WeChat public accounts continue to increase in importance and effectiveness in brands’ marketing strategy in China. In this post, I’m going to review different types of WeChat public accounts as things have been changing in the last few months.
There are currently 3 types of public accounts, subscription, service and corporate.
Corporate accounts, that are sometimes called enterprise, are designed for internal company use such as sharing memos, private group chat or as a simple project and task management system.
Corporate accounts can also be programmed to integrate more complex functionality and they are becoming increasingly popular within organizations. Also, in order to keep such internal networks secure, followers have to go through authentication process. This is quite unlike other accounts types where gaining more followers is pretty much the point.
Obviously, those accounts are not designed for marketing outside of a company. For this purpose there are two other types: subscription and service accounts.
Subscription account is typically the most basic choice as it is easier to setup and manage. It also allows sending out messages to followers much more frequently – once a day vs. once a week for service account. On the other hand, they do not have any integration options and advanced functionality that can be incorporated into service accounts.
One of the main disadvantages of subscription account is the way the messages are displayed: they will be grouped into one folder containing all the subscription accounts instead of being pushed to user’s session list. This means that a follower has to go into that folder to retrieve the delivered content.
Another disadvantage is inability to integrate ecommerce, such as an online store. So, if your goal is to enable your users to buy goods online, you should go with the service account.
Generally speaking, if your marketing strategy revolves around pushing content to users, subscription account can be just what you need. Verified subscription accounts can also provide some basic customized functionality through a menu. For example, the buttons can be linked to some parts of your website, such as product pages or store locations. In this case, it is highly recommended to have your site optimized for mobile or use responsive design that ensures rendering webpages properly on the small screen of a smartphone.
On the other hand, if your goal is providing higher degree of functionality to your users through customized menu or offer integrated ecommerce inside the app, verified service account should be the one to consider.
Here are different public account options that are currently available with WeChat:
Functionality also differs depending on whether the account has been verified. Currently, only China-registered businesses can have their WeChat account verified. Since foreign based businesses can’t open service account as well as verified subscription account, there is just one option available to them – unverified subscription account.
Here is the breakdown of different features available for verified vs. unverified subscription and service accounts:
