If you love solving problems, you’ll love WeChat.
WeChat is the instant messaging (IM) and social media App that was launched in South Africa in 2013. In terms of numbers, reports indicate that in South Africa it is sitting around the 5 million users mark after showing rapid growth post launch. Globally, WeChat boasts 550 million active users.
Why is WeChat special?
IMs are designed to allow person to person chats. WeChat does this very well, but what differentiates it is that it allows brands to interact with followers through “Official Accounts” or OAs.
How do Brands Engage on WeChat?
WeChat offers brands two options: Subscription and Service Accounts.
Subscription Accounts are designed for brands to push content to followers and don’t appear in your contact list. They are not as customizable as Service Accounts – but they serve a purpose, much like Twitter and Facebook by pushing relevant content to their audience.
The much more interesting Service Accounts are feature rich and appear in your contact list once followed. The brand channel is entirely customizable and extremely powerful. Imagine mobile payments, store finds, vouchers & coupons, surveys, competitions, consumer research, content sharing – these can all be done – and on a channel where your audience may very well already be.
WeChat Brand Account
Choosing a WeChat Service Account gives you the benefits of that channel – at a fraction of the development and maintenance costs of a native App. Think for a moment the complexities of launching and supporting an App for Android, Windows, Apple, Blackberry and even the Symbian based Nokia Asha platform – which is still relevant in South Africa with the Nokia Asha range being so popular.
The best way to conceptualise your brand channel on WeChat is to think of it as an “App within an App”. WeChat is proving to be a formidable problem solver when it comes to engaging with your audience through mobile.
BrandChat “ChatBots”
The “chatbots” are designed to provide and receive information through a natural conversational tone. They can be used by brands and organisations to achieve consumer marketing objectives as well as business service objectives.
Our BrandChat platform is designed to allow a service to be immediately integrated into one or more Instant Messengers with no development changes required. This allows for rapid deployment of a service accross multiple Instant Messengers without having to develop for each IM.
How does WeChat work?
BrandChat runs over readily available Instant Messengers (IMs) such as WeChat and Facebook Messenger. For older mobile phones, BrandChat can also run over USSD which can be reverse billed.
To see how BrandChat works please scan the below QR Code with WeChat. You can also search on WeChat for the official account “alwaysactive”:
