How People Use & Behave on WeChat

Alright, if you want to leverage WeChat as a pillar of your marketing in China then you better know the app well and how Chinese consumers are actually using it every single day. Which means, if you haven’t yet used the app, I highly suggest you download it, add some friends and use it!

In general WeChat is a mobile messaging app and naturally, that’s the primary activity that most WeChat users do on it, to chat with their friends and families. However, that’s really only the surface of WeChat because it’s got a complete ecosystem and you can pretty much live your whole life with it in China.

Now many of the functions below are going to be more apparent if you were in China, they won’t be as useful for a foreign outside of China but they’re available to pretty much everyone.

Chatting & Messaging:

Needless to say, what most people in China use WeChat for is to chat and stay connected with their friends and families because that’s what WeChat was originally built to a mobile messenger app.

WeChat Moments:

Moments is another key feature you should pay a lot of attention to because it is where users pay most of their attention to apart from chatting. If an average WeChat user is not actively chatting with their friends, they’re probably looking at their moments (朋友圈). In Chinese moments is actually call which directly translate to “friend’s circle”.

You can think of moments kind of like Facebook newsfeed but not as open. On Facebook, a stranger can search and find your profile and view your updates, if you didn’t change your privacy settings to hide them from none-friends. WeChat on the other hand, you cannot do this and can only view moments of people who are on your friend’s list.

Name: This is your WeChat name, whatever that may be.
Post Content: This is your post; your post can be long and short but if it’s long people will have to click on the “read more” to read the rest of your post.
Image, Video or Article: Here you have a few options, you can post 1 big picture, a bunch of pictures (up to 9), a short few seconds video, or a link to an external webpage or WeChat official account article.
Posted Location: You can choose to display where you posted the post and your location will show up below (if WeChat knows where you are).
Like & Comment Menu: This is a menu that opens up with 2 options, WoW(like) or comments.
Likes & Comments: This, unlike the Like & Comment menu, instead this is where you actually see all the likes and comments of your post.

Important Note: WeChat moments do not really have a share function and I’m not sure if it will ever have one but as of right now if you want to share a friends post you’ll literally have to copy and paste & repost it, unless it’s a webpage or article from a WeChat official account.

Time Capsule

Alright, WeChat Time Capsule is actually very new and interesting feature its kind of like Snapchat