From our 8 years of experience in cultural marketing and working on Chinese social media marketing campaigns on WeChat and Weibo, we have compiled a list of our clients' frequently asked questions about working with WeChat influencers.

1. Who's considered a WeChat Influencer?

WeChat Official Accounts with a large following would be considered a 'WeChat Influencer'. This is because official accounts have the ability to garner hundreds of thousands of subscribers, whereas regular personal WeChat accounts max out at 5000 friends/contacts. In terms of what posts look like on a personal WeChat account versus an official account, please refer to the below images.

On the left side is a personal WeChat Moments feed, which is where individuals post their updates for their friends and contacts to see. Again, note that personal WeChat accounts max out at 5000 contacts. 

On the right side is a WeChat official account. On the bottom is a customizable 'pull-up' menu bar, where there can be pages like About Us, Latest Projects, Latest Promotions, Contact Us, etc. WeChat Official Accounts post what we refer to as 'newsletters' and their readers can visit the individual articles within the newsletter to read them. There is no limit on the number of subscribers a WeChat Official Account has, which means it has a greater reach than a normal personal WeChat account.

2. Who can run a WeChat Official Account?

If the WeChat Official Account owner has a Mainland China personal Identification card, they can register a WeChat Subscription Account using this ID. For anyone who is NOT a Mainland Chinese citizen or if you have a company located outside of Mainland China, you are able to register for a WeChat Official Account using your business documents. In short, Mainland Chinese citizens OR China businesses can register, and overseas businesses with the required business documents can also register.

3. Can I target and work with WeChat Influencers who can geographically target the audience I want? 

Yes and no. Yes, because most WeChat Official Accounts incorporate a location descriptor into their account name for ease of discovery for prospective subscribers. WeChat functions differently from Instagram, and when you search for official accounts to follow, WeChat will not automatically recommend accounts similar for you to follow, which is why WeChat Influencers usually have a location descriptor to help users discover their accounts. 

No, because while owners/operators of WeChat Official Accounts have the option to manually segment their followers into different groups in the administrative backend and then select whichever groups they want to share a WeChat posting with, it’s unlikely they have a group just for 20-year old females in the Guangdong province as one of the manually segmented categories. That said, WeChat Official Accounts are able to see the location of their subscribers by percentage breakdown, so they can provide these stats for your reference.

If you are looking for an option to advertise on WeChat that lets you geo-target and target by demographics, WeChat Moments Ads on the official advertising platform could help you do that depending on which region you are targeting. Yes. Each different region offers full or limited/restricted targeting options and no single blog post will be able to cover all the special cases of WeChat advertising.

4. Is it OK for us to have the Chinese influencer post Chinese content and then direct readers to an English website or landing page? 

If you are looking for conversions such as having people sign up for your newsletter, register as a new user on your platform, or buy your product, we highly recommend having the experience in Simplified Chinese if you are targeting Mainland Chinese consumers. That said, we also understand that most clients may not have the time and/or allocated budget to build a Chinese site for their first pilot WeChat campaign. In this case, using a simple Chinese landing page would be the next best thing. Another thing to note is that WeChat users prefer to stay within WeChat and not leave the app, so if you are directing users to an external site, clickthrough rates are not comparable to what we would see on English websites.

5. What metrics can I expect to receive from a WeChat Influencer campaign and how do we measure success on a WeChat Influencer campaign?

If you place an advertorial or a banner ad with a WeChat Official Account, you can see the number of people the news was distributed to (similar to how we would think of magazine or newspaper circulation), the number of viewers (ie. number of clickthroughs to read your article), the path the reader took to reach the article, the number of shares, and the age demographic breakdown of the article's readers.

In terms of the success metrics, that is up to your marketing objective, and most of our clients aim to drive readers to an external site. In this case, we will embed a trackable link within a QR code to direct readers to the client's landing page, and the performance statistics would then be available for viewing from the client's own Google Analytics. 

6. Can I treat WeChat as a performance channel? Or is it mainly an awareness channel?

If you want to use WeChat as a performance channel, you can use trackable QR codes as mentioned above to see the amount of traffic being driven to your site from WeChat, and then view the consumer behavior and conversions from the Google Analytics platform. We also recommend WeChat exclusive offers, promotions, or gifts with purchase as additional drivers and incentives to monitor campaign success, and this works well for those who only have a physical shop or retail space, so they can see the number of people who physically show up to claim the offer.

These are just a few of the frequently asked questions from our clients whenever we are helping them plan a new WeChat Influencer campaign. Were there ones that we did not answer in this article? Shoot us an email at info@catalystagents.com and we are happy to help!