What are the top performing WeChat accounts? How many views do they get? What are the top performing WeChat accounts in each category? Here are the answers.
1. Top 5 (number of views)
In October 2015, the top 5 accounts were People’s Daily (WeChat ID: rmrbwx), CCTV news (WeChat ID: cctvnewscenter), CCTV Finance (WeChat ID: cctvyscj), Traffic Road Conditions (WeChat ID: duhaoshu) and FM93, Voice of Traffic (WeChat ID: hifm93)
The top performing WeChat accounts number of views range from 23 to 40 millions views per month. It is to be noted that some of these accounts get an impressive amount of views partly because they are not limited to 1 message per day as most WeChat accounts. It used to be that subscription accounts could post 3 messages per day, and some of these old accounts kept this privilege to this day.
2. Top performing WeChat categories
Not all categories are equal when it comes to WeChat. 68% of the top-500 accounts are lifestyle accounts. The top-performing accounts are mostly part of the gossip, humor and culture categories.
News article represent a smaller share, with the biggest sub-categories being daily news, people’s welfare and education.
3. Index winners
The winners on the various indexes are:
- Number of posting times: China Economic Net (WeChat ID: ourcecn)
- Number of articles posted (one posting can contain several articles): The first radio for private cars (WeChat ID: fm107107)
- Total # of views: People’s Daily (WeChat ID:rmrbwx)
- Total # of likes: People’s Daily (WeChat ID:rmrbwx)
- Number of original articles: BAZAAR (WeChat ID: bazaar-china)
4. Top number of likes
The top performing WeChat account for number of likes are similar to the top-5 in views, with People’s Daily and FM93 leading the way, but contains big lifestyle accounts in the top-5 such as Vision (WeChat ID: QQ_shijuezhi) and Read a Book after 10PM (WeChat ID: duhaoshu)
5. The club of the 100k
13 accounts managed to consistently get above 100k views on their articles. Two of them are part of the same group: “Lengtu” (WeChat ID: lengtoo and lengxiaohua2012), a kind of “Buzfeed” equivalent posting light and humorous articles
6. Bonus data: accounts getting renamed
Some of the accounts in the top-500 decided to change their name to a sexier or more memorable option (it is possible for all verified accounts to modify their name by re-applying for the verification of the account).
Interestingly, we can observe that the rebranding did have a positive impact, leading to a an increase in average number of readers.
How does it impact my business?
Top performing WeChat accounts give an idea of a super-high benchmark when it comes to the main metrics of WeChat (views, likes, posting volume, etc…) but they are of little relevance to most advertisers.
Although some of these accounts such as Lengtu do offer advertising opportunities, the prohibitive price of each message (50k RMB and upward) will discourage most companies.
They represent however good sources of inspiration for companies developing their content strategy and trying to get a rough understanding of what attracts the largest amount of users. But in practice, most brands will operate on niches which target market will require a very different content strategy than these general-purpose accounts.