How brands use WeChat for impact and engagement

WeChat is China's most indispensable app. Here is a look at how brands from Kate Spade to Chanel are using this versatile platform to market to Chinese consumers.

When WeChat said it wanted to connect everything, it wasn’t kidding – from mobile messaging to health tech to interactive toys, the company seems to have it covered. It’s even ready to overtake texting as the communication method of choice – no mean feat, considering the billions of texts sent every day.

This ubiquity of access and integration into its 600 million users' everyday lives has naturally inspired brands looking to nail the three R's of social user engagement – reach, recognition and revenue – to take advantage of WeChat’s commercial opportunities. Here are some of the best examples of key strategies used by brands to enhance their presence and engage their customers via WeChat:

Brand stories told through HTML5 mini sites

Setting up an HTML5 mini site specifically designed for access via WeChat through QR codes, chat, customized menus, multimedia messages, and shared messages on Moments gives brands the freedom to get creative with their content without disrupting other branded activity.

Fashion houses that are looking to enhance their profile in China, such as Moncler and Browns, have chosen this route as the swiftest, surest way to reach a new audience.

Chanel has created a fashion mini site which gives WeChat users the full Chanel experience, complete with news, videos, make up tips as well as product and promotional information. It uses the WeChat interface to its advantage, engaging users without taking them out of their familiar environment and providing them with rich, exclusive information reflecting the quality and high-end nature of the brand.

Louis Vuitton used the buzz generated from key opinion leaders (KOL) in its second series show to drive users to a WeChat mini site. It then offered them a virtual experience of the event, encouraged them to share it socially and gave them information about the new women’s range.

Audience participation with games and quizzes

WeChat users are highly engaged and predisposed at getting involved in app-based activity. Millions have downloaded games such as Dash and Speed. There’s clearly an appetite for interaction, and brands have been quick to exploit this. U.S. fashion company Kate Spade, for example, launched a sky lantern game where users could select a lantern color and write messages on it before releasing it to the sky. They were encouraged to invite friends to take part via QR code, and had the opportunity to win Kate Spade products by participating.

Coach has a reputation as one of the most creative luxury brands on WeChat. Its Modern New Yorker campaign asked users to send a text to the Coach WeChat account to receive nine photographic puzzle pieces of brand ambassador and superstar musician Leehom Wang, which they then had to complete for the chance to win a signed Coach poster. 

Disruptive advertising: thinking outside the app

Innovative application of WeChat’s functionality has led to a number of very successful campaigns, delivering measurable improvements to profits as well as popularity.

Uniqlo is an example of a brand that increased its WeChat followers from 400,000 to around one million in just six months and boosted sales by 30 percent with its Style Your Life campaign. In a project which brought together physical stores and online sharing, users were encouraged to try on outfits in-store in front of monitors - designed to give consumers access to a number of different backgrounds, including sightseeing in London and an evening in downtown Tokyo. The images were automatically uploaded to WeChat, where users could share them with their friends. Some users also uploaded selfies taken in-store.

Chinese mobile Internet company Dianping has also made creative use of WeChat’s messaging services to develop an innovative campaign to promote Avengers: Age of Ultron. This was the first brand to use a fake incoming call which, when answered, appeared to result in the user’s screen cracking under the signature attacks of the Avengers.

And here is a shot of the 'shattered' screen effect.

A call to action encouraged users to continue their experience in the cinema, and linked to the Dianping booking system. The campaign played to all the strengths of WeChat as well as the personalities of its users – focusing on telling a story, delivering it quickly and with impact to an audience used to short, speedy interactions and allowing them to easily act on what they’d seen without taking them out of the brand environment.

What’s next?

It’s clear that brands are keen to get involved in all the marketing opportunities WeChat has to offer. It’s a lucrative partnership with measurable benefits for both sides.

Naturally, WeChat wants to feed this appetite. At the beginning of this year parent company Tencent tested ads within Moments, and is in the process of ramping up in-app advertising. This will no doubt encourage brands to think creatively about ads which go with the flow of app content, although they will want to be particularly careful to do this in a way that does not disrupt the user experience (UX).

The lifestyle aspect of WeChat also provides brands with increasingly innovative opportunities to connect with users and potential customers – it’s now far beyond being a simple communication platform, with users booking taxis and air tickets, paying bills, making investments and much more. In its drive to connect everything, WeChat is set to become the platform of choice for both users and brands.

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Here’s How Chat Apps Are Becoming As Important As Social Media For Brands

A number of top pundits are predicting that messaging apps will become ‘the new social media’ in 2015, and here’s some evidence to support that theory from Line, the chat app from Japan with over 500 million registered users and 170 million monthly actives.

Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney released a surprise collaboration with Kanye West on New Year’s Eve and I was particularly intrigued to observe how the British musician’s team promoted it online.

McCartney is popular on social media and was one of the first global ‘brands’ to jump aboard Line, which has dedicated a large part of its business to connecting companies with users for a fee.

His Facebook Page is closing in on 6.2 million likes, he has 2.17 million Twitter followers and (just) 187,000 followers on Instagram. But top billing is reserved for Line — where he has more than 10 million followers thanks to clever marketing and the use of stickers, which were offered free to fans who followed his account.

So how did he get on with engagement?

Sir Paul’s Social Media Scorecard

• Facebook: 14,334 likes and 1,829 shares

• Instagram (which did not contain a link to the Soundcloud track): 15,600 likes

• Line: 1,074 likes and 31 shares on public post, and push notifications to 10 million-plus fans (see below)

Twitter: the @paulmccartney account retweeted Kanye West’s tweet, but only after his team deleted the tweet below promoting the collaboration.

It isn’t clear why the tweet was deleted — perhaps it didn’t generate enough interest or McCartney’s team was happier to promote West’s tweet — but the overall engagement numbers are interesting.

Instagram comes out top in terms of sheer likes — despite a far smaller fan base. While the Instagram post makes mention that the song is available on McCartney’s website there is no URL so just a small fraction of those ‘likers’ may have actually taken action and listened to the song.

Facebook almost certainly got more attention — with traffic to Soundcloud, iTunes and its own video player — but the problem with posting updates to the social network is that Facebook’s own algorithm dictates just how many of McCartney’s fans will have seen it. There’s no way that it got served to all 6.2 million fans’ timelines unless McCartney’s team bought Facebook ad space.

The Power Of The Push Notification

Line does things differently, and McCartney’s post went out to his fans in two ways — via a public post and private chats.

The figures referred to above are from the post that McCartney’s account made to its Timeline, which — as the name suggests — is a Facebook-like chronological feed of public posts available within a dedicated menu inside the Line app. There, users see all updates from their Line friends and ‘official’ (corporate) accounts — like McCartney’s — which they have chosen to follow.

Line’s Timeline is governed entirely by each user without an algorithm, they only see items from people they follow and they can also block out accounts they wish to ignore. There is no way a brand can pay to plant their messages there, such as they can do on Facebook, Twitter and (now) Instagram.

But, most importantly, McCartney’s account also sent private chat messages to each of its 10 million-plus followers on Line. There is no metric to quantify the engagement of that action, but the fact that most of those fans will have gotten a push notification with the message and link to Soundcloud (just like an SMS) gives you an idea that it might well have been hugely effective.

Indeed, on Line, the Timeline post is just a bonus. Line said in 2013 that one-third of its registered users open their Timeline each month, and gauging the total reach of an official account on Line is impossible.

Writing for The Next Web back in 2013, I pointed out that chat apps like Line are a genuine threat to Twitter when it comes to advertising cash, and the Japanese company’s Decemberacquisition of Microsoft’s MixRadio service has the potential to supercharge its appeal to artists and musicians worldwide once its proposed music streaming service goes live worldwide.

But Line isn’t the only chat app that is rivaling social networks. WeChat is becoming the de factor mobile internet in China — it is a must for any brands seeking to reach consumers there — while the same can be said of Kakao Talk in Korea, which is installed on over 90 percent of the country’s smartphones and also offers accounts for brands.

The appeal of chat apps for brands and advertisers won’t just be an Asian phenomenon in 2015, however.

Kik, an app that claims to have 80 percent of American’s youth on its service, recently let brands on to its platform, Snapchat is planning an Asia-style platform (and it just raised a truck load of cash). Even also-run Tango linked up with Spotify and offers a timeline-feature, while Rakuten-owned Viber introduced a platform for high-profile users in November.

And Facebook?

Facebook Messenger is a notable absentee from this list, but perhaps not for long. David Marcus — the former PayPal CEO who heads up Facebook’s messaging business — told Wired that he wants to “reinvent messaging between people and businesses.”

That will almost certainly mean a system just like Line’s, which allows companies to pay for an account which users can subscribe to for updates. A premium tier on Line grants companies support for two-way conversations, thus turning them into customer sales representatives, and Facebook may adopt that too.

As for WhatsApp, the chat app Facebook bought for $19 billion, it offers an SMS replacement service rather than a platform and its founders seem to have no plan to change that.

Asia’s messaging apps have been around longer, and thus most have more mature business models that generate income by connecting brands with consumers, in addition to other non-marketing revenue streams such as games and stickers.

If 2014 was the year that the West wised up to the potential of messaging apps, then 2015 is the year that they’ll get smart and make money from them.

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Social media speak to power

On Kings Highway in Cherry Hill, Unitarian Universalist Church members stand in solidarity with Ferguson residents protesting the grand jury finding in Michael Brown's death. (TOM GRALISH / Staff Photographer)

'Nothing should be normal or everyday about accepting all this," says Ferguson, Mo., Democratic committeewoman Patricia Bynes. "Social media has helped ensure the images and agony stay fresh in people's minds."

Ferguson stays fresh. On Sunday, members of the St. Louis Rams did a pregame salute in protest of what they saw as police violence in the fatal Aug. 9 shooting of Michael Brown. That angered the St. Louis Police Association, which called on the National Football League to punish the players. The league declined.

On Monday, demonstrations around the nation - including at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania - organized around the #HandsUpWalkout hashtag. Protesters left schools or workplaces in solidarity with Brown, at the time of day of his shooting, 12:01 p.m. Central time, or 1:01 p.m. Eastern time. Rallies briefly clogged Market Street near the universities. T. Stokes of Philadelphia tweeted: "You know it's real when there's a police helicopter flying above your protest."

The year 2014 has been the year of social media as social protest. Again and again, people have used Twitter hashtags, Facebook posts, Vine videos, Instagram photos, and messages on WhatsApp, WeChat, and many other media to support and organize rallies, often on behalf of marginalized or mistreated groups. Racial injustice has been the issue in Jacksonville, Fla., (in the Michael Dunn trial) and Ferguson. It was gender-related violence in the Ray Rice controversy and the Isla Vista, Calif., shootings.

Worldwide, Muslims resurrected the venerable #NotInMyName hashtag to protest Islamist extremism. Demonstrators in Mexico and China use social media to organize and campaign. And all over the world, video game players joined in the #GamerGate controversy.

So, no question, this is happening. But bigger questions loom.

Charles Gallagher, chair of the sociology, social work, and criminal justice department at La Salle University, asks: "What kind of legs do social media protests have? Do they change anything? Or is it all just 'slacktivism,' the lazy, next-to-useless click-and-take-credit social in-activism of the 2010s? No large-scale studies as yet can answer that question."

It's worth noting, though, that the Oxford English Dictionary welcomed slacktivism into its pages this year. It's a thing.

It's certainly a thing in China and Mexico, with massive, long-term protests honed and organized by social media.
The "Umbrella Movement" in Hong Kong was fanned by a viral image of a man waving off tear gas with his umbrella during a Sept. 29 protest, largely of students, against mainland control over local elections. "It wouldn't have had that name without social media," says James Carter, professor of history at St. Joseph's University. Within days, a statue of "Umbrella Man" had gone up as a symbol of protest. Carter says that hashtags such as #umhk "helped unify diverse protest groups under this one" - pun intended - "umbrella term." The protest is now into December, with government troops closing public squares and arresting demonstrators.

In 1989 in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, Carter recalls, "it was the 'cutting-edge' fax machine that got the story to the outside world. That's dwarfed by the number of ways you can do that now. The government knows the world is watching." Authorities tried to throttle Twitter and the "Chinese Facebook," Weibo, but "the protesters are media-savvy, having grown up with social media and smartphones," Carter says. They did ends-around on censorship, turning to one-to-one media such as WhatsApp and WeChat to warn of crackdowns, organize meetings, and get out the story.

In Spanish, the phrase ya me cansé means "I've had enough" or "I'm tired of this now." In the wake of the horrible Sept. 26 disappearance of 43 students during a demonstration in Iguala, Mexico, allegations arose that the town's mayor was in league with local narco-terrorists. The students have not been found, and national outrage exploded, over both their disappearance and the larger issue of the paralyzing, savage lawlessness in Mexico.
"These larger issues are systemic in Mexico," says Mark Lashley, professor of communication, who studies social media at La Salle University. "It's fascinating to see its expression on social media there."

After a long and bitter news conference on Nov. 7, Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam said, "Ya me cansé" and tried to leave. Those words soon were shoved down his throat via the Twitter hashtag #yamecanse. According to tracking site Topsey, it was used more than 3.6 million times in November. "That phrase," Lashley says, "was tailor-made for a social-media backlash. This is a substantial movement poised to continue, and you're seeing lots of creative uses of the hashtag, both in the demonstrations themselves" - in which protestors sometimes lie down and pretend to sleep or be tired - and in YouTube videos and editorial cartoons, taking government down a notch and allowing social media to work as the people's voice.

The door of the National Palace on the Zócalo in Mexico City was set ablaze. On Nov. 20, tens of thousands marched down the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City and gathered in the Zócalo. Sympathy protests arose in New York; Geneva, Switzerland; and Cologne, Germany.

So - do such media-driven protests "work"? It can be very hard to tell. In Jacksonville, Michael Dunn, who fired a gun into a van and killed a black man, was sentenced to life without parole on Oct. 17. In Ferguson, Officer Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown, was not indicted, but he now says he is leaving the police force. On Monday, the White House published a report and guidelines on "Strengthening Community Policing." On the other hand, the Chinese protest seems as if it's being scuttled. And there have been arrests in Mexico - but not of those being accused.

So the question remains: When is social-media protest just slacktivism, and when is it something more? And how do we know when it's working?

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