WeChat is Becoming Bad for Marketing

WeChat sounded exciting as a platform for online marketing ,but recent changes to its policies have made it less friendly to marketers

Posted by Ryan on 2013-08-12

Being honest, I did believe and was excited WeChat’s Public Accounts could become another Weibo as a platform that is suitable for online marketing, with its huge user base of 400 million users that’s still further increasing at a fast pace.

But with a series of recent changes to WeChat’s policies as well as personal observations, my belief shakes and the excitement is cooling down.

The reason is simple: WeChat is becoming bad for online marketing. Below is the breakdown:

1. WeChat Doesn’t Quite Like It

In June 2013 the project director of WeChat gave an official cold shoulder to online marketers (and spammers), by telling the media “WeChat is never an online marketing tool”.

Following that is another bad-news update to WeChat’s policies on enterprise accounts and media accounts. From July 2013, media accounts can send their followers one message at most per day, while enterprise accounts can directly send the followers only ONE message per MONTH.

The changes have sent a clear message to administrators of WeChat public accounts: Be there only when your followers need you, and don’t take the initiative to start a conversation if they don’t come to you first.

2. You Can Make Your WeChat Rock, But the Technical Price is High

One thing where I think WeChat Public Accounts surely beat Weibo is its awesome public APIs. With these APIs, you can tune your public account from a simple content distribution system into a very functional app with customized content based on your followers’ input.

For example, the public account of the Commercial Bank of China allows their credit card users to directly check their balances and credit status, pay the bills, reset passwords, and get support, simply by sending quick queries to the bank’s WeChat account.

It even has a LBS function that can give you a list of nearby shops and deals that accept their credit cards.

All this sounds awesome…

The “but” part is, you have to know how to play with the APIs or have a technical team that like your bribery and back you up.

3. WeChat is Not Social Media and Doesn’t Go Viral

Whether you use WeChat privately or run a public account, most of the time WeChat works the same as an IM tool in nature.

It is like a pipe. You input your message in one end and the receiver gets the message from the other end of the pipe. If the receiver wants to share it, it needs to set up another pipe.

Remember how you shared jokes via text messages like 10 years ago? It feels right like that.

You can not spread the message as easily as you do on Weibo or Twitter by simple reposting the message so the message has a chance of being seen by a lot of people and going viral.

Your thoughts?

Have you been using WeChat for marketing purposes, and what are your feelings and opinions about it? You are very welcomed to share them.

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