Weixin: A Social Media Marketing Case Study

What is Weixin? 

Imagine you could open a single app on your phone to perform such wildly different tasks like reserving a cab, sending money to friends, and share news stories. Weixin is a Chinese social networking app that provides its users with such capabilities and more. Weixin has seen quite a bit of success, but was it marketing luck or an in-tune marketing strategy? 

Wants and Needs 

Fundamentally, social networking users want a connection. Knowing the type of connection and what users are willing to do (or pay) to maintain it is a marketer’s job. Weixin provides its audience with multiple ways to stay in touch with friends in order to exchange messages, news, pictures, and more. Being able to utilize multiple ways to connect in a single app means that users won’t have to leave Weixin often. The more time users are on the app, the more familiar they become with it. The more familiar they become with it, the more often they are likely to use it for more of their needs. This allows Weixin to expand and to also address the audience’s wants once using the app has become habitual. Yet and still, Weixin would have had to do a thorough analysis of their target audience to understand their potential usage behaviors and motivations.   

Ease and Practicality 

No matter how many bells and whistles an app has, users won’t use it if it’s difficult to navigate. Weixin is easy to use, which is another nod to their commitment to creating a product that an audience wants to use—especially if it fits organically into their lives. An app that is user-friendly is an app that a user is likely to recommend to another. If that same app offers services that a user would normally have to go to multiple apps for at different times of the day and navigate through different interfaces of varying capabilities, the user will naturally continue using the singular, easy-to-use app. It’s the practical solution. 

An Inspiration for Others? 

Only time will tell what the outcome will be for Weixin. Will they continue to grow and become the ideal social networking app that others aim to replicate? Will Chinese users continue to enjoy having a single app store so much of their information and be so integrated into their lives? What Weixin has done is nothing short of remarkable, and it stems from knowing the wants and behaviors of their audience.  

It does make me wonder if something like Weixin would work in the United States. My iPhone is cluttered with different apps for different things, and the simplicity of having a primary social networking site is appealing. Still, we experience so many security breaches that the thought of so much information and content in a single app does make me a bit uneasy. Personal feelings aside, I believe Weixin’s ability to continue meeting their audience’s needs and delivering services they desire is an inspiration to all marketers and businesses. Success is at the feet of the audience.  

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this homework blog post as much as I enjoyed writing it (maybe even more).

Want to read the Weixin case study for yourself? You can find it the e-textbook here: https://www.amazon.com/Strategic-Social-Media-Marketing-Change-ebook/dp/B01M0HK3QL 

However, if you’re not a fan of Amazon, here are the book’s details: 

Strategic Social Media: From Marketing to Social Change
Authors: L. Meghan Mahoney and Tang Tang
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
Publication Date: 2017
ISBN: 978-1-118-55690-0