3 Tips to Maximise the Effect of WeChat Content

WeChat is one of many crucial portals for Chinese online shoppers to acquire new information. Statistic tells that WeChat users reads 5 to 6 articles every day, and to stand out from hundreds of articles published each day sounds more difficult than text pasting and graphics inserting, the kind of job most people perceived. Having a WeChat content read by readers is hard, but the rewards after that are driving all the eCom players to take a stake in WeChat operation. A study of a past campaign Azoya has done for client showed that WeChat can contribute up to 20% of total orders, compared to 37% from other paid sources. WeChat campaign is one of the most cost-effective methods to boost sales, and certainly, you can’t find all of those tricks on textbooks.

Here are the 3 tips that you can employ in daily operation to kick off your content strategy.

1. Choose an appropriate theme.

Content producers should bear in mind that they are producing content for a cross-border eCom account, not a gossip column. The difference between these two is that, eCom’s ultimate goal is to convert readers into loyal buyers but gossip column simply serves to satisfy people’s darkest needs. To enable a long lasting customer relationship, eCom account should provide readers with useful information to build a brand image of a resourceful helper. Of course, gossips could slightly improve page views for once, but in the long run, this would pose a negative effect on your account.

Many accounts have tried to tie their sales promotion to a trending news discovered on Weibo, but professional with experience on eCom account says that it’s not a good strategy. Most readers would have read the news already, probably from the same source. It would be best if content producers could write original pieces, something that’s not happening in most people’s lives, or foreign trends that do not appear in most Chinese digital media channels. Readers would most likely to subscribe to an account that offers tips and tricks, or information that they couldn’t get somewhere else.

2. A title that matters.

Name the article with a good title will improve views by at least 50%. A good title has following three qualities: summarized, attractive and long. A highly summarized title means readers would know what the article is talking about by simply glancing at the title. An attractive title should resonate with readers and answer to their most irritating concerns. People finds the first two qualities quite easier to understand, but why is the third quality important?

One of an interesting fact discovered by most WeChat content producer is that the longer your title is, the easier it would be to attract readers. A research on 1000 randomly chosen articles that has average views of 9600 shows that as much as 78% of the articles have titles that are between 13 to 27 characters long. A longer title means that writer can insert more keywords, write a complete sentence as title, and occupy more space on the screen to display your work.

The following three titles are examples that contain all three of the qualities and are quite inspirational.

You Can Rent Your House, But You Can’t Rent Your Life: 27 Good Things to Have In a Rental House.

Good Stuff to Share - I Am Relieved to Have Packed Them Up.

Less Than 100 Yuan, And All Girls Should Have One In Their Handbags.

3. Try to publish articles at a different time and find out the best timing.

10 p.m. is the best time to publish articles because data released by Tencent has indicated that reading peaked before bedtime. Articles published close and prior to 10 p.m. would have a higher chance being read by subscribers. For accounts that just started, 10 p.m. is a good timing because it guarantees exposure. But it may not be a good choice if content producers wish to improve conversion to actual orders. Because 10 p.m. is a bit late for most exhausted readers to shop online, and publishing content earlier might encourage readers to purchase by giving more time for them to perform the steps.

A few content producers that manage a pharmacy account found out that 15:00 is a good time to publish promotion articles after they tried 7:30, 15:00 and 18:00. They discover that most of their readers are housewife and 15:00 is the time that they put their children to nap and just finish housekeeping. They will then have time to check their WeChat notification, read a few articles and maybe buy a few things online.