Wechat - a Social Media Software

WeChat — a Social Media Software

Nan Wu

MGMT 3265

Lorne Jeal

March 23, 2017

WeChat — a Social Media Software

When talking about social media, most of the people in the world will have Facebook in their mind. It is true that “Facebook was the first social network to surpass 1 billion registered accounts and currently sits at 1.87 billion monthly active users” as of January 2017 (Statista, n.d., Social Network, para. 1). However, there is one huge market Facebook cannot reach — China because it is blocked by the government. Facebook’s failure in getting in the market gave chances to social media apps that are made in China. WeChat is one of the most successful social media apps in China. This paper will briefly review the origin of WeChat; WeChat’s current applications; WeChat’s market situation, and some personal thoughts about the app.

WeChat is owned by a Chinese internet company called Tencent which had been famous for its another social media software — QQ before WeChat came to the market. Mr. Zhang Xiaolong led his team developed WeChat in 2010, and released the app in January 2011 (China Channel, 2015, para. 5). WeChat is cross-platform application which works on most of the popular mobile devices such as Android, iOS, and Windows. Differ from its sister software QQ, WeChat was created to capture mobile devices’ market instead of PC market.

WeChat’s success should give credits to QQ. QQ is the largest social networking software in China, even WeChat is taking customers away from it, it still has 877 million active users (Statista, n.d., Social Network). WeChat allows users to sign in with their existing QQ account and share their QQ account’s networks within WeChat, which easily transfers the loyal customers of QQ to WeChat. That is one of the major factors that makes WeChat has 846 million active users (Statista, n.d., Social Network). This achievement only took 6 years since it was released.

WeChat focuses on voice massages more than text massages. This function has created a big value to the users. Most people who chose WeChat in the first place was because they were tired of typing on keyboards. The voice massage has made people communication more efficient. In a knowledge management perspective, WeChat is mostly applied to knowledge and information’s dissemination.

During the six years, WeChat is given many new functions that not only serve the users’ communication, but also other aspects in their life. According to Heath (2015), “WeChat users can do just about anything, including play games, send money to people, make video calls, order food, read the news, book a doctor appointment” (Para, 2). In order to get closer to the users’ life, WeChat enables the users to like their bank card to the app. That is “a notable achievement given that China’s is a distrustful society and the internet is a free-for-all of cybercrime, malware and scams” (The Economist, 2016, WeChat’s World, para, 8). Just because of this function, people start seeing business opportunities on WeChat. Users can post products for sale on WeChat, and receive payments directly without using any third party software such as PayPal.

Also, just as businesses in other countries, that host their Facebook or Twitter sites, Chinese businesses use WeChat to promote themselves and do customer service. Certainly, WeChat does not give free service to businesses.

WeChat as a well-developed software, its cost should mainly appear on R&D, and server maintenance. Moreover, it is believed WeChat is bringing a large amount of income to the mother company Tencent. Most of the profit generated by WeChat are from online advertising. As mentioned above, businesses pay for the advertisements on WeChat. Since WeChat is the second biggest social media app in China, it is a very efficient advertising channel.