WeChat is one of the most popular ways to communicate with others and one of the most popular social media in China. Phone numbers are the only thing you need to set up a WeChat account. Not only sending messages, but you can also share pictures on Moments, which is one section of WeChat, and comment or like the pictures posted by your WeChat friends. You can add others as friends just by their phone numbers, their WeChat names or if you are in the same group, you can add each other as friends.
Recently, WeChat has become one of the most popular platforms for selling goods. We even create WeChat Business to describe the WeChat accounts, no matter individuals’ or official, that use the massive market of WeChat and sell goods by sending information to individuals or showing items on Moments. Tmtpost points out that WeChat becomes popular for business for its large business scale, low set-up cost, convenient business model and high revenue potential.
But actually, the massive amount of business account has changed the WeChat I enjoy using. As Shuai Yang, Sixing Chen and Bin Li claim on Journal of Global Marketing, WeChat “can be considered as a marriage between traditional e-business and social networking communications”. We used to use WeChat as a way to communicate and show our daily life to others and see others’ lives. But now, we use it as a way to make benefits. It has changed the relationships between users and their WeChat friends. For example, I used to communicate for sharing thoughts, but now, I communicate for my own benefits—buying cheap goods or selling goods for money. The relationships are now being tied by self-interests. In the Moments, sellers like and comment their buyers’ pictures. It seems like a win-win choice, but the intrinsic quality has changed. Furthermore, according to Shuai Yang, Sixing Chen and Bin Li, there are results suggesting that development of friendships with new customers can help the strategy of developing business relationships; but developing friendships and business relationships with experienced customers negates each other. This has proved the opinion that WeChat Business actually has changed the human relationships on WeChat.
From my perspective, WeChat Business has revealed a social dynamic that people are willing to make money through the internet using relationships with others but not as in the past—learn a skill and work hard. People are adjusting to the internet era, struggling to make money, even inventing many kinds of jobs we could not imagine in the past. It is undeniable that using social media such as WeChat to make money is a good choice, but we cannot forget the original purpose of this kind of social media—communicating. With more and more beneficial friends on WeChat, whether the future of WeChat is a marketing platform?
References
http://www.tmtpost.com/233233.html
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08911762.2016.1184363