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!
