WeChat (微信) for Beginners: Introduction
By: Charlie Campbell
Tags: Messaging, Wechat, Mobile

WeChat is the window into China everything.

It’s a way for you to connect with friends, do business, and reach millions and millions of people. In a few short years, WeChat has grown from nothing into a messaging and marketing giant. Mobile China = WeChat.

WeChat is owned by Tencent (founders of QQ, another popular messaging app) and by the numbers, is one of the largest social networking apps in the world. As of August 12, 2015 WeChat has 600 million monthly active users (MAUs). Twice the population of the United States.

WeChat is a messaging service with an explosion of features on it’s mobile-only platform. Connie Chan from Andreessen Horowitz took a deep dive into WeChat’s history and future. Highly suggested for an in-depth review of WeChat’s business fundamentals.

I want to introduce WeChat basics so marketers and normal people like you and I can better operate in China. I’ll cover:

Why WeChat is important

How to set up the English version

Find and add friends

Feature introduction

In the meantime, I encourage everybody to download the app and I can be your first friend (id: bampbell).

WeChat can be downloaded from the app store either in English or Chinese depending on your phones default language. It’s best if you use a Chinese cell phone number to register, it will open up a lot of features but a US number works as well.

Why it’s important you start using WeChat

China is a massive market everybody is trying to figure out and get a piece of (myself included). WeChat is a perfect gateway drug to getting your feet wet with a built-in translate feature for non-mandarin speakers so you can begin to build a network.

WeChat serves a lot of different purposes for different people. Personally I have two accounts: one for business and one for pleasure. Here is some areas of your life it will improve.

Social Life

You’re entire social life will be run through WeChat. Guaranteed. People prefer to use WeChat over phone calls…yikes.

Business

Business executives, managers, employees, and businesses themselves all have WeChat accounts and use them daily. China never caught the email bug and have always preferred instant messaging. We now are seeing a transition from QQ (basically IM) to mobile messaging aka WeChat.

WeChat makes it easy to set up call times in different timezones and stay in touch with what’s happening in your business on the ground through images/videos. It has been the silver bullet on our nursery business.

Marketing

WeChat uses the ‘app within an app’ model and already hosts millions of mini apps on its platform (See Connie Chan’s article above). Marketers can target ming boggling numbers of active Chinese users through ‘official accounts’. This is important because Chinese consumers are notoriously difficult to reach and WeChat is a perfect platform to reach your target.

How to find/invite friends

There are a lot of different ways to add people on WeChat. Below are the most common. WeChat follows the Facebook model of adding/accepting friends rather than an open platform like Twitter.

User ID (usually their Chinese cell) — used unless you’re standing next to somebody

QR code — fastest and most used method of adding people on WeChat face to face

Other — there are other ways like shake or recommended friends but these are the ones you’ll use most

Accepting friend requests — Once somebody has added you, it will pop up under recommended friends

Features

WeChat is loaded with features and continues to expand focused on utility rather than fluff. I still remember when it was an ugly black/white screen you could send messages over wifi.

Messaging

Messaging is the core of WeChat and it’s main interface. You can send text, images, videos, files of all formats (.pdf, word, excel), voice recordings, stickers, and short 5 second videos.

You communicate directly with friends, not with strangers. It’s similar to Facebook but focused on the messaging rather than the ‘wall post’ model. Facebook went from wall -> messages, WeChat has grew from messenger -> wall (aka moments). Far more utilitarian.

Voice messages

Users are able to walkie talkie into WeChat and leave a voice message (max 60 seconds). What’s culturally interesting about voice recordings are they avoid one of the most annoying parts of Mandarin Chinese: typing characters. Unbelievably more efficient.

Autotranslate (yay!)

WeChat translates messages directly in app by pressing and holding messages. If your default language is English, it will automatically translate into Chinese and vice versa for Chinese <> English. Amazing feature for people living in China that don’t speak Mandarin.

Send images/video

WeChat automatically compresses images/videos and you can send up to 9 images at a time — either by taking them new or selecting them from an album.

Sights

Record and send 6 second clips either directly to other users via messenger or in the moments feature. Think Vine but built in.

Voice/video calls

Voice and video calls are embedded into the messaging feature. Voice/video calls are made natively through WeChat and can only be made through the platform (for now) and seems to be faster than Skype.

Group messaging

Pretty self explanatory. You can create a group and take advantage of all messaging features.

Group messaging alone is a gigantic time saver. One message can prevent an entire 30 minute meeting with our staff.

Moments

Moments deserves it’s own post. Imagine Facebook as a mobile only version of News Feed. You post articles, pictures, sights, or just their thoughts.

For each post you can either ‘like’ it or ‘leave a comment’. If I comment on a post, if we’re not mutual friends, the third party won’t see my post. This is another level of privacy for users posting personal content to their WeChat.

Another useful feature is you can highly target your readers by selecting who to send content to. This is awesome for marketers who want to send more directed adds at their audiences.

Can’t tell you how many people use this. Everywhere you look, they are spending the majority of their time on moments. I’ll be experimenting with ways to better target readers.

Payments

One of the strongest features of WeChat is it’s payment system. It allows payments to be paid directly through the platform itself and businesses can accept payment instantaneously. Through the payments platform you can: book a hotel, taxi, doctors appointment etc.

Payments bring the most important factors to business natively inside of the app: money. Through official accounts, businesses can reach users directly and in a more intimate way.

Note: this requires that you have Chinese cell phone number to sign up. I’ll think of a workaround method to hacking this so people can gain access to this feature.

I owe my social life and business to WeChat while living in China. It has served as an invaluable tool and I’m sure will continue to only get better. Moving forward, I can’t wait to see just how deep it can infiltrate everybody's lives.