To create WeChat marketing content with strong performance in term of views and engagement, you must be comfortable writing long length content and master the rules of WeChat .

For Community Manager familiars with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, WeChat content creation can be harder to grasp. It is very different from the rest of social media platforms both in term of format and creative approach. Creating content for WeChat is much closer to creating content for your website blog than for your social media platform.

• First, let’s discuss how and when your WeChat articles will be display to your audience
• Them, show what are the key element impact the opening rate of your WeChat articles
• Finally, explain how to build strong engagement and why it will impact the overall performance of your marketing content

How to share marketing content on WeChat ?

To share content with your community on WeChat, you must first open an Official WeChat account. There is two categories of WeChat Official account: Subscription and Service. The category of WeChat account will impact the way the content is deliver and the notification your followers will receive when you publish WeChat article.

Service Account

With a Service Account, user will receive your content as if they were receiving a message of their friends. They will be notify and your account will appear on top of their chat list. The user will then open the chat box to discover a preview of your  WeChat article. Then, they can then open and read a rich-media article display in the WeChat browser. Once a user open the message it will count as a view. The total number of views on an article is display at the end of the message.

Subscription Account

With a Subscription Account, your WeChat article will be deliver differently to your audience. Your subscription account will be regroup with other subscription account in a unique folder “Subscription account” on the chat tab. When any subscription account share a message, a red dot will appear on the folder but no notification will be share with the user. As such sharing article on a subscription account is less visible for the user, but also less intrusive. This mean user need to make a pro-active effort to come and check out your content.

The category of account also impact the frequency of publication. With a subscription account you can publish content once a day, with a service account you can only publish 4 times a month. This will impact your content planning strategy.

As you can see even if all your audience receive your content, the category of account can have a significant impact on the fact your followers will read or not your content.

Once you have decided on the category of account and created your Official WeChat account, you can now create articles on WeChat. You can do so directly from WeChat Admin Back Office center and also use editing third-parties tools to make your content even more impactul (Xiumi, Ipaiban…)

How to increase the opening rate and views on your WeChat articles ?

Writing valuable content for your audience will be a waste if you do not maximise the chance of your audience reading it. As we mentioned earlier, before landing on your full article, the audience will receive a preview on the chat conversation. It’s the way you will optimize the WeChat article preview box that will strongly impact the opening rate on your articles.

First, the preview has 2 key formats:

The following one when you share only one article:

And this one when you share multiple articles (1 main article + secondary articles, up to 8 in total).

As you can see the first format is much more impactful. The image is weider and the title easy to read title with a short content teaser.

So unless you absolutely need to publish multi-contents always favor the unique article formats. Keep in mind WeChat users are crowded with content. So as a brand you must be picky and only publish the best on the platform.

Now let’s break down the preview key elements you need to focus on:

The title

In the same logic as SEO, the title is the most important aspect of your articles. He must first perfectly sum up the purpose of the article and be enticing enough so the user want to read more. Here are some examples of best practices to create great WeChat articles titles, user will want to open:

• Use a question that will match a key concern for your audience and that your article will answer.
• Show your audience the value or the learnings they will get from the article with How and Why.  For example, how to do this or why you should do that.
• Lists and best-of. People love to do list or best-of so they can save time doing research. Offering your audience with the key answers on a particular questions will increase the opening rate on your WeChat articles

The main picture

The main picture is a key element in your article as it is the only visual appearing in the preview. Choosing the right visual is important as it should give an idea of the topic of the article without being generic. Also, you need to keep in mind the visual will be reduced and crop when people share your article or when display in your account history. Make sure to concentrate the key element in the center of the main picture

The Teaser/Description.

A short text is display in the preview to introduce your article when you use the “unique article” format. Customize the text and avoid using the first sentences of your article if they are not impactful enough.

How to build strong engagement on your WeChat marketing content ?

They are 4 metrics to combine to measure the level of engagement on WeChat:

• Shares
• Comments
• "Wow”
• Clicks on “Read more” or links in the article

WeChat Rules of engagement

To determine which metric you should favor, you need to keep in mind the following rules of the WeChat platforms.

1. Shares your article is the most valuable engagement on WeChat as it will help you reach beyond your community without using paid media
2. Even if a lot of users comment on your article it won’t increase the reach of your article. The network of the people commenting won’t get notify or know about their friends commenting on articles. So even if comment are great way to build a conversation on your article and with your community it won’t help reach out to more people
3. Wow on the other hand are a way for people to show their appreciation of an article and even if it’s not as valuable as sharing, thanks to Wow your article will have a chance to be display under the tap “Top Stories” in the “Discover” Menu

Now that you understand how engagement works on WeChat and how it will impact the views on your articles from people beyond your existing community, let’s discuss the focus and approach when you build digital marketing content depending on your business objectives:

Business/ Marketing Objectives: Brand Awareness

If your main objective on WeChat is to build brand awareness, you need to build your content to incentivize the user to share and Wow your content. You need to be extra careful with the copywriting and the story telling of your article that need to be both appealing and answering a key question of your target audience interest, so the user think your content will also be valuable to their friends.

Business/ Marketing Objectives: Sales, Drive to store/ website or campaign

Build a clear call to action to drive the user to the next step, ecommerce, visiting your store or participating in a campaign.

So, keep the content quite short and focus on the incentive user will have to answer the call to action. Do not to overcrowd the article with information that might not be related with the call to action.

Make sure to facilitate the customer journey by adding QR code and links both at the beginning and the end of the articles.

Let’s now recap how to create marketing content that outperforms on WeChat:

• Make sure to use the right category of account (Service or Subscription account)
• Optimize the preview message to maximize the conversation and the number of views
• Understand the rules of engagement to adapt and make them match with your business and marketing objectives.

Feel free to reach out to us if you need support to create great content on WeChat.

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