Why use a WeChat Official Account?
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For Chinese communities worldwide, WeChat is not just an app, it's a way of life. Why? And how does this affect your organisation's marketing strategy? Whether you want to reach an audience in China, or a Chinese audience anywhere else, you need to view this presentation. This presentation answers some of the most common questions we've had at Red Circle Network. If you're serious about selling to Chinese people, contact us at http://www.redcircle.network/
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Why use a WeChat Official Account?
- 2. WeChat Personal Account (PA) VS WeChat Official Account (OA)
- 3. Simon Young 杨槿鸿 ‘Simon Says.’
- 4. Who is this for? Red Circle Network has created this presentation to answer some of the most common questions asked by Western based Marketing, Social and Digital Media managers. Quite often, a business unit or team may be assigned to consider the level of commitment the organisation will make, for the commercialisation of the Chinese audience opportunity. This presentation will answer some of the most common questions asked by Western based Marketing, Social and Digital Media Managers, and will also be useful to senior managers involved in the overall business decision.
- 5. Why is this important? The questions in this presentation commonly come up, while business unit managers are assessing what do do about communicating with and engaging Chinese audiences in Local and China markets.
- 6. How is this useful? The aim is to make unknowns, known, to avoid critical oversights and mistakes which could potentially damage the brand and adversely impact on all future sales from the Chinese audience segment.
- 7. What are the impacts? The overall impact to a medium to large organisation is to consider whether the organisation can develop towards having the internal capability to self-manage Chinese marketing communications or will need to outsource Chinese social media marketing.
- 8. WeChat Personal Account (PA) VS WeChat Official Account (OA)
- 9. Let’s take a look at a WeChat Personal Account (PA) 1. Strictly personal information-sharing. 2. Based on the identity of a person. 3. Create unofficial Company Page. LIMITATIONS: Personal and unofficial company, • Can’t publish product articles. • Can’t do ecommerce. • Can’t do analytics. • Limit 5000. • Untrusted.
- 10. Let’s look at a WeChat Official Account (OA) 1. Publish articles with text, pictures and video. 2. Full access to the WeChat API. 3. Campaign management. ADVANTAGES: Official verified OA, • Connect 3rd party apps like KAWO. • Full ecommerce capability. • Unlimited audience. • Campaign metrics. • Trusted.
- 11. How does this compare with Facebook? Facebook personal profile VS Facebook Pages
- 12. Facebook personal profile I use my Facebook personal profile to share things that I like, but nobody buys off me, because they’d think it fell off the back of a truck!
- 13. Facebook Pages Facebook pages are trusted as authentic company pages, but even Facebook suffers a lot of fraud due to fake pages.
- 14. Unlike Facebook, WeChat is a financial services application. (WeChat conforms to Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations.) Companies are verified through their bank accounts. This is so that WeChat Personal Account users can absolutely trust paying the Official Account brand with their WeChat Wallet money.
- 15. What is it that we miss out on by using a non-official account (or Personal free one) over an Official one?
- 16. Answer In summary, trust and sales volume are two of the most important things you lose when you use a personal account instead of an official account.
- 17. Does it impact reach? Such as we can’t communicate with people that have official accounts set up in China?
- 18. Answer Personal accounts can reach anyone, anywhere in the world BUT, like Facebook personal accounts, they are limited to 5000 contacts.
- 19. Can they measure things on the non-official accounts?
- 20. Answer No. The only way to measure personal account activity is by manually counting likes and comments. Not fun.
- 21. The stores that have set up the free ones can we migrate people to the official ones?
- 22. Answer Individual WeChat accounts play a key role in promoting and driving traffic to the official account. We encourage this as part of the KOL go-to-market strategy. You can’t export a personal account database to an official account, but you can use coupons and other Official Account functions to convert an audience.
- 23. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS Function WeChat Personal Acct Personal Acct Impact WeChat Official Acct (OA) Official Acct Impact Contacts/Connections 5000 Contacts limit Can't grow beyond 5000. Unlimited Contacts Limit Unlimited Audience Reach. Publish Articles NO. Can't publish articles. 32 Articles Per Month. Can also apply COUPONS to Articles and QR codes to direct purchases at locations. Share Content YES. Share a moment. Photo. Link. Text. Share Video, Audio, Photo, Text. LIVE BROADCAST. Rich Engaging Content. Audience Reach. Contacts. Limited reach, because there is not much content to share. Extensive reach, because the content can be syndicated and shared extensively. e.g. Auckland Chinese Audience is approximately 300,000 WeChat Personal Account Reach is 1.7% of audience. WeChat Official Account Reach is 100% of audience or 300,000. API Connectivity NONE. Can't be connected. API can connect. KAWO Campaign Management Collaborative Portal Content. Campaign Management. Reporting and Metrics. Ecommerce Person-to-person. Sell/Buy with a friend. Accept WeChat Payments. WeChat Pay Wallets to buy products and services. Scalability One user, one device. One Person manages. Multi User, Multi Device. Marketing, Social Media, Finance and Management Team access.
- 24. Conclusion A Western business that has made a commitment to commercially engage Chinese New Zealand audiences, and which has facilitated an optimised customer experience for those China-Western audiences will achieve sales success. • WECHAT OA APPLICATION • RCN manages every complexity of this step by step to the final conclusion. • We suggest allowance for 4-6 weeks, this is due to compliance cues. • Western applications have less priority than Chinese applications. • OPTIMISATION • RCN optimises the experience through education and training. • RCN also applies automation to content management. • RCN optimises the customer journey.
Editor's Notes
- Red Circle Network presents
- What’s the difference between a WeChat Personal Account (PA) And a WeChat Official Account (OA)
- Hi my name is Simon Young, I run one of New Zealand’s most popular Premium Western brand channels for Chinese on WeChat. With tens of thousands of followers under my Chinese name Yang Jin Hong, I’ve helped a number of New Zealand’s leading brands to become China Business Ready. Lets take a look at who this presentation is for, why this is important, how it is useful and the impacts.
- Quite often, a business unit or team may be assigned to consider the level of commitment the organisation will make, for the commercialisation of the Chinese audience opportunity. This presentation will answer some of the most common questions asked by Western based Marketing, Social and Digital Media Managers, and will also be useful to senior managers involved in the overall business decision.
- The questions in this presentation commonly come up, while business unit managers are assessing what do do about communicating with and engaging Chinese audiences in Local and China markets.
- The aim is to make unknowns, known, to avoid critical oversights and mistakes which could potentially damage the brand and adversely impact on all future sales from the Chinese audience segment.
- The overall impact to a medium to large organisation is to consider whether the organisation can develop towards having the internal capability to self-manage Chinese marketing communications or will need to outsource Chinese social media marketing.
- Ok, so now that we have some context, Lets take a look at the difference between a WeChat Personal Account (PA) And a WeChat Official Account (OA)
- So first, let's take a look at a WeChat Personal Account - can you use it for business? Well, the name suggests that it is a personal account, strictly used for personal information sharing, based on the identity of an individual. You can create an unofficial company page - I've seen lots of WeChat accounts where, instead of a photo of a person, you'll see the company logo. effective way to represent your company? That’s the most important question we should be asking. And the answer is no, because there are a bunch of limitations on personal accounts. You can’t create your own content, you can only share someone else’s. So this means that you can’t publish your company’s product articles. But you can share articles, web links, images, videos, and GIFs. You also can't do ecommerce, which means you can’t sell products and services. You can receive payments to your own individual Chinese bank account - if you have one. If you do receive commercial payments to a personal account, you could potentially be putting your company in a tricky position with the Chinese government, which is not a good start to your China commerce entry. Remembering that you’re using a Chinese-based technology to engage Chinese people wherever they are. Chinese rules of governance apply. You can't do analytics on the content that you send out, except for manually. That's not much fun! Manually counting comments and likes to assess the effectiveness of your campaign. There's a limit! And this is probably one of the most important limitations of a wechat personal account. 5000 contacts is the upper limit of what you can have on a wechat personal account. That's a lot for an individual, but it's not a lot for a company. Another really important thing is that it's untrusted. In other words, what is there to say that I am who I say that I am? So there's that feature too. So if you're putting your company logo on your wechat, what's to say someone else hasn't done that as well? The impact of un-trusted is that people that don’t trust you, don’t buy from you.
- Now we have a look at the WeChat official account. A WeChat official account enables us to publish our own content with articles able to feature rich content such as text, pictures, animations and videos. A WeChat Official Account is a business product and services publishing platform; that's what it's designed for. So you can get a lot of rich information across in that platform. There's full access to the wechat API which opens up a whole world of other possibilities to futureproof your business, like customer loyalty programs, coupons and activities that drive business growth. We use the WeChat Official Account to connect with the KAWO content management platform - this enables collaboration between your company’s key marketing and content personnel and the support company translating the content and context, and adding in the key drivers for Chinese social media. Creating an efficiency by optimising a content process pathway that repurposes your pre-approved, on-brand content and now reframing that content and programming engagement for the Chinese audience to buy your products and services, and share this with their connections on WeChat, so that you achieve commercial scale. KAWO is important because the use of it facilitates a pathway to transition from outsourced to having genuine Chinese social media management capability. This will put a stop to agencies clipping the ticket with their permanent ongoing costs to your business. This business process optimisation has an overall impact of efficiency and cost saving. Your staff are already achieving efficiency for economies of scale by using Western social media management tools like Hubspot and Hootsuite for campaign management. So it’s going to be relatively easy for them to make the transition doing something they already know to do. KAWO can only be linked to WeChat Official Accounts, not to a personal account. Use of the software is game-changing. Now the saying goes, you can't manage what you can't measure, being able to measure your campaigns is really important. Full ecommerce capability means that you can now sell your products and services, and use proven techniques for engagement marketing – more on this later. There's an unlimited audience. So more than 5000 people can follow a WeChat official account. You get campaign metrics, you can see in quite some detail what happens to the content you send out. Another really important thing is that it's trusted. So the verification process, which we'll take you through shortly, means that you are who you say you are. Your company is legit, and it is actually a New Zealand company, which is very important when people are using a Chinese app.
- So, just for familiarity's sake, let's have a look at the platform that most western marketers use, because it’s a very similar situation there. We’ve got Facebook personal profiles vs Facebook pages.
- So on a personal Facebook profile, I use it for sharing things that I like. But I don’t really expect to buy and sell there, because people might think that what I’m selling has fallen off the back of a truck. Why? Because I’m just some guy, you know? I’m not a company selling a product or service.
- When we look at Facebook official pages, however, we’re looking at an official company presence that is fully branded and is the voice of the company speaking. That’s clearly understood in the Facebook world. A very similar situation appears in WeChat, except that in Facebook we still get fraudulent Facebook pages, we still get fraud happening in Facebook through these pages. That doesn’t happen in WeChat. Why is that?
- Because unlike Facebook, WeChat is a financial services application. Now of course, it’s better known for being a chat app and a social media app, that takes up 80% of customer engagement on their mobile phone in China. The reason the level of engagement with WeChat is so high is that Chinese people use WeChat the way kiwis use our debit cards – for everything. The Chinese consumer has money in their WeChat wallet, just like we used to say we have cash money burning a hole in your pocket. Now that money is in apps and on cards. It’s how they pay. For the same reason, because WeChat is a financial services application, that means that when your company has a verified WeChat Official Account, that verification happens through a transaction from your business bank account. This is so that WeChat personal account users can absolutely trust paying the Official Account brand with their WeChat wallet money. Because Chinese consumers have experienced so much fraud online. WeChat complies with international law: Anti Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations. So as you can see, WeChat is a platform that has advanced well beyond Facebook.
- Now looking at the specific questions we’ve been asked: What is it that we miss out on by using a non-official account (or Personal free one) over an Official one?
- You’ll lose trust, which damages your brand, and you’ll lose sales volume, because you can only reach 5000 people, and you can’t perform normal business functions like coupons, ecommerce, e-stores, in-store campaigns, live streaming, creative advertising, and monitoring and reporting for learning the key drivers that drive sales.
- Does it impact reach when you use a personal account? Such as, we can’t communicate with people that have official accounts set up in China?
- While we’ve already covered this, however to recap: It’s important to understand that the impacts of your first question. If you don’t have the reach to begin with, you’ll never do the level of business. And that limitation of reach is hardwired into the technology. So, why have that limitation if you don’t need it?
- Can personal accounts measure things on non-official accounts?
- Well, the simple answer is no. The longer answer is yes, you can, but it’s quite a tedious manual process. Not a lot of fun. And no connection to commercial outcomes.
- A question here; the stores or branches that HAVE set up free WeChat accounts, can we migrate them to the official ones?
- Having the most individual people sharing company content is the backbone of all social media. This is word-of-mouth on steroids. Personal account content sharing is considered to be vital to growing a brand’s presence. However, because personal accounts have such limitations, if the referral falls short of a transaction. A pathway is needed, on which those using personal accounts share content from official accounts to drive audiences to connect to the official account. As this happens, the personal account holder takes on a role as KOL (Key Opinion Leader), channelling audiences to the transactional account. So any personal account that has been built up, still plays a vital role directing commercial traffic. You can’t export a personal account database to a CSV file and upload into a WeChat official account. The way to drive the contacts of a personal account to engage the official account is through coupons. In the west, Uber solely conducted coupon marketing campaigns to build their global audience to completely disrupt the taxi industry. Coupons play a major role in building commercial audiences through referral.
- So here’s an overview, a comparative analysis of a WeChat Personal vs Official Accounts, and the impacts of both. When it comes to contacts and connections, you’ve got the unlimited potential of the WeChat Official account. You’ve got the ability to publish articles: 32 articles per month on a WeChat verified official service account. The ability to share content. Yes, that’s something that personal accounts do, so personal accounts – your employees and team members – are essential advocates in getting the word out. In a way, this is very similar to Facebook. Audience reach: so on WeChat it’s just limited to who’s in your contact group, but with a WeChat official account there is that extensive reach. API connectivity, this means that an official account can connect to Kawo campaign management, and even if your company requires helpdesk service, there is another platform called Grata that functions as a customer service helpdesk using the WeChat API. Ecommerce is person-to-person on a personal account, but on an official account you’re able to accept those wechat payments directly into your New Zealand company account. Scalability with a WeChat personal account is just limited to one person at one device, as soon as they login somewhere else they’re locked out of the previous one. Because that’s just security for one person. However an official account can have quite a number of admins, you’ve got multi-users, multi devices, which makes sense for a TEAM workflow.
- The conclusion? A Western business has to make a commitment to commercially engage Chinese audiences in a Western market. If you don’t take your Chinese audience seriously, you can not expect Chinese audiences to take you seriously. Your customer journey, needs to include an optimised customer experience for Chinese-Western audiences. One of the biggest things we’ve learnt in dealing with the China market, whether that’s in China, New Zealand or other Western nations, is that the Chinese audience is massive, it’s still growing, and has very highly engaged consumers. Commitment is a really important word there. Because if you plan loyalty to them via WeChat, they will respond to your loyalty programs and are keen referrers and affiliates. When it comes to optimisation, collaboration is another key word. Not only do we have to get the right people working together, we’ve got to get across communication in two different languages. Nothing can be lost in translation. Therefore, it’s not just about setting up the platforms, it’s about creating a integrated business process that drives the results you want. So there are two steps: Step One is the WeChat OA application. There are Chinese organisations that will wrongly set up a Western Based brand, through their Chinese based entity. The Chinese government is clamping on this and could ban Western brands which attempt to ‘work around’, government compliance. Genuine compliance is a complicated process. Compared with something like a Facebook page which takes about 5 minutes to open, WeChat for an overseas non-China account takes about 4-6 weeks, this is because of compliance issues with China are related to Anti Money Laundering and Know Your Customer Financial Services Rules and eCommerce functions within the software. The Chinese Government looks at foreign companies through a much stronger magnifying glass, evidenced by Google and Facebook both being banned in China. If Google and Facebook can be banned from China, your brand could very easily be banned from WeChat under those same rules. It is wise to be conservative. Red Circle works with authentic, highly regulated partners to ensure compliances and efficiency. Rec Circle is the first company in the West to introduce the Certificate in Chinese Social Media Management. And will optimise your customer experience through the education and training of your key personnel. Our end goal is for you and your team to be able to manage this by yourself successfully. While this sounds overly smple, We do a crawl, walk, run process which starts by us doing and you watching, and then progresses to us collectively working together, and then the end process is you working and us watching, supervising and advising. We apply automation to content management, so that the process is as efficient as possible, and is harmonious with existing processes around western content. We also optimise the customer journey, so we look at what is your audience looking for, what do they want, we keep looking at the analytics to make sure we are on track and giving people what they want to grow referral sales to the community.
- This has been Simon Young, or Yang Jin Hong, from Red Circle Network, looking forward to taking this discussion forward. Thank you.