around you. In one shake of the handset, users can connect with WeChat users during any events or tradeshows.

5. Social gaming:

Mobile games are a powerful way to attract and retain friends. WeChat’s social gaming linkage works like Japan’s Line or Korea’s Kakao-Talk, with supported games letting users sign in via WeChat to share scores or challenge friends.

WeChat uses cross technology features to change the way users communicate and socialize, and ultimately, how people purchase and paying behavior. Business users can use official accounts to build audience, facilitate payments and handle after sales service. With the easy linkage to Tencent’s other application such as Weibo, business users gain access to over one billion users around different platform.

Now WeChat is slowing turning itself into an advertising platform in a new way. Its ads are not distributed as instant messages; they appear at the bottom of corporate pages. Advertisers can specify their target viewers based on gender, age, location and even areas of personal interests. Based on those conditions, Tencent’s back-end system that matches advertisers and viewers will decide which corporate pages will host the ads.

While WeChat isn’t the panacea for all marketing in China, it can be an effective piece to build loyalty and increase sales in one of the world’s most competitive
 markets further to the rest of the world.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/09/can-wechat-become-a-major-advertising-platform/?mod=ST1