Sootoo Research said that over 60% users use WeChat everyday .

Sootoo Research published the report of "The behavior analysis of WeChat users", and so I would like to explain the part that is written about the situation of utilization at this time.

1. Have you ever used WeChat?

92.97% of respondents said "Yes". It's very high rate, but Sootoo is the company that provides the IT field news, so there may be a little bit bias in this answer. But on the other hand, it's true that WeChat users is rapidly increasing, and their user will reach 400 million people soon.


2. What is the reason that you started to use WeChat?

- That reason is that friends or colleagues have already used WeChat --- 71.34%
- That reason is that was interested in WeChat --- 47.42%
- That reason is that can send the voice or text by WeChat --- 34.05%
- That reason is that can use video call on WeChat --- 29.31%
- That reason is that can use group voice chat on WeChat --- 21.34%
- That reason is that use every time the products provided by Tencent --- 2.59%

In the last report that was written about "whole" social media, the answer of "Friends or colleague have already used it" was also the top reason. So it can be said that the one of the most important thing is the word‐of‐mouth marketing as I thought.


3. How often do you use WeChat?

- Many times in a day  36.23%

- One time in a day   27.17%

- One time in few days  21.24%

- One time in a week  15.36%





As a result, it follows that over 60% users use WeChat every day.


4. How many hours do you use WeChat at one time?

Less than 5 minutes  29%

6 to 15 minutes  34%

16 to 30 minutes  15%

More than 31 minutes  22%








5. Which feature do you usually use on WeChat?

- Voice Chat  93.51%
- Sending pictures  77.28%
- Watching pictures on Moments  61.66%
- Sending pictures to Moments   53.55%
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　　　　　　　・
- Checking the information from official accounts  22.52%
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　　　　　　　・
- PC version of  WeChat  7.91%



I think that this result proved that WeChat is the communication tools with friends or colleague regarding almost people at this moment.


This report also explained about the use reality of official accounts on WeChat, but I would like to explain about it at the next time.


Source => Sootoo Research

5 Tips of WeChat You Might Not Know

A vice president of Tencent Zhang were interviewed by a business magazine few weeks ago, and he talked about interesting 5 tips of WeChat as follows at that time.

1. The "Shake" function is the entrance for the each services.
WeChat have the "Shake" function as following picture:

Basically, the user uses its function to find the new friends on WeChat.
But now it has the new interesting function to understand the music name that user is just playing the music on their device.

     

I played the music that is saved on my Android smartphone, and then I tried the "Shake" function of WeChat. As the result, WeChat gave me the correct music name!
I think this function help users when user listen the radio or TV on their devices, and they don't know the its music name :)

Mr. Zhang said this is the one of example that this function exists as for the entrance of each services. And he said that they will continue to develop the new activation method in future too.


2. They don't provide the special client for iPad.
They already provide the client for iPhone, and actually its client also support iPad. So this means that they have not provided the special client for iPad.

In China, there are the custom that service provider separately provide the client for iPhone and iPad. For the example, Sina Weibo do that as following picture.

"Because most of the iPad don't have the SIM card, so the user have the limitation of place to use WeChat. This is not match with the concept of WeChat", Mr. Zhang said.


3. The function of posting only text character in the "Moments" exists only for the internal testing.
WeChat have the social function "Moments", and the user usually post the text character with pictures. But if the user long-click the icon of camera, the user can post the text only message as follows.

Mr. Zhang said that this function is for the internal testing, and they basically want the user to post the message with picture on it.


4. Tencent has developed the voice recognition feature by themselves.
They provided the voice recognition feature from version 4.5 of their apps, but Mr. Zhang said that they developed this function by themselves.
According to him, there are over 200 people in the WeChat team, and 30 people of them take charge of developing this voice recognition feature.


5. They regret that the main color of WeChat became green.

This is like a joke, but Mr. Zhang said that the main color of WeChat was blue at first. And they changed its color by each version at first, and they someday changed its color to green. When they changed its color to green, WeChat already became popular, and then the time was past. So they lost the chance to change its color from green to other color.

But I feel that green color is very match with WeChat... :)


Actually, there are 10 tips in the original article, but I selected 5 tips from there. If you are interested in other 5 tips, please visit here. That is written in Chinese...


Source => Sina IT

WeChat and Weibo both are mainly accessed from mobile devices.

A data research company "DRATIO" published a research report of social media in China.

This report is written about the comparison of Sina Weibo and WeChat user, and there are some interesting trend. So I will explain the summary of this report.


1. Do you use Weibo or WeChat or both?

Weibo only     20.6%

WeChat only  22.4%

Both   57.0%







The over half of users use both services, but there is an interesting trend by the below picture that was categorized by age.

Only using Weibo users has turned out that the older ages have the higher rate, but I think that old users maybe use QQ as a communication tool instead of WeChat.


2. In the recent one month, how often did you use each service?

The highest utilization rate of WeChat is over 4 times in a day, and the highest utilization rate of Weibo is 3 to 4 times in a week.


3. How many hours do you averagely use each service in a day?

Less than 30 minutes is the highest rate of Weibo user's using hours, and 30 to 60 minutes is the highest rate of WeChat user's using hours.

The users who are using WeChat more than 4 hours exist 13.4%, so it seems that the using time of WeChat is relatively longer than using Weibo.


4. Which devices do you usually use for each service?

Mobile access is the most popular method of usage of both services, but this is a natural thing. Because as I explained before, mobile device already became the top of all method connecting to the internet in China. Furthermore, Tencent defines WeChat as a mobile communication tool, and Sina said that their more than 60% users have used mobile devices to access Sina Weibo.


5. Where do you usually use each service?

#1   at home
#2   at office
#3   at transportation facilities
#4   at public place
#5   at outside
#6   at lodgings
#7   at classroom
#8   other




As a result, more than 80% users have used each service at home. And it is a characteristic thing that using each service 'at office' is more than 'at transportation facilities'.


6. Which feature do you usually use on each service?

Though it's a natural thing, 82.5% of WeChat users usually use chat feature on it. And the characteristic thing is that very few users use the social feature of WeChat compared to Weibo. I think this is one of the most important fact when we would like to utilize each service for our business.


For capturing Chinese social media market, it is a very important thing that compares Weibo and WeChat, and understanding deeply each property. So I would like to continue introducing that point of view in future too.


Source => DRATIO

VP of WeChat said "Official Account Admin Platform" is not a marketing platform. What is its intention?

As you know, many companies and organization have used WeChat as a marketing tool to develop or extend Chinese market. And they have already registered the official account on "WeChat Official Account Admin Platform (WOAAP) ".

According to Tencent,  there are hundreds of thousands of official accounts in WOAAP. And there are 30,000 accounts who already got the "V" mark, and 70% of them are the corporate user.


In this situation, in an event, VP of Wechat "Ceng Ming" said that WOAAP is not a marketing platform. What is this intention?

He mainly pointed out the two things.

1. Too much sales information will exhaust the WeChat user.
There is the limitation that the official accounts on WOAAP can post one information in a day, and "V" marked accounts can post two information in a day too. This limitation exists for not let WeChat users be tired of  a large amount of sales information.

As I explained before, they started cleaning up the fallacious official accounts, it also may be related to this.

2. WeChat as a social CRM tool.
Ceng Ming said that WeChat is suitable for managing users, communicating with users and providing customized services to users. He said it is like a social CRM tool.

As an example, he introduced the case study of China Southern Airlines.

As I explained before, China Southern Airline has leveraged WeChat to reply automatically the flight information, the weather in the each place and so forth to their users. Additionally, users can reserve their seat via WeChat now.


Actually, the leading actor is the user of WOAAP, so it's free to use WeChat as a marketing tool. But Tencent recognizes that WOAAP is not a marketing platform, so it may be difficult to expect the marketing feature addition in future.

But api of WOAAP is published on their site, so it may be able to expect that third party vendor develop the tool for becoming convenient for marketing on WeChat.


Source => Sina Tech, DF Daily

China Telecom and Netease formally published their collaboration IM tool "Yixin". They will establish a joint venture for beating WeChat.

China Telecom and Netease held a co-event today, and they formally published the collaboration IM tool "Yixin" today.

 


They announced following things at the event.

- They will establish a joint venture soon to promote Yixin.
According to the some sources, the investment ratio of this company is 7 (China Telecom) to 3 (Netease), and all of the investment amount is 200 million RMB (= 32.41 million USD).

- They aim to gain more than 100 million registered users and more than 50 million active users in the six months.

- China Telecom will pre-install this "Yixin" to their providing smartphones (not all).


And they also said that WeChat is their rival, but do they have a good chance of winning? Let's check the difference of functional aspect with WeChat.

Yixin has the feature of chat (including group chat), social, emotion icon and QR code and so forth as same as WeChat has. And its UI is also similar to WeChat.

But Yixin has some interesting features that WeChat doesn't have as follows:

1. Yixin can send/ receive the SMS message that is not only the mobile phone of China Telecom, but also China Mobile and China Unicom.

   

I send an SMS message from Yixin to my China Telecom's mobile phone, there was no problem with it, and also no problem to reply SMS message to Yixin.

I think this feature is especially good to use when the people who are out of China would like to send the quick message to the people who are in China.

2. The linkage functions with E-mail.

This feature helps check your email on Yixin. It's only you have to do is that register your email on Yixin.

Its feature is very convenient, but there is some limitation at this time.
- This linkage function can work with only the email service that Netease or China Telecom provides.
- When I tried this function, receiving the email on Yixin is no problem, but replying or sending email from Yixin doesn't work well.

I think we have to wait for their improvement at this time.

3. Voicemail features to the mobile phone or fixed phone.

I think this feature is also especially good to use when the people who are out of China would like to send the quick message to the people who are in China.

But unfortunately, it seems that it doesn't work well at this time as far as I tried.


Well, I think that Yixin has a good chance to compete with WeChat, because they have some good functions that WeChat doesn't have.

WeChat was added a lot of topics such as game center, mobile payment and so forth. So I think that Yixin should not go this direction as same as Wechat, and they should go the way to become the total communication platform in all of on the user's mobile phone.
Ex.) linkage functions with email, SMS, Weibo, WeChat and so forth.

If they will go that way, I think it's possible to compete with WeChat.


Source => Sohu IT, ChinaByte, CNFOL

The rule of WeChat official account will be changed. Tencent emphasized that WeChat is not a marketing tool again.

As I explained last time, Tencent held a partner conference on July 3. And I explained that oversea users of WeChat already exceeded 70 million people. And today, I would like to explain another important thing related WeChat.

At that conference, there was a session related to official accounts of WeChat, they announced that changing the rule of WeChat official accounts.

I explained before that the display method of official accounts will be changed in the next version of WeChat. And in addition to this, they announced that official accounts will be categorized two types as follows.

1. 订阅号 (Subscription accounts)
2. 服务号 (Service accounts)

According to their explanation, "Subscription accounts" can post one message in a day, but its message is not displayed in the top page of WeChat as I explained before. And "Service accounts" can post only one message in a month, but its message is still displayed in the top page of WeChat as same as the current version.

Now it's not clear that the existing official accounts will be categorized which type. But some resource said that the official accounts of media (News and so forth) will be categorized as a "Subscription accounts", and other official accounts will be categorized as a "Service accounts"...

It's not clear that this definition of categorization is true or not at this time, but anyhow, the effect of marketing on WeChat will become much less than now.


VP of WeChat said "WeChat is not a marketing tool, it's like a Social CRM tool" before, but it can be said that this message is gradually embodied. So we have to prepare the action for this trend, and we have to reconsider social marketing method in China.


Source => Tech QQ, Ifeng Net

Tencent updated the login page of WeChat public platform and the case studies.

As I explained before, WeChat have a management platform(PPoW) for the official accounts, but recently its login page was updated as follows.

Last time, I explained that the oversea users of WeChat already exceeded 40 million people, but the image of this login page looks like to suggest that Tencent will accelerate overseas advance.

There is no update in the page of after login at this time. But there are some new features compared to my last explanation, so I would like to explain them.

As the above picture, the feature of "Advanced Settings" was added the right end of menu. And on the "Advanced Settings", users can manage auto reply feature and customize the menu of display screen of WeChat. And users can also demand to become its developer to refer the APIs of WeChat PPoW.


And at the same time, the case studies on this page was also updated.

They introduce 5 case studies on there, and China Southern Airline leverages WeChat to reply automatically the flight information, the weather in the each place and so forth to their users.

And Evernote is also leveraging WeChat, they makes WeChat user easily share the information in WeChat to each Evernote accounts.


Recently, the official account on WeChat is more and more increasing, but I would like to continue introducing the interesting case studies as ever.


Source => Public Platform of WeChat(PPoW)

Oversea users of WeChat already exceeded 40 million people. They also published the translation page to accelerate localization to each languages.

WeChat already started to make inroads into foreign markets. And as I explained before, a lot of countries started to use their WeChat.

And recently, they announced that oversea users of WeChat already exceeded 40 million people. According to the news, the whole number of WeChat users were 312 million people, so it follows that the rate of oversea users are about 13%.

According to the news, their rival, LINE, have over 60 million users in foreign country, so it can be said that WeChat lags behind to LINE at the moment.

But they also published the translation page to accelerate localization to each languages.

Actually, this is a volunteer based efforts by frenetic their fans. WeChat team said:

WeChat is looking for help from our users around the world to improve localization in the app. You can help us with your expertise in Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malaysian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, or one of many more languages we support.

Volunteers can login to this page by Facebook or Google account. And after login, we can find the English sentence that WeChat team would like us to translate.

I tried to translate from English to Japanese :)

Each services or products should have many frenetic fans, so I think this is very interesting efforts. Would you try this?

Well, I think that we have to keep watching the two things about WeChat as ever. One of them is "WeChat will be changed to the paid service?", and another one is this "overseas deployment". Let's keep watching.

Source => TechWeb

Let's start marketing on WeChat(Weixin)! Guidance of managing official account on WeChat.

As I explained before, WeChat is now rapidly increasing their users in China. And many companies already started marketing activity on WeChat, such as Starbucks.

And it's no doubt that other companies who are in the English-speaking countries also would like to start marketing on them, so I would like to introduce how to manage official account on them. 

First, when you would like to manage the official account on WeChat, you have to use the "Public Platform of WeChat(PPoW)".

After accessing the top page of PPoW, you have to click the button of "注册(= Register)". After clicking the button of "注册", a dialog will be appeared as follows.

If you already have a QQ account, please enter the its ID number and password on it. If you still don't have any QQ account, then please click the button of right side "注册信QQ(= Register the new account of QQ)".

*Notice: You cannot use the QQ account that already coupled with the private WeChat ID.

After you enter the ID and password of QQ, the registration page of new WeChat will be appeared as follows.

You have to enter the WeChat ID, introduction of this account, nation, languages and the type of this official account. If you enter the all of item, please click the button of "确定(= OK!)".

*Notice: Actually you can select "English" at the section of languages. but as a result, it seems that PPoW still only support for the Mandarin.

If there are no problem, you can see the top page of PPoW as follows.

This PPoW is consist of five menus as follows.

1. 实时消息 = Real-time Information

You can receive the message from followers of this account, and send the reply to them on this page. 

2. 用户管理 = User management

You can manage users(followers) of this account on this page, and you can also categorize them by each type(favorite, black list, self-customized and etc.).

3. 群发消息 = Posting to the group

You can set the message that you would like to send to the followers at this page. There are the five type of message as follows.

a. 文字 = Text  b. 语音 = Voice  c. 图片 = Picture(s)  d. 视频 = Video(s) 

e. 图文消息 = Text + Picture(s)

And you can specify the message type from these.

*Notice: If you are not a verified user, you can only one message in a day.

4. 素材管理 = Contents management

You can upload the contents that you would like to send with the messages on this page. And you can send the preview of messages to the specific users. 

*Notice: It is necessary that the specific user is a your follower.

5. 设置 = Settings

You can change the information and nation of this official account on this page. Furthermore you can download the QR code of this official account here, and you can put its QR code on your Web site or other social media for increasing followers.

And you can apply to become a verified account, but it's necessary that this official account has more than 500 followers for this applying.

If you input the correct ID and password on mobile apps, it will return the error code of "(4, -69 Login failed)". It seems to be a specification of WeChat at this time.

Actually, you can register to this PPoW as a private person. But if you enjoy WeChat as a mobile collaboration tool, you should not register the account via PPoW.

Ok, today that's all. 

I would like to write about the advanced method or case study of WeChat marketing in near future.

The end of this article, please forgive me to introduce our official account of WeChat.

Actually, our official account usually introduces our products or services in English, but we also introduce the trend of social media or mobile market in China. 

According to the explanation of this PPoW, verified account have more variety method of sending messages. In order to know these merits, and I will write the blog about this, we have to become a verification account. I appreciate your cooperation :)

P.S. Now Tencent provide an international version of PPoW. Because this version provides the English menu, let's try this if you want!

Source => Public Platform of WeChat