Any company looking to expand in China must become acquainted with WeChat, China’s social media and messaging super app.
For brands or businesses looking to expand in China, WeChat Official Accounts are a key tool they should be looking to utilize.
Nanjing Marketing Group has run content marketing campaigns on WeChat for over a hundred businesses; I manage a personal Official Account and other social media platforms in the United States and China.
In this article, I will explain how a WeChat Official Account works and examine ways a new account can gain followers.
I will also cover how to create well-crafted, valuable articles for your readers and explain other tactics for driving traffic to your account and keeping your audience from unsubscribing.
What are WeChat Official Accounts?
As I have said in previous articles, the best way for a company to utilize WeChat is by setting up an Official Account.
Official Accounts are one of the quickest ways for consumers to learn about your company and services, and allow foreign companies to create articles (including text, images, or videos) on different topics for their fans.
If they become your follower, they will receive an update about each new article you post on WeChat, which helps you keep top of mind with your current and future customers.
Create Quality Content for Your WeChat Official Account
The content you put into the world through your Official Account will determine how you are perceived.
The word “quality” can be defined in several ways, and doesn’t just boil down to making something look good.
Rather, it is whatever your target audience finds valuable.
You may already know exactly who your target audience is. However, we often find that while companies new to China know their target audience in their home country, they still have some learning ahead of them when understanding their Chinese audience.
Create Educational & Helpful Content
Once you have an idea of your audience and what they are already interested in, it’s time to begin producing content.
First off: Ask yourself what they want to learn or what they want to achieve.
If you’re a game company, make content about a character’s background story or the hard work that went into designing a level. If you’re a school, interview a student about why they chose your institution over another.
Don’t be posting just for the sake of it.
When brainstorming ideas for your content, think about how your product or service can help consumers solve their problems.
If you see a trending topic and believe your brand can add something to the conversation or provide something that’s been missed—post about it!
The article in the image below is about the game Black Myth: Wukong describing how the game has become so popular in the West that non-Chinese are becoming interested in learning more about Journey to the West, the traditional story behind the game.
Integrate Trends (Optional)
While it’s essential to make the content useful for readers, in some cases it’s also useful to integrate trends because this can increase the chance that a follower will open or share the article.
Note that compared to other social media, this strategy is limited.
Unlike Douyin or WeChat Channels, the primary source of traffic for Official Account articles is not a “For You” type algorithmic feed.
Rather, it is the followers’ message area.
With that in mind, our strategy is generally to weave a trend into an article, but not to make it the core topic.
For example, when it was the hottest period of the year, we created an article for Genie on maintaining lift equipment.
Instead of the article being a list of technical instructions, we included many cultural aspects of staying healthy during the hot weather.
To learn more about what is trending in China, you might want to check out:
- Our Chinese Culture category blog posts
- Our founder’s short videos on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.
Use Visuals and Clear Writing
In this modern age of 30-second videos, visuals are more important than ever before; nevertheless, too many creators make amazing content but fail to get noticed because of this simple ingredient.
You may have an article full of important information.
You may have an incredible product.
However, none of this matters if your visuals don’t attract people to your video or article in the first place, and this is especially true for younger accounts.
In the West, the younger generations have been shown to have shorter attention spans due to their exposure to digital content, and it might not be too much of a stretch to say that the same applies to young people in China.
Accounts that have built up a reputation and trust can rely less on visuals sometimes because viewers are already aware of the content they are putting out.
Nevertheless, eye-catching titles and thumbnails are the best way to draw someone’s attention in an online space cluttered with content.
Similarly, whenever you’re editing a video, check to see that the cover for your video includes your title too. This way, if a user ever enjoys something of yours and goes to check out your channel, they can quickly swipe through your older content and select something that looks appealing.
Brand recognition and understanding grow as users engage with more articles and content. This means they will be more likely to follow you and come back for more later.
If there is enough space to show it, add an appealing picture for the cover of an article or video.
Below is a screenshot of Dior’s Official Account, and as you can see, each article has a visual that goes with its title.
In the first article, the title highlights what fashion line is being promoted (MY DIOR); in the second article, a picture of the article’s subject (i.e., the product) is displayed.
Keep Your Content Short
At Nanjing Marketing Group, we usually try to keep our articles under 1,500 words, but as you can see by this article you are reading, some topics require more.
Length guidelines are not concrete, and sometimes even going against them can help you stand out.
If you publish longer content that does well, keep doing that!
Below is a screenshot of a 28-second video of a concert from Mao Livehouse, a popular music venue in Beijing.
The videos embedded within WeChat articles should generally be shorter ones, perhaps three minutes or less. Unlike content for WeChat Channels or TikTok, these videos probably won’t make the WeChat article go viral.
If you have videos in another format, you might want to post them somewhere other than a WeChat Official Account:
- Long videos can be posted on Bilibili, China’s closest thing to YouTube.
- Vertical videos, which are usually short and can be cross-posted here:
- WeChat Channels, which behaves so differently from WeChat Official Accounts that we will create a separate article about it.
- Douyin.
- Little Red Book.
- Bilibili as it supports both horizontal and vertical videos (like YouTube).
Post Less Frequently
Now that we have spoken about quality, the next aspect to consider is quantity.
How often should an Official Account be posting?
Our go-to strategy is to post once to four times per month.
Each article is carefully crafted and provides value to the reader, so we aren’t likely to annoy them with the constant posting of uninteresting content.
As the budget increases, we’re likely to keep to the maximum of four posts per month on the WeChat Official Account, but invest more in one of the following:
- Advertising
- Content marketing on WeChat Channels
- Content marketing on other platforms
How long will it take for content to begin to gain followers?
WeChat Official Accounts’ follower base tends to grow slowly compared to other social media platforms because they aren’t highly viral.
However, they do have a strong open rate since the articles show up in the messages area of followers.
Make Use of the Custom Menu
Companies also can add tabs to their official account, such as “Services.”
Not all companies may want to do this, but for some industries, having this tab can be useful for helping drive traffic to your main website or to a page where users can pay for your services.
With a services tab, your users are more likely to follow your account as they know it is the most convenient way of accessing your services.
How to Boost Your Traffic
Once you start publishing valuable content for your users, it’s time to start driving more traffic to your account.
This will amplify your follower growth.
Work With Influencers
Like the West, China has people who make their living posting content online called influencers or KOLs (key opinion leaders), and you may want their help to promote your Official Account.
Influencers can be especially useful for gaining trust in the eyes of others, and that trust can rub off on you.
Influencers might be able to promote you via their
- WeChat Official Account,
- WeChat Channels account (short video),
- other social media, or
- all of the above
We’ve worked with many influencers, and choosing them can be tricky as influencers come in all shapes and sizes.
In the example below, popular Chinese influencer Austin uses his channel to talk about laundry detergent companies.
You should always choose an influencer that has followers likely interested in your Official Account, and while their follower count is one thing, we pay more attention to the level of human engagement with their content.
Hold Offline Events
In a recent report I published concerning Baidu (China’s Google) search data, I found that a younger Chinese demographic is very interested in going to offline events at cafes, bookstores, and similar venues in their cities.
Take advantage of this trend to build up your WeChat Official Account.
Offline events can grow your Official Account in two ways.
You can publish articles advertising your event, and you may even want to ask the venue you’re working with to share the article.
On the night (or day) of the event, display flyers inviting attendees to follow your Official Account.
(We can help contact venues in cities across China to ask if they would be interested in hosting an event.)
Even food and beverage businesses, like the sports bar in the example below, will have an Official Account to inform their followers of what’s happening.
As you can see, they constantly post about upcoming events happening at their bar to attract people.
Odds are, when people attend these events, they also get interested in following their WeChat, especially if you put QR codes out during the event.
Share QR Codes
QR codes are a BIG thing in China.
WeChat users scan QR codes directing them to your Official Account, and from here they can choose to follow your account.
Hisense, a maker of televisions and fridges, shared this article:
As you can see, they added a QR code to the bottom of their article.
Here are some ideas of where to share QR codes:
- Your website
- Your other social media (when permitted by the app)
- Physical flyers
- Ads
- Conference banners
- Email signatures
- Packaging for your products
- In-store displays
- Receipts
Make sure also that you include a QR code on all your content, even offline flyers.
Marketers consider WeChat Official Account followers as some of the highest quality followers you can get, so you will probably want to drive all your fans there.
Paid Ads
There are two of the common ways you can publish ads on WeChat:
- WeChat Moments: Moments is very similar to the home page on Facebook or Linkedin. This is where WeChat users can see whatever their close friends and connections have shared. WeChat accounts can pay to have an ad published so that select audiences will see it on their Moments page.
- Article Ads: Similar to how you may want to work with key opinion leaders, you may also want to pay to place an ad at the bottom of articles belonging to already popular accounts.
I recommend paying for ads only once your account has several published articles, including key information about your business.
You don’t want new viewers coming to your account to find nothing that interests them.
Here is an ad for Coke on WeChat Moments, Wechat’s version of the home page. Notice how they have used four photos to make it larger.
To help you learn more, we also created an entire website about WeChat Advertising.
How to Retain an Audience
Once you have gained an audience, the next step is keeping their attention.
There is a lot of competition out there, so you don’t want your success to get lost in the crowd.
Be consistent with your content. People will remember your face or brand so keep up the momentum of posting content once one of your articles or videos is doing well.
Once you have a large enough audience, you may reconsider how often you are posting; after all, with more eyeballs seeing your content, each post will have more traction than before.
At this point, you could spend more time researching to create better content, even if that means posting less. However, if you are happy with your current schedule, keep doing whatever is working for you.
What are some other ways to retain an audience?
Avoid Posting BAD Content
We usually use “service” Official Accounts for marketing as these are very noticeable to followers because they show up in their messages area.
While this is good, it also has a hidden downside—If you start posting content that they dislike, they are more likely to unfollow you.
The most common problem we’ve seen for some clients is that they post too much promotional content.
Promotional content should be used sparingly.
Ideally, every single article should be of value to the reader in its own right, but it would be alright to post, say, one promotional article after every four instructional or informative articles.
Create a WeChat Group
Social media is supposed to be “social,” and WeChat is a place where Chinese citizens can message one another.
Friendships are created from shared interests, so your brand’s product or service may be something two people both enjoy.
Fashion brands often bring people together because their styles represent an idea or people consider their products cool, and when wearing a brand, a person hopes to belong to something bigger.
Restaurants and food function in a similar way—The same could be true for other industries.
When you make content for your audience, keep this communal aspect in mind. Draw attention to how your product and service brings people together or enables an individual to become part of a group.
One way to create a community is by establishing a WeChat group for people to discuss your product.
Do Giveaways
Knowledge is the most important gift that content creators give their followers.
However, you may want to go a step further: Hold competitions that push people to share your content in exchange for tangible rewards.
Netease, a Chinese tech and gaming company, is offering rewards to teachers for Teacher’s Day, a holiday celebrated in China.
This method fosters followers’ interest and encourages them to share it so that more people see it.
Include Customer Service
If you already have a product on the market, a WeChat Official Account can be the best place for your customers to reach out with their problems.
Therefore, make sure you use your Official Account customer service feature, which is available for all “service” type Official Accounts.
Besides convenience, customers like to use it because they don’t have to give up their personal information to get support from you.
You can learn more about WeChat for customer support in this blog post.