If you want your business to enter the market in China, WeChat should be the first prioritized marketing channel you need to consider. With more than 700 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) today, WeChat becomes the digital platform of the most traffic in China. Even big luxury brands like Dior, which had doubts about WeChat marketing years before, finally changed their mind and started the transformation of playing somewhat distant to customers, to selling products directly on WeChat.
Why WeChat is so popular?
It is amazing to see how Chinese mobile users are having so much affinity to WeChat. They use WeChat to
- send voice and text messages
- read news
- acquire information from public accounts
- pay for daily expenses (taxi/utilities/restaurants/shopping/red envelop etc.)
- even start their own business
And much more…
To conclude, the main reason why WeChat can achieve such a great success is that the customer experience in WeChat is a closed loop – customers can do anything within WeChat.
What does it mean for business minds?
Given this great opportunity, many business-minded people opened their own public accounts and begin to deliver blogs on WeChat, then convert their influence into money, either by opening online shops or affiliate marketing.
Sounds like a great idea! But wait…
According to the recently released data by WeChat, there are 2 million public accounts in total until the end of 2017. This means, it is not so easy to stand out from the crowd! On the other hand, thousands of account owners stop updating their blogs and step out automatically at the same time, due to the increasing competition in WeChat.
Why the competition on WeChat is so intense?
-
Low threshold
Anyone who has a mobile phone can create their own public account. There is no requirement of education, age, expertise etc. Whoever wants to be a key opinion leader/influencer, can have a try on WeChat. Today, it is no surprise that your Chinese friends are owners of 2-5 public accounts.
2. Changing User behaviors
Users are complicated. Today they prefer chicken-soup romantic style articles; tomorrow they prefer dark realistic contents. Contents of no changes ignoring the user preferences will have increasing churn rate. If your account aims to profit at the end, you should not play cool in front of your potential customers, but please them, talk to them and know what they want to read.
3. Increasing competitors
More and more individuals and business entities are joining the competitions, since the influence of WeChat is widely accepted as a main channel to conquer the Chinese market. This means, it is very important to deliver competitive contents that make you stand out and earn the loyalty of readers.
4. More information sources from other channels
Fierce competition do not only come from WeChat internally, but also from the external platforms. China is a leading country in experimenting and developing new media vendors.
Recently, Xiaohongshu (a platform to share luxury goods and lifestyle) and Douyin (a platform to create own short video) are drawing much attention. These new channels are splitting the traffic, and thus challenging the dominance of WeChat.
5. Tighter legal restrictions
WeChat begin to tighten its restrictions on contents more often. You need to pay attention that Tencent can block your articles any time, due to laws policies. This means, in this platform, your contents must comply with the restriction rules of WeChat, unlike your independent personal website. Be careful – Your competitors can also report your contents and play the ugly game.
Nevertheless, no need to feel frustrated, as the benefit of WeChat obviously outweighs its strong competition. In the next post, we will talk about the ways of how to make your WeChat content marketing stand out!
The Digital Teahouse 
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