WeChat: The evolution and future of China’s most popular app

Essentially, WeChat can be used for just about anything you want to do online. Although it does not own all of the products that reside within its walls, it does facilitate easy integration between most of China’s most popular apps.

This bike-sharing program allows cyclists to pay for rides using their WeChat wallet. It is similar to bike-sharing schemes in cities worldwide aside from one difference: it does not require docking stations.

This mini app allows users to make small donations to charity for each 10,000 steps they take on a daily basis. For each 10,000 steps, a user can donate 1 Yuan, which is equivalent to roughly 15 cents.

60% of users open the App more than 10 times a day. 21% of users open Wechat more than 50 times per day. 17% of users spend 4 hours or more per day on Wechat.

Wechat pay, also known as Wechat wallet, is a user’s ‘ Digital wallet’and it is used to pay for everything, either via a tap of the phone or a snap of a camera. It boasts over 600 million active users, compared with 450 million for its main rival Alipay, owned by Alibaba.

Mini programs are WeChat’s attempt to resolve a seemingly insoluble paradox on mobile devices: people spend a lot of time in apps, but they only use a very small selection of apps in total.

Consumers are expected to use a much wider variety of mini Apps within Wechat in future. It is somewhat like Google’s accelerated mobile pages initiative, or Android instant Apps.

'search' will compete directly with Baidu and provide something new altogether. Tencent, Wechat’s parent company, also owns Sogou (a minor competitor to Baidu) this will at least lend this new venture some engineering expertise. Wechat is uniquely positioned to do what Google and Facebook so far have not achieved.

There are options to market brands on Wechat, either organically or via paid promotions. Paid promotion has only been available since 2015 and ads make up only 15–20% of Tencent’s revenues. By comparison, ads make up more than 70% of Facebook’s revenue. But that number is predicted to more than triple by 2018 rising to $11 billion in annual advertising revenues.

Most of those international accounts are held by Chinese people who have moved abroad. But Wechat has started to gain some ground in South America and Africa. There are now over 5 million Wechat users based in South Africa alone. It has been reported that foreigners based in China have become even more addicted to the App than locals. This could help to expand Wechat’s reach to Western markets. A wide range of studies has highlighted how differently Chinese and American consumers perceive their respective environments.

Wechat has built its success on integrating its way into its users’daily lives and integrating all of their most popular brands and services. By first building an engaged (in some cases, addicted) user base, it is now in a Supreme position to provide them with useful advertising.