Australian companies may apply for a WeChat official account under their own company name, or join the SydneyDirect marketplace to get a WeChat store and tap into the China market.
WHY WECHAT SOCIAL MARKETING IS CRUCIAL FOR YOUR BUSINESS
In terms of social media marketing channels, 99% of Australian businesses don’t have a WeChat official account. In term of social network
70% of Australians use Facebook daily,
30% of Australians use Instagram daily.
It seems Facebook + Instagram already has a good coverage to the social network, the true answer however, is not. The fact is 12% of Australians are using WeChat daily, and some of them don’t really use Facebook, fewer use Instagram.
Indeed WeChat is the most used social media platform for the Chinese-speaking people, if you consider there is only 8.3% Australian residents that are from China, then the 12% WeChat coverage is sufficient to suggest:
- Almost 100% of Australians from China use WeChat
- More non-Chinese are starting to use WeChat
Why does the Chinese social network have such high coverage? This is because WeChat is not only a timeline feed and messenger only social tool, WeChat has seamlessly integrated various functions in the APP for everyday agenda. and has become a significant part of everyone’s daily life, people use it as an ID, for social status, for shopping & payments.
Thus, WeChat is inevitably the channel for Chinese marketing. It is the best contextual commerce platform that every Chinese use everyday! So how can Australian companies obtain a solution?
Only from recently, Australian companies are eligible to apply for their WeChat official accounts! However due to high cultural barriers and complexity during the application process, very few companies had succeeded with the application. In fact, less than 1% of Australian companies currently have a WeChat account. Sounds intimidating, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, with right approach, it still can be done easily. Yet, before jumping into creating a WeChat account, there is the ultimate question to ask: “Is your business ready for Chinese marketing? Do you have Chinese content for marketing at all?”
China social network marketing turnkey solution
Aussie companies that aim for the China market could not avoid using WeChat, Weibo for their China social marketing. A major difference of WeChat and Weibo, is that WeChat is linked with WeChatPay, whereas Weibo is not, and WeChat is used more as a messenger APP, whereas Weibo in its nature, is a blog APP. So for businesses that wish to have a mobile store, WeChat is the right choice.
And the next big question is how to open a WeChat account, most Aussie companies find it is very hard to get the solution with these barriers:
- LANGUAGE BARRIER – in China social media you got to use Chinese; Chinese content generation is a problem for most Aussie companies.
- BUSINESS ENTITY BARRIER – WeChat private account is easy to register, however private account is only a messenger account, it does not work as a “page” or ‘APP store”. Only WeChat official account can be a page and App store, but official account is not really open to foreign companies to apply.
- COST BARRIER – companies keen for getting WeChat official account (OA) often hard to find trustable agent to apply for them. Even find one still need to assign a 3rd party partner to host the OA under its China business entity, and the cost may at the mark of AUD10K, without guarantee on account security and autonomy.
For companies that does not have Chinese resource to manage its own WeChat account, we suggest to go for SydneyDirect marketplace solution for a fast tap into the China market and get a cross platform Chinese webstore and WeChat store with great marketing features.