I think they just made a movie about Weixin (way-shin) and it won a bunch of Golden Globes and an Oscar, maybe? Something about everything being everywhere, all at once? That was about Weixin, wasn’t it?
I don’t know, I didn’t see the movie. Did you?
If it wasn’t about Weixin, it could have been.
Weixin is a Chinese social media application that aims to be a one-stop shop for its users.
According to http://What Is Weixin? – Maddie’s Life (home.blog) this platform “combines the best of Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, Twitter, and even eBay all into one app, but it is more than that.”
To accomplish this Weixin first came to an understanding of who their target audience would be (you can’t please everyone, you know). This audience is young, urban, smartphone owners.
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Next, it tries to learn everything it can about these users. Through both direct and indirect communication, the goal is to learn about you.
- Where do you go?
- what do you eat?
- what form of transportation do you use?
- what bills do you pay?
- who are your friends and family?
- What is your favorite form of entertainment?
By understanding these and many more, Weixin can provide links that take you to the sites you want, while still keeping you safely blanketed under their overall platform.
By collecting this data Weixin is able to continually monitor what its customers are asking for, create these services, and make itself even more indispensable.
What can this do to inform you about your own social media platform? Are you doing everything you can to acquire this data?
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The site Xiph Cyber discusses this at, http://Xiph Cyber – How social media is tracking you & collecting your data:
- – Surveys
- – Geo-fencing
- – Cross-site tracking
- – Browser fingerprinting
A video done by Proxyway mentions social media “scraping” and both how it can be done and what it accomplishes.
http://How Do Companies Use Social Media Data Collection to Get an Advantage? – Bing video.
Information such as:
- Brand mentions
- Product mentions
- Followers
- Relevant keywords
- Likes
- Number of views.
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To someone new to the social media data collection game some of these appear irrelevant, I assure you, they aren’t.
Wexin makes itself a part of daily life in China in much the same way Facebook does in the United States. Sharing and commenting on videos. Keeping in touch with important people in your life. Posting news and advertising products.
However, you can pay bills, find taxis, search out and consume many forms of entertainment and basically use it to help schedule your life.
Its owner, the Chinese company Tencent describes it in an article, http://Weixin’s Expanding Ecosystem Creates Exciting New Opportunities For Brands – Tencent 腾讯,, as:
- A smart lifestyle ecosystem that enables global businesses to access China’s consumers.
- Weixin, launched in 2011, is China’s most widely used social communication platform. It provides users with a convenient and mobile digital lifestyle via a rich offering of entertainment and secure payments function.
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The numbers that they provide are quite impressive. 1.2 billion accounts as of December 2020 and 400 million active logins daily.
They are a success for a reason. They gather and understand data.
A deep dive into the strategy employed by Weixin and its parent company Tencent, will give social media professionals a lot to think about.
Why join a site that allows you to share videos when you can join one that allows you to also pay your electricity bill, order flowers, manage a daily schedule, find a cab, make dinner reservations, send instructions to the babysitter, and give presents to your friends all in one?
Whether Weixin can be successful in other countries depends on the future state of the world. I believe that many tech-savvy, urban, cell phone owners would love to get their hands on an app like this.
Whether or not they are willing to give Tencent and thus China, all this data is another story. Also, what are the possible political ramifications?
Which brings me to the point of this blog.
If your company could create an app that was everything, everywhere, all at once, why wouldn’t you?
It’s all about the data.
Hi Eric,
Your discussion post got me hooked from the first line. Weixin really is everything, everywhere, all at once.Next, it tries to learn everything it can about these users. In your discussion post you stated “through both direct and indirect communication, the goal is to learn about you.” You used examples like where do you go or eat, what transportation do you use, what bills do you pay etc. to really get to know Weixin’s audience. Weixin has been able to create a superior app experience by collecting all this data by learning what customers want and providing it to them. Another statement I really liked what you said was “why join a site that allows you to share videos when you can join one that allows you to also pay your electricity bill, order flowers, manage a daily schedule, find a cab, make dinner reservations, send instructions to the babysitter, and give presents to your friends all in one?” This question has made me think and wonder why hasn’t a company in the United States create an app like Weixin?
Hi Eric,
First and foremost, thank you for having a blog that allows comments! Its harder to review these blogs without a comment bar 🙂 Great job keeping the post conversational, it really helps make it an easy read that engages the reader to the end. You also mixed in creative photos and even links to other articles which really shows that you did your homework on this one. I agree with you that Weixin’s multi-faceted approach is worth noting and learning from, and just makes sense to an end user rather than having to go to many different places to do the same exact things. I liked the list of questions that Weixin asks about the users as well. Good spacing and white-space, well done!
Aimee