WeChat: A Social Media Perspective

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The social media, today, has become one of the most effective ways to communicate. Emails and telephones are no longer the primary way of electronic communication. Consumers today prefer to ‘tweet’, ‘comment’, or even ‘chat’ with their friends, relatives and colleagues. WeChat is a mobile text and voice messaging service that was developed by Tencent, China in January 2011. It is used in the form of a mobile application. WeChat application is available on various mobile platforms such as Android, iTunes, Blackberry, Windows and Symbian. It supports languages such as English, Chinese, Indonesian, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Malay, Portuguese, Thai, Hindi and Russian. In most of the countries and mobile platforms, it is available for free downloading. WeChat was earlier called “Weixin” and Ma Huateng, CEO of Tencent, devised it. It was rembranded in April 2012, for international markets. What began as a small project at Tencent Guangzhou Research and Project centre in October 2010, now quickly garnered more than 300 million users worldwide. The growth and popularity of WeChat has been phenomenal as it grew from 5 million users in 2011 to more than 300 million users in 2013. WeChat, unlike its main competitor WhatsApp, has developed a platform where its users can chat, shop, play games, meet new people, and even do banking. In China, it is the number one app for messaging, and voice services. This is a big bonus for WeChat, as China is the world’s biggest telecom market. Apart from China, it is making progress in penetrating the Asian and South African markets. WeChat has started expanding into Europe, U.S and has launched a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign, which would cover India, South Africa, Italy and Spain. WeChat has... ... middle of paper ... ...ps are a small part of social media bandwagon, but they are one of the most important aspects of marketing and companies are realising this fact. This is the reason why a giant like McDonald’s, which spends millions of dollars on advertisements and promotions, has collaborated with WeChat to offer discount coupons, and services to its customers. This trend of cross-promotions is going to increase in the coming future. The focus would be to increase revenues and profits, but social messaging app makers such as Tencent need to remain true to their vision and goals. WeChat must remain simple, free to download, provide exceptional user interface, and introduce better features in days ahead. Works Cited Features.www.wechat.com n.d. Web 25. Feb. 2014 Josh Roberwww.trutower.comn.d. Web 25.Feb.2014 Wind chimes Communications. (2013). Social media Handbook. Mumbai, India

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