WeChat Content Best Practices [January]
Looking back to the month of January (when 2020 was a little less complicated) we found many great examples of brands creating creative and engaging WeChat content. We’re sharing our top 5 favorite posts with you below which cover different ways you can craft compelling copy, visuals and engaging content for WeChat.
Brand: NongFu Spring (农夫山泉)
Best Practice: Drive people to a fun game
This drinking water brand released their Rat Year edition water for Chinese New Year.
In a WeChat post they depicted what it is like for Chinese to travel home during Chinese New Year and told the story through a small rat trying to make it home against all the challenges.
At the end, you have the ability to play the game and win special CNY bottles.
People could not buy them in the shop. These special products are only available when you participate in the CNY campaign or purchase enough amount of their normal products during this period.
By scanning the QR code on the back of the bottle, people can play with this mini program game called “Send Rat Home.”
This cute rat represents this Chinese New Year, also every Chinese people who want to travel home before New Year’s Eve.
A little bit of VR technology makes the game more interesting.
People just need to successfully click on the moving rat on their phone, then they will win the gift straight away!
Since the gifts will be delivered to winner’s home, the brand can gather a lot of personal info for the future.
Brand: Starbucks
Best Practice: Combine multiple platforms to drive awareness
How to use WeChat and live-streaming together to drive awareness and sales?
Starbucks collaborated with the live-streaming host, Austin Li, who is famous for live-streaming himself trying on lipsticks.
He once sold out 15,000 lipsticks in just 15 minutes
Starbucks sent out a WeChat post featuring Austin Li to promote their membership. They gave the influencer 1,000 Stars (points), which means... A LOT of coffee.
They announced that during a Taobao live-stream, fans can also have the opportunity to win the same, as well as some other gifts
This drove big traffic not only to a Starbucks live-stream where they announced the winners, but also to Austin Li's live-stream
WeChat remains the most preferred channel people want to hear from brands on, however when it comes to converting, live-streaming, especially on platforms like Taobao, is clearly the most effective.
This is why social media & ecommerce in China can become so complicated for foreign brands - each channel is very unique, and used for very different purposes.
Publishing content to a WeChat account alone won't get you very far, to scale, you'll need to think multi-channel.
Brand: W Hotels
Best Practice: Easy & fun engagement
How to be creative when you only have limited brand materials to run the CNY campaign?
To celebrate the RAT Chinese New Year, W hotel created this interesting engagement on WeChat to bring fun and good tidings to their audience.
They transferred these colorful rat images taken from the CNY promotion video into a screenshot lucky draw game.
Each rat is represents a key word to make a wish on your new year — energetic, likable, successful, clever and so on.
If you comment below to share your key word, you will have chance to become one of ten winners to get hongbao gift box from W Hotel.
And if anybody gets the special screenshot which has 8 rats together and sends it to the WeChat account will have chance to win the CNY gift box.
By setting up more than one step game rules and offer different level of gifts, W Hotel increased the followers interest in interaction as well as providing a very simple, yet fun engagement with their content.
Brand: HEY TEA
Best Practice: Storytelling with sub-articles
The visuals inside your WeChat article are not the only ones that matter. We know that open rate of sub-articles is quite low, so how do you attract people to this content? One way is to draw people in at the first impression by creating a visual story with all the posts.
HEY TEA uses the main article to relate to the sub-articles below it.
No matter how many sub articles to go with one post, HEY TEA always makes sure the cover images of them are telling the same story.
Brand: French Dragon
Best Practice: Consistent messaging
Did you know you can include voice messages in WeChat articles?
French Dragon not only creates a very strong visual code with each article, but also has a signature audio element.
Each article is prefaced by a short voice recording from the brand’s founder and artist. She introduces the content of the article and shares about her personal life, making the reader feel that they are stepping into her world as she creates their custom ceramic pieces.
By numbering the audio file for each article, the reader can tell that each article is connected to a larger story and they should follow the account for subsequent recordings.
