Why WeChat is the Future of American social media.

WeChat is a Chinese multi-purpose social media mobile application software developed by Chinese conglomerate Tencent Holdings. As of January 2018, it was the third most popular mobile messenger app, based on the number of monthly active users (It had 980m).

Though it was first released in 2011, WeChat has been slow in expanding beyond its home base of China and other East Asian countries such as Bhutan, Vietnam and Taiwan. I was only recently introduced to WeChat on a recent trip to China.

Outcome? Mind blown.

The following three segments capture what I consider to be the game changing features of the WeChat mobile application:

App-Within-An-App Ecosystem
The first thing that stood out to me about WeChat was its App-Within-An-App model. WeChat is not just another messenger app such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger; it is an ecosystem.
Need to book an Uber? Need to make a doctor’s appointment? Buy a movie ticket or Taylor Swift’s latest album? You can do all of this within the app itself. The concept of mini-apps blew my mind.
This has several advantages to the consumer: 1) Convenience, in that you don’t need to leave the app and that you don’t need to enter your payment details across a range of different apps, 2) Consumers can save valuable storage space on their phones. These mini-apps within WeChat disappear once the transaction is done. This way, consumers don’t need to permanently retain hundred different apps for different purposes. This becomes a major USP especially in developing economies such as India or Africa where mobile storage is extremely limited.
This also has several obvious advantages to WeChat and Tencent(the holding company): Network Effects take hold where the greater the number of mini-apps on WeChat, the greater the number of people that sign up for it. The greater the number of people that sign up, the greater number of service providers who will want to be on the app.

Payments
WeChat has shows me what the future of payments looks like. WeChat allows users to bind their bank account with WeChat, essentially making their phone a wallet. But it goes beyond a simple mobile wallet. WeChat has combined all the convenience of Venmo + Splitwise + Apple Pay + Amazon Go in its payments features.
One of the most popular features is the Pay Vendor Feature. For example, if you are at a physical Whole Foods locations and lets assume that Whole Foods is a registered vendor on WeChat. You can simply pick up, lets say, a box of cereal at WholeFoods, scan the item’s QR code and voila! Your purchase is complete. This sort of online-to-offline integration allows WeChat to not only collect a commission per transaction, but also collect an tremendous data on consumer behaviour that they can later sell to the vendors.
Furthermore, WeChat has paid close attention to cultural sensitivities in its biggest markets while devising new product features. For examples, it has a feature within Payments to send a “Red Packet”. It is customary in China for people to give each other a red-envelope with a token-amount of cash on auspicious occasions. While this may seem like a simple “Send money” feature on Venmo, the way WeChat has packaged it is different. The sender prepares a “Red Packet” that he can then send to either his contacts or to a random person(s). The receiver is informed that he/she has received a red packet — literally a red envelope, with a message, pops up on the screen. The receiver has to virtually open the envelope to see what or how much money there is inside. The way WeChat replicated a physical tradition makes this a very unique feature. I believe that similar product features could be applied to markets outside China, such as India, where similar traditions thrive as well.
A third unique feature within payments is how they have used QR codes. Every unique wallet is assigned a QR code. While walking on the streets of Beijing, I could literally give money to beggars by scanning their QR codes that they had magnified and printed. WeChat has truly pushed the boundaries in terms of what consumers can do with QR codes.

Mobile-First Features
WeChat has shown me what a mobile-first application truly looks like. Unlike other competitors such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat was exclusively designed for the mobile. Accordingly, different product features within mobile and mobile users in mind.
For example, you can shake your phone when using WeChat to find and connect with other active WeChat users nearby. When I was in Beijing, a shopping mall conducted a give-away where people inside the mall had to open WeChat and shake their phones in a 20 second long window; a lucky few would receive “Envelopes” with a randomly selected amount of money. Such mobile-first features help build immense brand loyalty and engagement beyond the core messenger and services value proposition.

TLDR; WeChat is what Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp or Apple Pay or Venmo or Amazon may look in the near future. It has product features that are mobile-first and culturally-specific. At the same time, there are certain caveats: WeChat’s path to success may have been sweetened by certain China-specific factors, namely culture and infrastructure. It will be interesting to see what play, if any, WeChat makes in America and other Western markets, and how successful this play might be.

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