How Wechat well played in SNS platform.
While Alibaba and Jack Ma became leading giant of Chinese B2B and B2C market， Wechat business has enter the game and became a threaten competitor of Taobao.
WeChat is a voice and text communications app released in 2011 by Chinese investment holding company Tencent Holdings Limited. As of 2015, WeChat has 549 million monthly active users with 1.1bn registered accounts worldwide. 100m of users are based outside of China. In 2014, WeChat restricted the number of friends a single user could have to 5,000.
Here’s some Stats about wechat:
- 46% of Chinese users have made WeChat their number one app (Source: Technode)
- 80% of Chinese users follow an official account (Source: Technode)
- $15.3bn in mobile data consumption was driven by Chinese WeChat users in 2013 (Source: Technode)
- WeChat is estimated to be worth $100bn (Source: Forbes)
Source: canalys.com
Source: Technode.com
As the most popular SNS tool used in China. Wechat has a function called “Moment” that users can publish their stories and photos. So, besides being used to send message, wechat also allow the users to share their stories/photos to their intimates, which brings a huge opportunity to business.
As we learnt in marketing, the word of mouth is the most effective advertising and that’s how Wechat played to build their business. And it’s especially important to social media marketing by considering target millennial customers. So, by promoting product in Moments, the Wechat business grows dramatically.
However, what interesting is they already took action to against Alibaba long times ago. When Wechat plans to enter e-business market, what they did in the first place is to banned the direct link to Taobao. Which means, 1.1bn registered users cant log in Alibaba and Taobao through Wechat.