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13 Tips on How to Boost Your WeChat Followers

With a new WeChat account, it can be hard to gain your first followers. An effective methodology to connect with your potential consumers – listen to them, respect them, adapt your marketing and your products to their needs. You need to put in time and effort into interacting with people – showcase it in your content, to spread your message.

With an average of 902 million users logging into WeChat every day, WeChat marketing offers a powerful way to connect with consumers.

You might also like:WeChat – China’s Homegrown Goliath

These are the ways that you can boost followers for your account:

  1. Articles need to be original and authentic to resonate with your readers.
  2. Articles need to have eye-catching headlines and compelling visuals. Headlines that pose a promise, a question or related to hot topics and buzzwords tend to stand out and encourage clicks. Include quality visuals, GIFs and videos in the article to support your storytelling.
  3. Articles need to have engaging and appealing content that rouse thinking, learning or laughs. Almost 50% of users will share it with friends on Moments if they are touched emotionally.
  4. Articles should spur call to action and have shareable links to encourage interaction. Include prompters such as “Share with your friends,” “Share this article to your Moments feed,” and “Read more”. Remind them to follow the account. Remind them (again) to share one more time (at the end of article). Encourage them to comment and share their personal experiences.
  5. You can start with your current database – get all colleagues to sign up for a WeChat account. Thereafter, get them to share on their moments and encourage their friends to follow the brand. (You may want to create an incentive for them. Those who post articles on Moments every Friday will get half-day time-off…just a wild suggestion! Haha!). Promote your account with a tagline, on employees’ email signature – “Have you followed our WeChat account?”
  6. Next, encourage your customers or prospects to follow the account via mass email. Get the sales team to spread the word during their face-to-face interactions with customers.
  7. Optimize QR (Quick Response) Code by displaying them on both offline and online touchpoints – business cards, product brochures, tradeshow standees, corporate website, downloadable PDFs, EDM (Electronic Direct Mail), social media platforms and on employees’ email signatures.
  8. If you are attending or hosting an event, incorporate WeChat into your registration procedure. Instead of registering attendees’ name and collecting business cards, encourage them to join your database by becoming WeChat followers.
  9. Vary your content on different social media platforms. Have an organic post on LinkedIn to discuss China markets and accompany it with a WeChat QR code. (Please note that other “rival” China social media platforms such as Weibo do not allow dissemination of WeChat QR code).
  10. Work with WeChat KOLs (Key Opinion Leader). They are very active on WeChat and have built a large, engaged community around a certain topic or niche market. A KOL can create unique, well-written articles or a series of articles to encourage engagement amongst users about your brand, other than just recommending it. This builds brand awareness and forges a stronger connection with your followers. Although it is still expensive, you will need to invest at an early stage upon opening your WeChat account. The charges can vary from 4,000 RMB to 200,000 RMB per article (or more) based on my experience working with a KOL agency.
  11. Never buy followers. It is rather common to find ads on Taobao promising 100K WeChat followers for 1 RMB, but it simply means 100K bots. You will have “followers” but this will not convert to sales. We need actual community engagements for your content to be shared.
  12. Guest posting on “sister” accounts. The other accounts could belong to the sales distributors or your customers. Write case studies on customers and post them on your accounts or vice versa. This way, you can leverage on the followers’ base of one another.
  13. WeChat advertising – When you have enough content, you can launch advertising campaigns such as Moments Ads and Account Ads.

– Moments Ads appears in the Moments feed of your target audience. The lowest budget for a Moments Ad campaign is 50,000 RMB, and the price can fluctuate depending on the target cities and specific interest groups.

– Account Ad targets a specific group of audience and the advertisement is shown at the end of articles of well-known WeChat accounts (also called “publishers”). These publishers have high subscription counts and page views. You can promote your brand in four different ways with Account Ads: encourage people to follow your account, encourage users to download your app, provide a coupon or visit your campaign/promotion page. It uses the CPC model and the bidding system starts from 0.5 RMB per click. Usually, the advertisement will stay active for 3-5 days and it is best to optimize it every three days.

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