In China, one social media platform is dominating the market by knowing what their audience wants and providing all those tools in one easy to use platform. Weixin, is a social networking tool in China that combines the ability to send messages, read and share news stories, post photos, videos and web links, find a taxi, book airline flights and hotels, connect with friends, play games, buy movie tickets, one touch voice recording, sell products, and make quick and easy payment transactions to friends or to pay bills.
One app. That’s it. In China, that’s all you have to have on your phone to do all of those things!
We can do all of those same things on social media in the United States, but the difference is we have to download and open multiple apps to do it. We have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Lyft, Ebay, Etsy, PayPal, ApplePay… the list goes on and on and on….in China they download one app and have access to all of those functions.
Just three years after being introduced in China, Weixin had nearly 300 million users – a faster adoption rate than Facebook or Twitter – giving the app a dominant position in what is now the world’s biggest smartphone market. This one app is now how almost everyone in China communicates. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been blocked in China by the government and that is when the idea of Weixin was born by Chinese Internet powerhouse, Tencent. The company knew that if it didn’t do something big, it would face extinction in the Chinese market. The threat of extinction inspired this company to reinvent themselves and become the next big thing in China, and they did it! Product managers and developers searched for new ideas and researched what the Chinese consumers wanted and the elegant and easy-to-use Weixin app was born.
One thing I think that makes this app so special for Chinese users is that they included a feature for red envelopes. Red Envelopes are a special tradition in China where people give monetary gifts in red envelopes at special occasions like weddings and holidays. The app took an old Chinese custom and brought it into the modern world. The Weixin app allows users to give red envelopes by sending predetermined amounts of money to either a group or an individual, but the money can be sent in randomized amounts. So let’s say you have a group chat set up with five friends, and you want to share $10 in red envelopes to your group of friends. You can set the envelopes to disburse equally so each friend receives $2, or you could set it so that the first friend to tap and open their red envelope gets $5 and the other friends get a random cut based on the order that they open them. The envelopes expire in a day, so this adds an element of excitement and keeps people coming back to the app as quickly as possible.
Red envelopes was a genius idea as it got people comfortable with sending money online, making people dependent on using other features of the app once they realized how easy it was to pay bills, pay for meals, purchase movie tickets… The company introduced red envelopes during Chinese New Year in 2014 and the number of people using Wexin payments more than tripled from 20 million to over 100 million in a month. During the first Chinese New Year holiday, which is a 6 day holiday period, users sent each other 20 million red envelopes. Just one year later, that number reached 3.2 billion, again showing the importance of knowing what is important to your audience!
The Wandering Yogi 33 