Study Finds Companies are Investing More in WeChat Platform

A recent report found WeChat, a social media app, has more than 700 million monthly active users and more than half (61 percent) are opening the app 10 or more times each day. The multifunctional app is widely used in China for messaging, news, sharing content, and mobile payment.

The “2016 WeChat Impact Report,” a joint effort by Tencent Penguin Intelligence and China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (translated by WalktheChat), shows the app is being leveraged as a marketing tool as well – more than 560,000 businesses have official WeChat accounts.

As WeChat’s audience grows, businesses are not only establishing a presence on the platform, they are investing in it as well. More than 64 percent of the operators invested in their own public accounts, up from 53 percent last year.

The data shows that regardless of the monetary investment, businesses intend to invest more in their account on the WeChat platform this year.

WeChat’s sizable user base is two-thirds male and one-third female, with 40 percent indicating they are corporate professionals.  The vast majority (94 percent) of users are accessing WeChat every day, with 55 percent devoting more than an hour a day to the application.

Steven Chang, Corporate Vice President of Tencent, recently told The Drum that marketers are competing for people’s attention against content, movies, social, games, websites, all of which are easily accessible on a mobile phone, which underscores the need for business’s to develop quality content.

“This makes it more important to build coherent stories that users want to get involved with. Making that experience of marketing seamless for the user or the customer is essential,” he said.

The top three uses of WeChat Official Accounts (business accounts) are information release (84.7 percent), marketing campaigns (64.1 percent), and client interactions (45.8 percent).

As far as sharing content, the survey found WeChat users are more likely to share an article if they find it valuable (48.8 percent), interesting (39.2 percent) or emotionally touching (38.6 percent).