WeChat seduces Hong Kong taxi drivers

December 19, 2017

WeChat and Alipay have once again stepped up their game by providing cashless payments for the taxi drivers in Hong Kong. The 40,000 strong taxi industry was an untapped audience for the cashless payments giant, Octopus. WeChat and Alipay are investing heavily in marketing campaigns after realizing the potential of the market.

 

The cabbies in Hong Kong have earlier been known to rely strictly only on cash as their primary method of payment.  But of late, they have started embracing alternative payment methods to attract more customers. Afterall, this is the era of digital innovations and breakthroughs! This provides a huge market for WeChat and Alipay, especially when the drivers are unhappy with the administrative charges levied by Octopus for their cashless payment service.

 

WeChat Pay has even advertised on a couple of taxis to create awareness and to encourage more cabbies to adopt their e-payment service. On the other hand, Alipay aims to encourage mainland tourists to adopt their payment method. This is perfect because, the city is witnessing a large number of tourist populations and solo travellers and an increasing demand for easy transportation and payment methods.

 

So far, almost 1,000 taxis have signed up for WeChat HK while 1,500 taxis have signed up for Alipay.

 

With the e-payment race gaining momentum, who do you think will emerge as the king of cashless payments in the taxi industry? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

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WeChat guide: How to use and build mini-programs ?

December 11, 2017

Tencent launched the WeChat Mini programs earlier this year and took the market by storm. So what are these mini programs and how can you use it?This blog will give you all that you need to know about WeChat’s interesting feature.

 

These mini programs are essentially sub applications/apps within WeChat itself. The user can make use of these features without having to actually download or install them. How exciting! Thousands of mini programs have already been launched where you can order food, watch videos, book tickets for movies, book cabs or even shop online!

And this is just the beginning, the mini programs feature looks more promising by the minute.

So what are the things that make mini programs a great addition to WeChat?

 

Easy to use

There are 3 different ways to get the WeChat Mini Programs and they are incredibly easy!

 

  • Option 1 –  By typing the name of application you are looking for in the WeChat search bar
  • Option 2 – By clicking on the mini program link shared by your friends
  • Optin 3 – By scanning the QR Code of the application you want

 

Finding these apps do not involve any extra effort and the sheer simplicity of this process makes Mini programs extremely user-friendly. And if you like an app, you can easily share them with your friends and get them to use to it too!

 

Multitasking

Wechat articles requires the user to exit the article if they want to chat with someone. But mini programs does not possess this problem.The users can pin the app on their Chats page by selecting “Display on Top”. Then they can re-enter the app whenever they want.This is a huge plus point for the app.

 

Open platform for developers

Based on the update in March, individual developers can add their products to Mini programs. This open platform approach encourages more people to innovate and create new apps on the program.

 

Do you have any favourite apps from this feature? Let us know in the comments below!

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WeChat owner Tencent beats Facebook in value and become Asia’s First $500 Billion company

November 22, 2017

Founded in 1998, Tencent, which is one of the biggest tech giants in China made its way to the Top 5 Biggest Firms in the World. It is now the first Asian company to be valued at over $500 Billion surpassing Facebook that was dominating the social media field.

 

 

The most successful app created by Tencent, Wechat, is said to have around 980 million monthly active users, with 38 billion messages sent daily. And the Youtube alternative in China, Tencent Video boasts of a huge subscriber base. Revenue from its gaming division, rose to 18.2 billion yuan  due to its fantasy role-playing hit “Honour of Kings”, which is expected to release in the United States next year.The company also holds 12% of the popular picture messaging app, Snapchat.

 

Tencent’s Hong Kong listed shares have doubled in value this year and on Tuesday the company’s value was estimated to be $523 Billion. This is followed by Tencent’s rivals in Asia, the AliBaba group (valued at $481 billion) and Samsung electronics (valued at $364 billion).

 

With the drastic surge in growth, Tencent will surely be making waves in the tech, gaming and social media sector next year.

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WeChat Data Report – Summer 2017

August 18, 2017

From communicating with friends and performing complex payments, WeChat has been at the center of the digital revolution in the Chinese market. Each year, WeChat releases detailed reports on its performance and user behaviour with their analysis. Here’s a summary of the data in these reports.

 

Number of Users and Behavior:

WeChat has recorded daily active users to be over 877 million in June 2017 with over 20 million official accounts on the database. This is an increase of 21% from last year.

The app also recorded 600 million monthly active mobile payment users. Moreover, every day 50% of users use WeChat for an average of 90+ minutes. Another interesting point is that 30% of all time spent on mobile in China is on WeChat alone.

WeChat User Data 2017 China

WeChat User Engagement

We now know how many users visit the app everyday. It’s time to take a look at what they do when they are online. The last year saw an increase of 67% total messages sent per day on WeChat with an average of 8 calls per month with over 65 mins of calls per month per user. Apart from sending messages, users are also reading content from official brand accounts. Ever month users read official account articles the length of a novel!

Users also send each other 28 red packets per user in a month with ¥580 sent each month per user.

WeChat User Engagement

WeChat in Overseas Travel

Over the last year, 135 million outbound travellers from China spent over $261 billion abroad with top destinations that included, Japan, USA, Thailand, S Korea, Australia and the United Kingdom. This has been largely possible due to businesses targeting Chinese customers as they travel abroad by simplifying payments. For businesses, 40% of Mobike rides are initiated from their WeChat mini program (other 60% being from their own app) Anoother addition is that, Moments ads targeting Chinese tourists abroad are officially opening up to all businesses from August.

As WeChat sees an increase of users everyday, it will be quite interesting to see how the platform grows beyond its current capabilities to make it an integral part of business and life in the Chinese market.

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How Wimbledon is using WeChat to attract Chinese audience ?

July 26, 2017

The Wimbledon tournament is one of the most prestigious tournaments in the world. In China, the Wimbledon tournaments were not as popular until, professional tennis player Li Na came along. She was instrumental in announcing to the world and to China, the world of Grand Slam Tournaments. Being quite successful at her career having won tournaments in Australia and France, she started and spearheaded almost a tennis movement in China.

Many young Chinese tennis fans had someone to associate with and support in the Tennis world and the support for the sport grew tremendously. However, due to less awareness of the sport fans found it difficult to access this Wimbledon content.

 

Wimbledon too, isn’t far behind and was quick to understand that in order to break into China they had to really understand the Chinese market which had tremendous potential to grow. They were able to understand that the traditional rules of other countries did not apply and Chinese youngsters were not always using television sets to view the tournaments.

Young affluent Chinese youngsters were using WeChat to view these tournaments and interact with their friends. In addition to partnering with digital TV deals, Wimbledon has now partnered with the most popular network in China, WeChat. Millions of young Chinese fans will now be able to access the Wimbledon tournaments on their mobile devices with ease.

As the fans of the sport continue to grow, the collaboration with WeChat will only boost the awareness of the Wimbledon tournaments much farther.

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How the TOP 500 Official WeChat Accounts are performing ?

June 16, 2017

WeChat is fast growing as one of the biggest social platforms and is an essential part of the daily life in the Chinese market. Brands are increasingly using this platform as a way to leverage their goods and services in China. The market being highly competitive, for brands to make it to the top 500 WeChat accounts is a great feat!

Every month, top performing WeChat accounts are tracked and these are the findings. NewRanks tracked the performance of a pool of the most popular accounts between April 2016 and April 2017 and these are the top highlights for this analysis.

1. Average article views have reduced

In a short span of a year, WeChat added over 170 million monthly active users. However, the analysis found that there has been a decrease in the average articles viewed by the users. In fact the number saw a decrease of 5,257 views per article. An important influencer of this number may be the increase in the official accounts on WeChat. This means the users have more options to choose from and the official accounts are becoming increasingly competitive. On the other side, the number of likes to articles has increased by 138 per article.

2. Ranking of the Top 500 Accounts

An analysis of the top accounts from April of last year indicate that 75% of these top accounts have seen a decrease in their ranking compared to last year. Only 21% of these official WeChat accounts moved up in ranking in 2017. The decrease can be attributed to official accounts investing more in creating quality content over quantity of articles. Also, there is the viral paradox where you can’t predict the viral aspect of the platform.

3. Ranking Changed drastically for brands

Among the top 500 WeChat Accounts in April 2016, only 274 accounts managed to retain their position as being in the top 500. Even the most popular accounts have had to revamp their content considerably to keep up with the changing trends in social media.

A brand to note here is, Global Times (环球时报) that went up 428 ranks in a period of a year. Another brand to note is TripAdvisor that lost 15,584 points.

4. The shifting trend from traditional media to WeChat Accounts

Among the top 104 performing accounts 24% of the accounts are media related. This is a huge indicator that Chinese media is shifting the trends from traditional media to the new age media. Media accounts have the advantage to report live and get the information out faster with this platform.

5. Original Content Linked to Increasing Ranks

The percentage of original content increased from 8.7% to 11.2% in a year. The interesting thing to note is accounts that produce more original content have an increase in ranking as compared to accounts with decreasing ranking that produce 9% less original content. The publishing of audio content has also increased 4.8% as compared to 2.1% in 2016.

As the competition gets more intense, marketers have to increasingly develop unique content strategies to match the ever fast pace of the social platform.

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Search, the WeChat way!

May 25, 2017

In order to understand how much positive energy is prevalent in the country, China watchers tracked the term “transmitting positive energy to society”  and the number of times it was mentioned in the chinese newspapers, especially People’s Daily the country’s top print.

 

This exploration was headed by David Bandurski, a researcher with the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong. He found that the term was taken into importance after it was mentioned by Chinese president Xi Jinping during a 2012 meeting with former US president Jimmy Carter, calling for more positive energy in the China-US relationship. He also used the term “transmit positive energy” when he toured state-controlled news outlets last year.

However the usage happen to decline from a peak in 2014 has resurfaced in the international stage resulting in the term appearing in 111 People’s Daily articles so far this year.

 

When exploring such research it brings us to understand how easy it is to find and track such content today in the digital world. Tencent recently launched a new feature ‘WeChat Search’ that will allow us to search content within WeChat (Moments, Articles and Official accounts). This feature has surely made WeChat a great threat to Baidu, the internet company that provides search engine services.

 

Baidu has been predominantly used for checking company’s background and reputation, while WeChat allows users to see the engagement of other users, the articles and the social comments in turn establishing the performance of the brand and its influence real time. With Tencent purchasing a 36.5% stake Sogou, the pioneer of search engine that is able to index WeChat content on their special section bringing the much need integration for WeChat.

 

Baidu’s slow growing revenue is no match to Tencent’s profits and revenues shooting upto 50% growth each year. The more the merrier can be the motto for the search engine industry, striving on mere existence of data, more of which enables better output upon the results. The popularity of WeChat brings in users, more users leading to more data which again leads to more users and it goes on.

 

WeChat has created quite the buzz in the digital space and it is surely taking the lead among its competition in the country.

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KRDS promotes French tourism on WeChat with Atout France

May 12, 2017

KRDS is glad to welcome Atout France as a new client ! We appreciate their trust in our vision and approach to increase France visibility on WeChat.

Atout France (France.fr) is the unique official French government agency in charge of promoting the first touristic destination in the world for 25 years: France. The agency helps 1,200 tourism professionnals in their international development and over 2,800 promotion campaigns are organized every year.

KRDS’ scope of work includes strategic consulting, on-going content creation , content moderation, campaigns and activations with media buying and KOL collaboration.

KRDS experience with travel and tourism clients on WeChat was much appreciated by Atout France.

Stay tuned and follow Atout France on WeChat !

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Russia blocks WeChat

May 9, 2017

China’s most popular social media app WeChat developed by Tencent Holdings gets listed among the prohibited websites in Russia. An official statement by Russian internet watchdog body Roskomnadzor confirmed the news as WeChat failed to fulfil Russia’s internet regulations. According to Roskomnadzor’s spokesperson, WeChat was blocked over not providing contact details for Russia’s register of “organizers of information distribution on the internet.”

 

Tencent having launched its app in 2011 haven’t been able to popularize in Russia, however this move may affect Chinese tourists and Russians doing business with China.

 

WeChat is not the first social media app prohibited in Russia, earlier this week Roskomnadzor listed Blackberry Messenger and Line to be banned as well. All this started after a law passed in 2014 required all foreign social media, search engine and messaging services to store the gathered personal information of Russian users within the country’s boundaries.

 

Tencent responded to the block stating “We’re experiencing a block and we’re deeply sorry,” on the company’s microblog,“Russian regulations say online service providers have to register with the government but WeChat doesn’t have the same understanding (of the rules),” the official also added that the company is communicating with Russian authorities on the issue.

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WeChat Pay chasing Alipay with 1.2 Trillion of USD in 2016

May 5, 2017

China has taken the lead at an astonishing rate in adapting online platforms as a common mode of payment compared to the rest of the world. In a period of five years (2010-2015) the percentage of digital payments, mostly mobile in the country has increased from 3.5% to 17% for all retail transactions.

 

The total amount processed through such payment portals in the year 2016 has been 3 trillion USD, with WeChat Pay chasing Alipay with 1.2 trillion USD. This demand for mobile payments became visible after the establishment of these two services, which combined owns 63% of the market share in digital payments today. With 800 million new WeChat Pay users to Alipay’s 450 million, WeChat Pay takes the lead while Alipay leads in payment volumes.

 

According to the data published in the Tencent Penguin Intelligence Survey, WeChat pay is the primary payment method for offline purchases with 93% adoption rate across tier 1 and tier 2 cities which includes Beijing and Shanghai. Cash comes in second place (39 percent), while debit and credit cards are third.

 

With respect to the competition, both WeChat Pay and Alipay are directed towards a common goal of minimizing cash transactions in China and are doing their best in expanding overseas by collaborating with local partners and becoming easy and attractive to implement.

 

As a testament to the central stage mobile payments has taken in Chinese consumers lives, Ogilvy & Maher and Ipsos concluded in a survey of China’s mobile payment market that “[Chinese] mobile payment has permeated all aspects of life and changed basic, everyday habits.”

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