GUEST POST-WeChat Story Part 2: Tipping Point In V 5.0
The following is Part 2 in a multi-part series about the rise of WeChat, the popular mobile instant messaging service owned by Tencent.
By Lanie Nie
If WeChat’s story can be divided into two parts, the big dividing point would be the launch of its 5.0 version on August 5, 2013. Before that, users of the popular mobile chatting app were mainly focused on fancy gimmicks like “shake“, “people nearby” and “drift bottle” that help users make contact with a few strangers. The hyperactive “moments” feature is also very popular, allowing users to share photos, status updates, links and locations with friends; and so were “official accounts” that enabled business owners, media outlets and even individuals to push out messages and articles to their followers.
But after the launch of WeChat 5.0, people began to wonder if the real ambition of this chatty app might go beyond its dominant role as a center for Chinese socializing on mobile. With a newly introduced mobile payment solution and an enhanced “scan” function that is no longer restricted to QR codes but also applicable to bar codes, book covers, street views and even basic English to Chinese translation, WeChat showed a strong interest in bringing out the next generation of shoppers in its post-5.0 era.
Moreover, WeChat began to take initiatives to develop an ecosystem around its core messaging function. For example, its 5.0 version divided the category of official accounts into service accounts and subscription accounts, and capped the number of mass messages that could be sent to their followers at one per month and one per day, respectively, in a bid to curb abuse of the system by overly aggressive sellers.
Re-Educating The Public
While things like the mobile payment revolution may still need time to find a following, the ubiquitous WeChat has already ingrained some profound changes into Chinese society. Here are some critical features WeChat offers, of which we’re just starting to see the implications:
A return to private networks
Unlike the dedicated WhatsApp, the Middle Kingdom-born WeChat is structured in a way that allows it to function not only as a communications tool, but also a user-centered networking platform like Facebook (Nasdaq: FB) and a social media platform like Twitter (NYSE: TWTR). However, the social network-style feature on WeChat creates a very different space for private sharing than currently exists through other social networks. Users are only allowed to see comments about others’ posts by people that they are also friends with, reducing the visibility people have into one another’s lives given by open social network sites.
Moreover, instead of being miserable finding the balance between friend posts and sponsored content and making story scoring and ranking algorithms smarter like other social networks, WeChat simply asks users themselves to decide what they want to share and with whom, an approach that controls information outflow and possible social network fatigue and is flexible for catering to different privacy needs.
When all the various functions of the whole social networking service are accommodated into one big mobile app and autonomy of one’s network is given back to the user himself, WeChat actually facilitates “sharing with smaller groups”, the next big trend for social proposed by Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, in an interview with Wired magazine last year.
Executives, who are not that technology-savvy, swarm after extremely expensive courses to learn the tricks of WeChat, afraid of missing out chances to join small coteries on metrics of either wealth and social status or interests and profession.
Online communities on WeChat demonstrated the reach of small-group sharing on December 18, 2013, as the Shenzhen-listed film production company Huayi Brothers (Shenzhen: 300027) saw its stock fall by the daily limit of 10 percent that day, mainly dragged down by bad reviews from fund managers and securities analysts. In that instance, the negative talk centered on comments the night before, after a pre-screening of the company’s highly anticipated blockbuster film “Personal Tailor”, that swept through the moments column of literally every relevant person.
Lanie Nie is a writer, translator and participant observer of localization and internationalization efforts by Chinese technology, media and entertainment companies. She freelances regularly for Chinese business and technology news websites and can be emailed directly at lanienie@hotmail.com.
