September 2017

WeChat is an important way of life in the Chinese market currently. With more users joining in an exponential rate, it is also a place where marketers come together to sell their products and business in this online marketplace with minimal restrictions. Every day, 12 million articles are written by brands on the platform and every month readers read an entire novel worth of articles by brands. With this competitive edge, how can brands ensure that their content stands out amongst their competitors ? The answer is simple!

To understand this, we must first understand what kind of articlers, users share the most. What makes them viral in nature, where users are mass recommending them to their friends. Understanding this can help us arrive at a guide on creating the best and viral content on the platform.

1. Evoke an Emotional Response to the Content:

Often the content that is the most viral, has a personal touch to it. It has the user feel immersed in it, enough for them to share this experience with their friends. Users love to send their friends content that expresses their personal points written in the most efficient and effective way. A great example of this is an account well known for its reviews and movie shows, launched a campaign that created a stir in the mainstream media, The company gave away 100 free tickets to participants who arrived at any airports or Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou within a few hours of it being published. This brings us to the second point:

2. Don’t be afraid to think out of the box

Often marketers are unable to push the limits of their thinking and are confined in a box. Sometimes, the content that goes viral the most is content that does not accept the social or traditional norms and rises up amongst the clutter. Users are more susceptible to share content that they are certain, their friends would have never seen. The ‘wow’ factor is extremely important to create viral content in the WeChat space.

3. Focus on storytelling

Each piece of writing must have a story based approach to best explain your brand to the audience. Have one objective and write your stories based on that objective, ensuring not to stray away from the topic. This may confuse users if not done correctly. The content must always be vetted keeping the end user in mind, their feelings, their beliefs etc.

4. Encourage a Conversation

Great viral content is one that forces people to have an internal discussion with themselves. When the ‘dress’ happened on social media, people were torn amongst themselves trying to figure out if the dress was golden or was it blue? The discussions were rampant in office, at school and at the dinner table. Discussions like these are what make the content go viral, in a sense there should be an open ended interpretation sometimes to enable a good conversation.

5. Interaction in Key

Increasing the interactive ability of the content, will largely increase its chances of becoming viral. The content presented must be enjoyable and interesting to read for the audience to encourage their interaction with it. Interactive H5 pages often achieve millions of views in a short span of time.

There are other important points like being concise and to the point. However, these guidelines mentioned above are quite essential to create interesting and shareable content on WeChat!

Living and working in China for over 7 years, I consider myself to be an early adopter and an avid user of WeChat. And as a WeChat lover and marketer, I cannot keep myself from reiterating that WeChat is one of the most innovative, convenient and efficient instant messaging platforms in the world. Chinese and foreigners living in China are able to carry out plenty of tasks whether it is shopping, payments or interactions with friends and brands on WeChat, often spending many hours everyday on it.

However, with a platform so versatile, I am disappointed in the way workplaces are using it.

Here’s a summary from personal experience on how WeChat has negatively impacted work efficiency and how, as a company we are trying to change it for the best for our colleagues and our clients.

The points mentioned here are true for most messaging platforms, but the importance of WeChat at work in China makes it particularly more impactful given its usage in everyday life, than anywhere else.

Professional or personal ?

The reality is, most of the employees use their personal WeChat account for work.

The problem: The blurring of the frontier between personal and professional life is more obvious on WeChat than anywhere else. I know very few people that use a dedicated “professional wechat account”. As a result, client conversations are mixed with your friends’ discussions, and everyone is distracted by both personal notifications at work and professional reminders at home. This is lose-lose situation.

Additionally, it also raises concerns on the amount of professional data that can be stored/lost on a personal account,which the businesses have no control over. Let’s not even get started on WeChat names, profile pictures or moments sharing.

The solution: Use a professional phone number and WeChat account. It can be quite painful and difficult to implement at first but this is a much required step to increase efficiency in the workplace. This may provide clients and employees a good work-life balance.

So many messages …

Let’s be honest, everyone mutes group messages unless they enjoy a life ridden with chaos!

The problem: At the end of the day, you can not follow all the group conversations you are in. After muting the notifications not to become insane, you will end up missing information as you scroll quickly through the hundred of messages you missed. This is a shame as people actually might think you have “read” the information.

The solution: Try to avoid large group conversation for work, and tell people that you are not reading 100% of what is written there. Instead, encourage a one on one, or small group conversation to effectively convey your points.

We don’t talk anymore

When was the last time you used your phone to call someone?

The problem:

If you want to have an interactive exchange, opt for a call or meeting to have a meaningful conversation. Chatting is a grey area between writing and talking. So, why do people love it ? Because most people in this age are quite lazy and love to have the feeling of what I call “multi-task efficiency”.

With WeChat they can “chat” during meetings, while eating or sometimes when they are in the intimate space of a bathroom. As a result, we take less and less time for a proper call, as we have the feeling of gaining time on WeChat. The truth is “multi-tasking” is a great source of distraction, a loss of efficiency and source of mistakes because you are not fully focused on the task at hand.

The solution: Take time to have a call or a meeting to ensure a proper dynamic and interactive conversation rather than chatting. Don’t be lazy and use the call function when needed.

Project management nightmare

The truth: Managing a project on WeChat is not only difficult, but can easily escalate into an impending disaster.

The problem: WeChat group conversation are not structured to manage a project efficiently. Group Names are most of the time generic, making the “object/subject” of the discussion not clear, all tasks are mixed-up, buried in layers of conversation and never properly “closed”.

Iterations have a tendencies to strongly increase and validations are far from clear as not all groups stakeholders “follow” the discussions.

Also taking into fact that documents are stored for a limited amount of time and conversation history is easily lost if you have any issue with your phone.

The solution: Use proper management tools and push your interlocutor to use emails for key project milestone and validation.

Writing is thinking

The truth: You cannot write well on a WeChat discussion.

The problem: Seeing Donald Trump on Twitter may have given you the confidence that you can build your thinking on WeChat. Don’t. You can not write properly without a clear structure, including titles, paragraphs and alineas. And if you try do it on WeChat, you will definitely look like a weirdo. Some of us might try, by sending multiple messages but you are at risk having your demonstration being “cut” by another user message which we can all agree, is always unpleasant.

The solution: Use WeChat to send very simple messages/information, or even only to notify people. If your message is getting complex, write a clear email or build a document. When user will be able to write articles like an Official account my point might change, but until then don’t try to develop complex writing format on WeChat

Is there a WeChat workplace habit that drives you crazy too? There can be simple solutions to these problems. However, they can only be implemented with the cooperation of all parties to increase efficiency in the workplace. Maybe WeChat could opt to have different ‘modes’ for work or personal to separate the messages. We can only wait and find out what happens!

Aurélien FERRIE

In China since 2010, Aurelien FERRIE joined KRDS in 2013 as General Manager – Greater China. With KRDS, he is helping international clients (Air France, Club Med, Louis Vuitton) to grow their visibility on Chinese social media platforms. With a strong experience in sales and marketing, Aurelien quickly became an expert of Chinese social media platforms, especially WeChat, that he consider to be one of the most innovative platform in the world. His ambition is to keep growing his digital expertise and experience to keep offering the most innovative online solutions to brands in China

5 Steps to make viral content on WeChat