WeChat Content Best Practices [September]
The same content best practices can be applied across most social media platforms — WeChat being no exception — to list a few; know who you’re talking to, provide value, be authentic and encourage engagement.
However, WeChat is particularly unique when it comes to forcing brands to be creative with content.
As WeChat is what we liked to call, a ‘Walled Garden,’ it can be more difficult than Facebook or Instagram, for a post to reach a users outside of its current followers. This, combined with the limited paid advertising options from WeChat, makes it difficult for brands to break into the China market via social media. However, to WeChat’s credit, this forces brands to be creative, and produce high-quality content that users just cannot resist sharing.
I’ve rounded up 5 articles from September which display several WeChat best practices;
OREO
⭐️Best Practice:
👌🏼Encouraging engagement in all forms
👌🏼Different types of media used
Brands often forget that WeChat is a very interesting platform to create content for — you can engage readers through text, video, sliding images, voice and more. You want people to be doing more than just reading, or let’s be honest, scrolling quickly through your post. Add in pictures that slide, make the reader turn their phone — create content that is so fun to interact with, that people want to share it.
Oreo includes many ways to engage all in one post, with slidable graphics, gifs, DIY recipes and finally at the end, encouraging readers to comment on which DIY recipe is their favorite.
Comments can be given a thumbs up by anyone who reads the article, and here, the most upvoted comment has received over 1000 thumbs ups.
✅DO:
👉🏼 Give readers a way to interact with your product or service & then ask them about it! It’s both helpful feedback and engaging!
💡Some ideas:
DIY recipes
Quizzes
Checklists
👉🏼Creative/unconventional ways to use your product
👉🏼Reply to comments — you’ll see on this post that the ‘author’ which is the Oreo Official Account has replied to many of the comments left on this post. This is low-hanging-fruit that many brands miss out on across most social media platforms — engage with commenters! That’s the whole purpose of social media, people want to engage, especially with brands. Reply to comments and build long-lasting relationships with your audience.
PIZZA HUT
⭐️Best Practice
👌🏼Sub article cover photo
When you publish on WeChat, you’re allowed to publish a ‘push’ with up to eight articles (you can do these pushes either 4x per month if you have a service account, or 1x per day if you have a subscription account — drop me a message if you’re not sure which type of account is best for you!)
Typically readership drops off quite a bit after the main article, and even more so for anything with more than two or three articles, however, Pizza Hut found a clever way to draw followers to their sub articles.
Pizza Hut offers many promotions, separating them out into sub articles in clever, and enticing ways. Just take one sub article for example, which hd received almost 30K more views than their main article;
The characters in the photo say; buy one get one — within two seconds, without even having to read the title, you know what you’re getting.
✅DO:
👉🏼Get creative when choosing cover photos for a sub article.
🚀Pro Tip: Make sure when you publish your article, you’re adjusting the uploaded photo so that the frame is optimized for the 1:1 ratio.
Here are some other accounts using creative sub article cover photos
MARS PETCARE
⭐️Best Practice
👌🏼Creative Call to Action
👌🏼Graphics
Aside from their always amazing and eye-catching, adorable graphics, Mars Petcare gave readers of one of their articles a unique way to further engage with the Mars community by joining a membership group.
When managing any type of social media channel, it is important to be thinking of how you can further engage your audience and pull each reader, each person that comes into contact with your content, further into a funnel.
Each channel has different ways you can do this that work best for that particular channel. For example, you can direct someone who follows your Facebook to join your Facebook Group, or an Instagram follower to click the link in your bio — make sure that giving your audience an easy and appropriate way to get more content from your brand.
For WeChat, ensuring that whatever action you’re asking users to take is as smooth as possible is key. Remember Chinese consumers are used to apps that don’t just provide one or two functions, but serve as entire ecosystems — they are used to seamless experiences.
Here, Mars Petcare suggests two different groups for cat owners or dog owners, users can scan a time-sensitive QR code to join the membership for special perks.
✅DO:
👉🏼Try to make awesome, on-brand graphics — remember, a reader’s first impression will be how your post looks, not what it says. Excellent graphics, used consistently can also keep followers coming back for more if they know they’re going to enjoy reading your articles.
👉🏼Create pathways for readers to further engage with your brand, whether this is directing them to a WeChat mini program for ecommerce, offering loyalty membership programs, linking to another WeChat post, or even just as simple as including a read more link (which you should always do not matter what), make sure your audience can get more of you.
DYSON
⭐️Best Practice
👌🏼Headline Category
👌🏼Clear headers
✅ DO:
👉🏼Set expectations (the sooner the better) — have clear titles and branding for certain types of content
👉🏼Make articles easy to read — you don’t have to get fancy, use bold text, spacing, colors to make the important stuff stand out. Test the article with a friend and see if they can pull out the key message you’re trying to get across within 8 seconds of scrolling through your post.
WEHUSTLE
✅Best Practice
👌🏼Regular content series
👌🏼Provide clear information
One of the questions I often receive from people managing WeChat Official Accounts is how to grow and maintain loyal and engaged followers — creating a regular content series is a great way to do this.
It can be something quite simple, and not specifically about your products or services, but something that provides value to your community, comes out at a certain time each week/day and can be branded to give it even more of a consistent look and feel.
weHustle, a platform that connects users through jobs, events and directory services creates a roundup of events each week and posts it as a sub-article.
The article is always formatted the same way, and is a great example of how to share information about events in a comprehensive, and clear way.
If you look at weHustle’s posts, their curated events articles often receive a higher read rate than even the main article. This is a type of post that not only keeps followers engaged as they know they can expect something useful from the weHustle account each week, but it’s also an enticing post to share.
Another example of a great weekly content series is The Cool, the Cheap & the Crazy from Baopals, an ecommerce platform for foreigners looking to buy off Taobao. They do a weekly round up of products found on Chinese ecommerce site, Taobao, usually resulting in some pretty outrageous content.
✅DO:
👉🏼Have a regular content series that provides useful information, or tools for your followers — so useful that they’ll want to share it!
👉🏼Make sure you’re providing information about upcoming events in a clear, easy to read format — a reader should be able to gather event summary/when/where/price in a matter of seconds.
