WeChat Content Best Practices [April]

How can you grow a WeChat account? It’s a question that baffles thousands of brands, both domestic brands in China, and especially foreign brands. Your WeChat strategy should be constantly evolving to account for changes in the way people use WeChat (mini programs) to changes in environment (coronavirus) to changes in China’s digital ecosystem (rise of Douyin, short video, live streaming etc.). 

However what has remained constant over the years is the value and importance of quality content. Good content will help you to build a true and engaged following for the long-term, an important investment you should have the patience to make. 

Each month, my team and I share our top 5 favorite WeChat posts of the month and highlight what we see as great ideas that for the most part can be implemented no matter the size of your budget. 

Brand: Grow HR

Best Practice: Monthly series 

How to keep people looking forward to your posts each month? Provide a useful monthly series that will help your audience save time, solve problems and improve their abilities. 

Each month, Grow HR, a boutique talent acquisition company publishes a collection of webinars focused on helping their audience with business success in China. The agency prides themselves on being able to find the right candidates because of their in-depth knowledge of the China market. 

The monthly post aligns well with the brand’s values and serves their audience with highly useful information. 

Brand: Lalu Raw Beauty 

Best Practice: Get your readers to guess your new product

If you’ve followed these articles for a while, you’ll know Lalu Raw Beauty is one of our favorite brands to talk about, and this month we just had to include them again. 

How do you get your followers excited about new products coming out? Make them guess what they are! 

Lalu Raw Beauty held a contest for users to make them guess the brand’s two newest products in their skincare line but giving them the product ingredients and benefits. Users received the ingredients and had to click to reveal the benefit for each ingredient grouping — by revealing all the benefits users then had to give their best guess as to what type of products the brand was releasing. 

The person who left the comment which was top-voted the most would win both products! 

This is a great way to create hype around new products, show the ingredients and the benefits of the new product as well as get people to share the article with friends to have their guess top-voted. 

Brand: GQ 

Best Practice: A Quiz about YOU

Quizzes can be a great way to engage readers and get them to share among friends. Design a quiz that brings the focus to your audience, giving them a result which indicates a quirky characteristic or lifestyle they lead based on the answers given. 

GQ is very good at finding and gathering insights about human behavior in the today’s world, and the quizzes they post poke fun at our habits and pop-culture.

Such as, “It is impossible to express happiness and unhappiness in one word, unless the word is…”

When people click on the smiling blue guy, the answer will appear: 

“the “haha” from your girlfriend”

Brand: Fenty + HEYTEA

Best Practice: Creative collaboration with other brands 

Growing your followers on WeChat can be painfully difficult, but like they say, two (accounts) are better than one! China is rampant with unlikely brand collaborations — some work, and some are just too far out there. However HEYTEA + Fenty Beauty really hit the sweet spot. 

Since the peach season is coming and this kind of fruit has become the No.1 popular flavor in the snack food market in China over the past two years, HEYTEA decided to make it even bigger this year.

The drink, called Cheese Peach Flavor Tea (芝芝桃桃) is one of their star products. When HEYTEA brought, they announced this campaign with Fenty Beauty on April.29 together.

Meanwhile, Fenty Beauty released a limited edition makeup bag with a Cheeks Out blush cream inside.

Any followers of these two brands who post a makeup look using Fenty Beauty Cheeks Out blush cream, and hold a Cheese Peach flavor Tea in the same photo will have a chance to win a gift.

This win-win cooperation brings Fenty Beauty closer to the local TA in China and raises the global fashion value of HEYTEA.

Brand: WhatYouNeed

Best Practice: Sometimes bold pays off 

Publishing content on April Fool's Day is a challenge for many brands. 

It's thin line to walk to mind the tone of the brand and make followers feel “tricked” without harm or offense at the same time.

Therefore, we believe that most brands choose to play it safe by just ignoring this day.

But if one or two brands do have a good April Fool's Day idea, it stands out, such as WhatYouNeed.

This is a very active WeChat account, focusing on popularity of popular psychology. The average reads of each article is over 100,000. 

On April 1, it released an article called “We announce that WhatYouNeed is making a move into fashion industry”

When you click in, you will see an article with high similarity with fashion brand. What they promote is a black handbag called “Choice.”

By reading the article, people cannot tell if it is a joke or an official announcement immediately. Only when they scroll down to the comment section, then they can confirm that it is an April Fool’s joke, and a successful one. Don’t be afraid to have some fun and get creative! 

BONUS 

We couldn’t help but to include this second post from HEYTEA

Brand: HEYTEA

Best Practice: Great storytelling 

When HEYTEA launched these new coffee products, they created a virtual HEYTEA Cafe in WeChat.

Not only does it go back in time to play with the popular vintage style, it also tells an engaging story in earnest.

A man and woman happen to meet in the HEYTEA Cafe, it seems that may have been a chance for some mutual affection to develop at first, but in fact, they were old opponents and recognized each other by the vanilla flavor of coffee.

The story doesn't have to be told perfectly, the coffee and the taste are the real protagonists, but we still get lost in another world, and thank to HEYTEA, we can watch this film without a big screen.

Have you seen any exemplary WeChat articles or accounts? Let me know in the comments!

This article was co-authored by:

Olivia Plotnick & Coco Appleby

Our team helps brands and individuals build community & influence, generate leads, and drive sales by creating content for today's most powerful social media channels. If this article sparked your curiosity check out my other articles or drop me a message to chat!

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