Social Media

How Effective is Your WeChat Blast?

The big data gives us the advantage to read and understand the customer more than ever. Marketers realized that the product-centric marketing or this type of business is not satisfying to their customers anymore. In a customer-centric business model, marketing efforts are starting to look like a well-designed performance, the audience demands more than just the simple plots– they earn for extra experiences, which means that customer service and newsletters are becoming tasteless. What they need is the extra spice–convenient and captivatingsocial media content.

The nature of WeChat give it audience a sense of customization, therefore what the official accounts roll out to their followers, is already considered “one step in the door.” However, the headline, the banner, the look and feel of the entire messaging, the frequency of your blast, all determines whether your audience will open the first article (headline), let alone the second and the rest. In a way, this is a mini newsletter that requires all the inspection and scrutinizing in detail. That’s when the metrics come in, and this is not news to us.

Reading the WeChat metrics hasn’t been easy ever since the beginning. Even WeChat’s developers and the acquiring company Tencent were reluctant to provide such insight. With the release of WeChat 5.0, the official account interface provides us multi-dimension charts and graphs to play with.  How you understand your metrics now is crucial to the quality of your future content.  You can be at top of the game if you can keep up with the WeChat trend, before data-kings like Radian 6 comes in and make everyone an expert of WeChat marketing. (For definitions and basic editing guidelines, please refer to the end of this article.)

To tailor the content to your reader, first you have to understand who is following you.  Many of you who started an official WeChat account would think it’s too late, but the truth is that the time you think you’ve wasted on sorting out your followers will be effectively retained when you are trying to prepare content for them.  The new demographic segmentation function gives you many comprehensive indicators, given that a large percent of WeChat followers would use alias, which rarely shows any professional or personal preference.  Therefore, reading the demographic map and manually grouping your audience would be necessary, especially if you are aiming to have a mass following.  The foreseeable future of WeChat Qunfa would be targeted to different groups within your market, therefore in the long run, grouping your followers would be the first step.

Judging from the speed of your follower growth, the next step would be monitoring the change of follower demography over time.  Set up a system, and extract data based on a consecutive time period.  You will see how your followers are shifting from one crowd to another.  For example, if your brand is targeting 20-year-old recent graduates, then the map should manifest a gradual centralization of 20 something followers, and maybe it’s a good indicator that the two 40+ couple un-followed your account.  If the age group shows a scattered audience, then it’s time to re-adjust the strategy and work on your content management.

Noted that all the metrics—demographic, repost rate %, PV and UV etc.—are interdependent.  Therefore, in order to have a larger impact and boost your “moment-sharing” presence, the next step would be

To sum up:

  1. Understand your audience
  2. Adjust your content to shift the bell curve of your follower demography
  3. Measure and monitor the reach of your messaging

For Your Reference:

  1. Frequency & Blast Schedule
    • Before we get 500 followers, this account can only send one blast per day.
    • Suggested blast time: 12-13pm, 17-21pm
    • Suggested frequency: 2-3 times per week, regulated time and date (i.e. every TTH noon)
    • Any irregular posting can be considered but it’s better to cultivate reader’s habit and be consistent so your reader knows when and what to expect.

2. Content Collection and template

  • Main Banner 720×400 px
  • Sub Banners: 200×200 px
  • Headline: within 15 characters
  • Main Article Abstract: within 20 characters
  • Article: in between 200 to 1,500 characters
  • Only one accessible link (for confidential information, login needed)
  • Other links: please convert to short links, e.g. http://bit.ly/DecNews

3. Key Metrics and Measurements: (The metrics is only saved on WeChat backend interface for up to 7 days)

  • Open Rate (%): the number of follower open versus the number of delivery
  • Repost  (numeric)
  • Follower increase (%)
  • Reach (%): the number of people that read this message versus the number of delivery
More reads on WeChat:
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