What is the difference between good and great WeChat promotion? The use of mobile features.
WeChat is different from other social networks because it was built for mobile, and only for mobile. So how to unlock the full potential of WeChat?
Leverage the screen
The company Life-Fun (灵泛) (WeChat ID: LIFE-FUN-SHOP) made a great job at leveraging the fact that mobile screens are perfectly adequate for drawing. Sketching with your finger is indeed much more pleasurable than it would be to awkwardly draw with a pointer in Paint.
Life-fun had the great idea to guide their users to draw simple shapes: their first WeChat promotion campaign invited users to draw pictures of cats.
Before trying by themselves, users could see examples drawn by other “artists”, thus giving them a feel of what would be potential outputs of their own work and providing inspiration. And of course, users were invited to share their work and “like” or comment the artworks of their friends.
Shake it!
There is little awareness of the fact that HTML5 gives access to the accelerometer of the phone. You can therefore use any inclination of the phone to design games or implement “share” features (independently from the WeChat “shake” function).
The WeChat account 维意定制 (WeChat ID: wayesdz) invited users to get their “new year horoscope” (新年运势) by shaking their phone, emulating the “lucky fortune draw” (求签) which would be traditionally done in a temple.
The combination of playfulness, tradition and technology made the campaign viral.
The next level of WeChat promotionl: iBeacons
The last and more obvious characteristic of a mobile is that you always keep it with you. This portability is fully leveraged once you combine WeChat promotion with the next frontier of connected objects: iBeacons.
iBeacons are devices enabling you to locate users in a very accurate way in a specific space.
A concrete example? Cleveland Museum in the US used 230 iBeacons to triangulate the location of their visitors, and display information about 45,000 artworks depending on which ones were in their vicinity.
Another great use-case? The LINQ hotel in Las Vegas partenered with WeChat and the Californian start-up Ayla Networks to build a fully WeChat-connected hotel room (actually using Zigbee and wi-fi rather than iBeacons). All the lights and appliances in the room can be controlled via the Chinese social APP.
The next frontier for WeChat promotion in China is doing the most of these accurate-location services, and taking the experience from online to offline.