4 Ways to Gain WeChat Followers without Spending Big

In 2018, not only online traffic tends to become more pricy, but also the cost of acquiring new social fans will go up. Acquiring new fans at controllable cost has become a challenge that the brand marketing manager must overcome.

While those premium brands with big marketing dollars have a lot of more liberty on buying driving traffic, other brands will have to leverage some light investing and smart ways to attract followers to fit in their limited marketing budget.

WeChat Apply, as a service provider for Tencent social advertising, has been living and breathing in the new media era. We want to share with you the 4 most frequently used methods to increase followers for WeChat official accounts without spending big.

WeChat Ad

It is a display programmatic type Ad offered directly by WeChat. Advertiser is able to do two types of Ad: Official Account Ad and Moment Ad

The Official Account ad appears at the bottom of WeChat articles in the WeChat Eco System. It offers the advertiser the option to build ad to for the purpose ranging from following, App download, pick voucher and other promotion. It supports the ads in multiple formats of landing pages.

The Moment Ad used to be the luxury play only affordable to those deep pockets couple of years ago.

BMW China used to burn RMB1 million (AUD $200k) a day on WeChat Moment Ad nationwide in China.

Since the beginning of 2018, Tencent has lowered the entry bar to those medium brands. An anonymous source from a household mobile phone company tells WeChat Apply that their mobile phone. The brand launched a WeChat Moment Ad campaign targeting all WeChat users located in Australia on Valentine’s day 2018, it received 1 million impressions and 10%+ CTR. IT was an absolute killer result.

Cost of fans acquisition:★★★★★

Effectiveness:★★★★☆

Retention: 40% ~ 60%

Scope of Application – all kind of official accounts

WeChat Wi-Fi

WeChat Wi-Fi provides Wi-Fi beacon device and developer ports integrated with WeChat official account. The set up can provide free Wi-Fi to people around shop, pop up store, cinema, exhibitions, train station, airport, shopping Centre and other public space as such.When users are promoted to follow the WeChat official account in order to connect to Wi-Fi.  The new fans number increase can be significant however it is kind of all cover approach other being selective on target audience.

Cost of fans acquisition  ★★★☆☆

Effectiveness: ★★★☆☆

Retention: 20% ~ 35%

Scope of Application: Telco, Travel and Transport type with national or regional presence

 WeChat Payment

WeChat Payment has become a standard-to-have way for Chinese consumers nowadays to pay for their goods and services. It is applicable both online purchase and offline store visiting. User were by default “forced” (if they do not untick) to follow the official account after the payment is completed.

It is really a good tool to capture those real paying customers and nurture them in the subsequent community managing and social influences with the aim to get their repeating purchases.

Cost of fans acquisition ★★☆☆☆

Effectiveness: ★★★★☆

Retention: 50%~60%

Scope of Application: eCommerce, Finance and Investment management type

Doll Machine & Photo printer

Users are attracted to scan QR code attached to the Doll Machine or Photo Printer in order to get free use. It is an effective way to attract new followers in public space.It fits to those brands who are not very critical about segmentation of audience. Retention rate is not very high, people tend to follow when they want to use and unfollow afterwards. However it can work well for those brands selling kids products/services.

Cost of fans acquisition ★★★☆☆

Effectiveness: ★★★☆☆

Retention 25%~40%

Scope of application: Entrainment, Photography, Cultural and lifestyle.

About WeChat apply

WeChat apply is an award winning China WeChat digital marketing agency based in Sydney.Working across all aspects of the marketing solutions like WeChat promotion, WeChat Official Account Registration, WeChat KOL, WeChat Mini Program Ad. and so on, we will ensure you have a solid marketing strategy together with perfectly delivered campaigns. Wechat apply  will transform your China online marketing to increase your lead generation, brand awareness and market engagement.

The post 4 Ways to Gain WeChat Followers Without Spending Big appeared first on WeChat Official Agency.

China’s Four Great New Inventions in Modern Times

A number of China’s technological innovations have been making their moves in the world. Among them, four stand out with a reputation of China’s “four great new inventions” in modern times, which have made the daily life of the public more convenient. They are not actually inventions in technical term, however thanks to China’s huge scalability, the following 4 phenomenon have been pushed to a whole new level leading the world.

Dockless Shared Bicycles

There are over 30 bike-sharing companies in China that operate around 10 million bicycles for shared use to individuals in dozens of Chinese cities.

Although the service of shared bikes originated from Western countries, China surprised the world with a business model of station-less shared bikes that spearheads the sharing economy.

Compared with traditional shared bikes, dockless bikes allow users to simply pick up or park a bike anywhere on the street, instead of at designated docking points.

By combining GPS, smartphone apps, mobile payment and Internet of Things technology, China’s system of dockless shared bikes provides the public with a convenient and affordable transport alternative.

To unlock a bike, you need to scan a QR (Quick Response) code on a shared bike through a smartphone app. To finish riding, you manually lock the bike and pay for your ride though mobile payment services that are connected with the bike app, such as AliPay and the WeChat wallet.

China’s two leading bike-sharing operators, Mobike and Ofo, have been gearing up for global expansion.

Mobike entered Singapore in March and Manchester, Britain, in June. Its distinctive orange bikes can also be spotted on the streets of Florence and Milan, Italy. This September, Mobike is set to land on the soil of London. Ofo, similarly, has begun operating in the United States, Britain, Singapore and Kazakhstan.

In the financial market, the two rivalries have also gone neck and neck. In June, Mobike raised $600 million in a Series E financing round led by China’s Internet titan Tencent, the largest in the global bike sharing industry to date. Now, the company’s total funding has reached nearly $1 billion. In February, Ofo also raised $450 million, which valued the company at $1 billion.

High-Speed Train

Boasting low cost and quick delivery, China has built the world’s longest high-speed rail (HSR) network. Branded as a “name card” for China, HSR runs at speeds of 250-350 kilometers per hour (km/h).

By the end of 2016, China had a 124,000-km railway network, which had the world’s largest HSR network of more than 22,000 km. It had operated 2,595 high-speed trains by 2016, which took up 60 percent of the world’s total high-speed trains.

HSR service debuted in China in 2008. Since then, the country has witnessed an average annual growth of over 30 percent in passenger trips, according to statistics from the China Railway Corporation. By 2016, there had been more than 5 billion passenger trips on China’s bullet trains in eight years.

Currently, China is working on next-generation bullet trains with a maximum speed of 400 km/h. By 2020, one fifth of the country’s 150,000-km railway network will have been HSR, linking more than 80 percent of major cites across the country, according to data from the National Development and Reform Commission.

China’s HSR has also gone global. In 2014, China completed the construction of its first overseas high-speed rail in Turkey. In June 2015, China and Russia inked deals for 770 km of track connecting Moscow and Kazan.

In October 2015, China and Indonesia signed a joint-venture agreement on the construction of a high-speed rail between Jakarta and Bandung. Besides, the China-Thailand railway is currently under construction.

Alipay and WeChat Pay lead China’s move to a cashless society, so customers can scan for purchases. FENG YONGBIN / CHINA DAILY

Alipay, , is China’s leading mobile and online payment service, established in 2004 by China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba Group. During the online transaction process, Alipay acts as a third-party platform, on which buyers pay for their goods by imputing payment passwords or scanning payment code on the Alipay app installed on their mobile devices.

Mobile Payment

Besides, Alipay can also be used for transferring money from one Alipay online account to another account, or from the online account to a bank account by binding a debit card to the online account. It is such convenience that enables China to edge its way towards being a cashless society.

On top of that, users can pay family or personal bills through Alipay, such as water and electricity bills.

Alipay also supports cross-border online and in-store payment, which allows users to make purchases on international websites and apps with Alipay.

Far back in 2013, Alipay exceeded PayPal as the world’s largest mobile payment platform. Thanks to the massive user base and various payment scenarios in China, online and mobile payment has enjoyed absolute advantages in market competition.

In the first quarter of 2017, the market share of Alipay and its major rivalry Tenpay (Wechat pay) reached respectively 54 percent and 40 percent, according to Chinese market research and consulting company iResearch.

E-commerce

With around 731 million Internet users, China has been the world’s largest and fastest-growing e-commerce market. In 2016, online shopping in China saw a growth rate of 26.2 percent, generating 5.16 trillion yuan ($767 billion), according to a report on China’s economic data by the National Bureau of Statistics.

Last year, Chinese people bought more food online with a growth of 28.5 percent. Clothing sales rose by 18.1 percent in the year, while items like mobile devices took up nearly 12 percent.

E-commerce now accounts for 15.5 percent of the total retail sales in the country. Thanks to lower costs and fewer licensing requirements, the bar for individual merchants to open an online shop in China has been set lower than the threshold for opening a physical retail store.

E-commerce has also injected fresh vigor and vitality into the economy of rural China in recent years. In 2016, e-commerce created more than 20 million jobs in rural villages, with over 8.1 million online business owners. Rural buyers also contributed 894 billion yuan ($131 billion) to China’s e-commerce sales last year. Leading operators in China’s e-commerce market include JD.com, and Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao.

About Wechatapply

Wechatapply is an award winning China WeChat digital marketing agency based in Sydney.Working across all aspects of the marketing solutions like WeChat promotion, WeChat Official Account Registration, WeChat KOL, WeChat Mini Program Ad. and so on, we will ensure you have a solid marketing strategy together with perfectly delivered campaigns. Wechatapply  will transform your China online marketing to increase your lead generation, brand awareness and market engagement.

The post China’s Four Great New Inventions in Modern Times appeared first on WeChat Official Agency.

How to get your first 10,000 Weibo followers without a cent on paid Ad

Like any matured powerful social app, Weibo, you can call it a Chinese version of Instagram+Facebook, has already makes heaps ads revenue from their social advertising tools for business to spend on, however, given Weibo has reached 340million monthly active users in 2017, 30% up on the previous year, is there an organic marketing approach to grow followers and turn your fan base into a lead funnel?

Over the past year, our WeChat Apply social team helped a B2B software company client starting with an empty account and zero followers. In the brief span of just 50 weeks, we accumulated more than 14,000 followers for the client. As a result, my client now gets about 15 to 20 leads a month from Weibo for their supply chain enterprise-grade software services targeting China-based corporations in China market.

How would you like to do that?

Let me explain how you can follow our example and build up your Weibo Chinese audience that will help you market your business in China

1. Start with Goals

As with so many other things in business, it all starts with a set of goals.

What do you want to do on Weibo? What are you hoping to get out of it?

You might decide that you want to use Weibo as a cost effective way to penetrate into China market without large capital investment？Or you might be thinking that Weibo is a great way to share pictures, videos, stories or announcement of your products or your business because it’s rich media focused. Maybe you’re just looking to land some direct purchases from your Weibo account cross border?

Whatever your goals are, make sure you approach Weibo marketing with an eye toward fulfilling it. Then start looking for ways to gather your audience.

On Weibo, you have two demographics: partners and customers.

Partners are people in the same industry or in an industry related to your niche. They’re not necessarily competitors, though.

For example, if you’re a web developer, then people who design WordPress themes might be among your partners. They complement, rather than compete, with your business.

They can also help you promote your business.

How? By commenting on and liking your updates. They help give your Weibo account the appearance of authority.

Then, there are Weibo followers who are in your target market. Those are the people whom you want to become customers.

Once you’ve identified partners and people in your target market, it’s time to start gathering information about them. What are their typical qualities? Where do they spend their time online?

And this is important: Whom do they follow on Weibo?

That’s important because you want your Weibo account to attract them. Fortunately, you can do that by imitating other accounts that they already follow.

Find between two and five Weibo accounts that your distributors and potential customers follow and analyze them. What kind of content do they post online? Who follows them?

Also, take a look at their bio. How do they describe their business? What does the profile photo look like?

Go through their posts and look at the hashtags they use. Make a note of the most popular hashtags. You’ll probably want to use those in your own posts.

It’s important, though, to make sure that the post corresponds to the hashtag you use. Otherwise, you’ll be branded a spammer.

Finally, take a look at their most popular posts. Make a note about the types of photos used in those posts and the topics they cover.

Now that you’re armed with that information, it’s time to get to work.

2. Build a Profile That Converts

Your profile is where you’ll put the link to your landing page. That’s why it has to be optimized for conversion.

Weibo does allow links on stories, though. Those are collections of photos and videos put into slideshow format (an idea Weibo “borrowed” from Snapchat).

If you think you can promote your brand best by marketing with stories, then you can add links outside of your profile.

So how do you produce a profile that converts? Follow a few simple steps.

First of all, give yourself an appealing bio. Remember the basic rule of marketing here: Emphasize what you do for customers. Tell people that you fix their problems and make their lives better.

In other words: Don’t just talk about what you sell. Instead, tell people how your products or services benefit them.

Also, give yourself a fabulous profile photo. Go professional with the picture if you have to. It’s your one chance to make an outstanding impression and convince people that you take your business seriously.

You should also give people a reason to click on your link. Whet their appetites with a tease such as a discount or a freebie. Then, tell them they can learn more by clicking on the link.

Keep in mind: There’s nothing wrong with having a landing page dedicated solely to people who arrive at your site from Weibo. In fact, you’ll probably make your Weibo visitors feel special if you do that.

You can also do the “Mashable trick” with the link on your profile page. As the name implies, that’s a technique perfected by the website Mashable.

Here’s how it works: When you post a photo, add a caption that explains the photo and include text like: “For more information, click on the link in our profile.” Here’s the important part: After posting the photo, change the link in your profile so that it goes to a part of your site relevant to the Weibo post.

In other words, change the link in your profile with each update.

3. Create an Editorial Calendar

If you want to move ahead of your competition on social media, create an editorial calendar. Many brands don’t bother with that.

An editorial calendar is a schedule of your upcoming posts. It tells you what you’ll post and when you’ll post it.

Get the ball rolling on your editorial calendar by going over the successful posts you learned about in step 1. Then, go and do likewise.

Yes, copy the type of content that others have used successfully and use it yourself. Imitation isn’t just the sincerest form of flattery. It’s also a great way to promote your brand.

Keep in mind: Some stuff is copyrighted. You obviously don’t want to run into a copyright dispute or lawsuit.

You can, however, post content very closely related to the successful posts of others. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Also, don’t come across like a sales rep on Weibo. If you just post content that’s trying to make a sale, you’re going to have trouble gaining and keeping followers.

Instead, mix up your content a little. Post some humorous memes now and then. Share lifestyle tips. That will help you add some personality and humanity to your brand.

Make sure that some of your content uses the hashtags you found in step 1. You especially want to use the more popular hashtags, because they should give your posts greater exposure.

4.  Publish and Engage

Once you’ve got your editorial calendar in place, it’s time to start following it. Promote your business by publishing content on a regular basis.

There’s more to being successful on Weibo than just posting content, though.

Remember: Weibo is part of social media. It’s called “social” media for a reason.

You need to be social on social media.

That means you should engage with other Weibo users. Follow accounts in your niche and accounts related to your niche. Like and comment on posts you appreciate.

If you’re viewed as an active member of the Weibo community, you’ll come across as a genuine user and not somebody who’s just trying to sell something.

Also, you’ll often get a follow back from the people you follow. That’s especially true if they’re interested in your business.

Here’s another thing to do: Look at the top profiles in your niche. Then, go through some of their posts. Follow people who are commenting on those posts. These are the most engaged people, so there is a chance they will engage with you also.

All of this will help your posts show up in Weibo Search, which can send more people to your profile and business.

5. Analyze, Scale, and Promote

After a few months of Weibo marketing, take some time to review what’s working best for you.

Go over your analytics. Make a note of the types of posts that receive the most engagement. Be sure to publish posts with similar themes in the future.

Also, make a note of what types of posts are receiving the least engagement. Scratch those kinds of posts off your editorial calendar if there any more like them coming up. Replace them with the kinds of posts that are more successful.

Finally, consider running ads on your top posts. That will give you a chance to effectively add a link to them.

6. Rinse and Repeat

Repeat step 5.

Go through your analytics constantly to find your top performers. Then, add more posts just like those to your editorial calendar.

Also, keep on engaging with other posts. Remember, you’ll appear “real” if you’re liking, following, and commenting on the posts of other Weibo users.

Finally, focus on growth. Keep working to build your audience so you can reach more people. Then, customers will find their way to your website.

About WeChatapply

Wechatapply is an award winning China WeChat digital marketing agency based in Sydney.Working across all aspects of the marketing solutions like WeChat promotion, WeChat Official Account Registration, WeChat KOL, WeChat Mini Program Ad. and so on, we will ensure you have a solid marketing strategy together with perfectly delivered campaigns. Wechatapply  will transform your China online marketing to increase your lead generation, brand awareness and market engagement.

The post How to get your first 10,000 Weibo followers without a cent on paid Ad appeared first on WeChat Official Agency.

From Imitator to Innovator: Evolution of WeChat In 7 years

In China, more than 80 percent of smartphone owners are actively using this mobile App WeChat. That’s almost a billion of users; more than the population of the US, Russia and the UK combined.

At its start, WeChat was just a replicate of WhatsApp Messenger with push-to-talk feature, also known as walkie-talkie. But now it has evolved as a mixture of WhatsApp, Instagram, Skype, Apple Pay and many other apps that westerners are familiar with.

As this “king of Apps” in China near its seventh birthday, its developers are considering the app’s future: In addition to copying and mixing, they are trying to create something new.

Cross-platform for the win

The App was launched on iOS in early 2011, and ported to Android right afterwards. At first look, it looked just like WhatsApp with its somehow similar green icon and user-friendly interface.

But under the hood it was carefully crafted to penetrate the Chinese market. Most Chinese phone players didn’t need to register for an account to use WeChat. They can sign in with their mobile phone numbers or other social media accounts.

It sounds very normal to people nowadays. But at a time when mobile operators asked extra charge for inter-operator texting, it was a killer function.

Cross-operator availability is the key for WeChat’s initial success. It’s huge for the App’s developer, Tencent, whose desktop-dominating messenger QQ had a struggle in the rising mobile market.

Tencent buried their company name deep inside WeChat. A lot of users were not even aware they were still on Tencent. The ad-free experience was also very different from previous Tencent software.

WeChat also provided location-based service, enabling users to find other nearby users. The App was called a “one-night-stand tool” for a while.

People-to-people, money-to-money

WeChat succeeded in gathering mobile users, but it needed more to keep them following.

In April 2012, Tencent introduced social networking to WeChat. It works mostly like Instagram. You share your photos on your stream and watch others’ stream at the same time.

It’s still one of the most popular ways to share photos with friends in China. Other ways to enhance communication include a sticker shop copied from famous Asian chatting App Line and a “game center” for users to compare their mobile game scores.

These features helped WeChat to reach 200-million-user milestone in the same year. But Tencent wanted even more. If you get tired of sharing photos with friends, you can share it with everyone by making your account public like a blog.

WeChat’s enormous users attracted salesmen, who used public accounts to distribute coupons with potential customers. The method was so widely-used that Tencent eventually added online payment to WeChat in 2014, igniting the wildfire of person-to-person wholesale model in China.

Small change indicates big confidence – WeChat used a Nasa satellite photo of the blue planet with Africa the Human’s origin. After Sep 2017, WeChat quietly changed the photo to an APAC centered view taken by a China’s own geostationary orbit satellite.

This move threatened Alibaba, who owns Taobao, the largest online shopping platform in China back then. Alibaba founder Jack Ma started to fight back by building his own messenger Apps, but none of them have come near where WeChat has gone.

At the same time, WeChat Pay cut a big chunk off from Jack Ma’s decade-lasting online payment empire. According to data company iResearch, the market share of Tencent’s payment platform in China rose from 10 percent in 2014 to 40 percent in 2017, while Alipay shrank from 80 to 54 percent during the same time.

Kill other Apps

As WeChat became a must-have for Chinese mobile users, Tencent went on to stabilize its monopoly by merging even more features into the App, including car hailing, hospital appointment, civil service and many, many more.

In 2016, head of the WeChat team Zhang Xiaolong announced a new plan to make all other mobile Apps unnecessary.

Dubbed as “Mini Program,” Zhang created an App store inside the WeChat App.

For the phone users who do not want to install too many Apps, this is absolutely good news. Open WeChat and you have everything at hand.

Demonstration of WeChat’s Mini Program. Users can access mini-apps by swiping down the recent conversation list. The mini-app is listed in system multitasking UI as a standalone app.

Any App maker can share WeChat’s vast fan base, WeChat Apply team believes the Mini Program is a game changer and has passed its initial stage and in 2018 it will become widespread a lot more.

So after seven years of development, what will the Chinese App market dominator do in the future? Stay focused on WeChat Apply to for more updates about the WeChat annual gathering.

About Wechatapply

Wechatapply is an award winning China WeChat digital marketing agency based in Sydney.Working across all aspects of the marketing solutions like WeChat promotion, WeChat Official Account Registration, WeChat KOL, WeChat Mini Program Ad. and so on, we will ensure you have a solid marketing strategy together with perfectly delivered campaigns. Wechatapply  will transform your China online marketing to increase your lead generation, brand awareness and market engagement.

The post From Imitator to Innovator: Evolution of WeChat In 7 years appeared first on WeChat Official Agency.