January 2018

Which marketing learning from WeChat social gaming surge ?

January 25, 2018

Tech giant, Tencent Holdings is once again making headlines for creating the perfect fusion between mobile gaming and social media. This has led to the coinage of the term “Social Gaming” which is all the rage in China right now.

The launch of Wechat’s social gaming platform attracted more mobile gaming users in China. The main categories of games include shooting, running and flying with 33.4% users playing for roughly 10-30 mins. Friends play a major role in influencing the users to choose a particular game.

Recently, a game called Tiao yi tiao went viral in China and has recorded over 100 million daily active users since it was introduced late last December. The best part is that the users can access the game without installing additional app or software. The aim of the game is to move a hopping block from one platform to another by tapping the screen. Notifications of the top players and the rankings are also visible to the users.

The game owes its instant success to the app’s wide reach. WeChat has over 980 million active monthly users.

For the brands, social gaming is a large untapped part of WeChat that has huge potential. Businesses must definitely consider how they can incorporate social gaming as a part of their marketing strategy. The biggest plus point is the readily available active users on the platform. This means the brand need not take any extra efforts to get users on the platform and then to play their game.

Tencent rose above the market expectations when it showed a 61% increase in revenue in the third quarter last year. This rise was mainly due to their video game business, spearheaded by the game Honour of Kings.

China’s video game market was estimated to be worth $32.5 billion USD last year. This only goes to show the rapid growth of social gaming in China. We wonder what the next viral game would be and what brands would be the first to hop on the social gaming shuttle!

How WeChat is replacing your wallet in China?

January 17, 2018

China has announced a new Digital ID system where the residents can link their National Identity Card to the popular messaging and social media app, WeChat, through facial recognition. The app currently has over 980 million monthly active users in China.

The new ID system has been introduced as a pilot programme in the Nansha district of Guangzhou. The program came into existence after the joint efforts of the Ministry of Public Security, Tencent’s WeChat team and various other banks and government departments.

This system opens up a whole new monetary portal for the tech giant Tencent as China’s ID cards are used for almost anything and everything. Residents use it for hotel check-ins, train bookings, bank account openings and the list goes on! If this pilot programme proves to be successful, Tencent might finally have what it takes to overtake its close rival Alibaba.

The pilot programme is compartmentalised into 2 divisions. The first ID offers a limited access function and the second one provides a more advanced access function.

The limited or the light version can be obtained through facial recognition in the WeChat application and can be used for low-security functions like verifying identity for hotel bookings. But the upgraded or the full version must be obtained by visiting an offline terminal and scanning the physical ID card. This edition can be used for high security functions like registering a business.

With Tencent starting to become a huge part of the governmental functions, it would be interesting to see what the future holds for WeChat.

How WeChat fights fake news with artificial intelligence?

January 2, 2018

In this era where social media rules everything, the creators of the all these platforms are constantly battling with the circling of fake news. This problem of fake news has drastically increased over the past few months with the increase of number of users in these platforms.

And it is no surprise that China’s tech giant Tencent is also facing this problem. Tencent’s signature application, WeChat, has around 1 billion users and it weeds out around 15 fake stories per second which makes it 1,000 stories per minute. This alarming rate of the fake news has alerted the developers of the platform to build strong softwares or utilize third party apps that can help find the fake articles and remove them instantly.

Tencent uses third-party fact checkers to help them eliminate the fake articles and information. They work with over 1,300 experts and institutions to fight the spread of fake information across all its major platforms including WeChat. Around 800 authorised third-party organisations have helped Tencent to shut down 180,000 accounts that published fake news on WeChat.

Additionally, the tech giant also uses another tool called WeSeer that enables them to monitor and keep an eye on the authenticity of content. It is a powerful software that can that can predict which articles are likely to go viral in the next hour, locate the key accounts driving the spread of information, identify stories of interest and break down readership by different segments, e.g., location, age and community. It has also launched a mini-app in WeChat to help users identify the authenticity of information circulating on the platform.

The company strongly believes that by making their AI more smart and more efficient in identifying and digesting information, it will prove to be a stronger method to eliminate the hoax articles and news.