How to Make Your WeChat Brand Posts Popular?——Empirical Evidence from Well-known Brands

Abstract

Abstract:

WeChat is the largest and youngest mobile social networking app in China. Due to its massive number of users, high user stickiness, and low marketing costs, many companies have used WeChat as a new communication tool to push branded posts to their subscribers. Compared to other social media sites such as Facebook, WeChat is relatively new and has unique features. Thus, there are too few theories that guide companies to implement effective WeChat communication strategies. Based on 334 WeChat posts from 8 wellknown brands across 4 industries, this study investigates possible drivers of WeChat post popularity (measured by the number of reads/likes). Our results show that how a post is positioned, how long it is posted, and how informative it is affect both the number of reads and the number of likes. The presence of promotional information in the post title only affects the number of reads. We also find a marginal significant negative effect of the (warm) color of the cover picture on the number of reads. However, vividness and entertainment do not have a significant effect on WeChat post popularity.

Key words: WeChat marketing, social media, communication, the number of reads, the number of likes

Peng Chenming, Zhang Sha, Zhao Hong. How to Make Your WeChat Brand Posts Popular?——Empirical Evidence from Well-known Brands[J]. , 2016, 28(12): 176-186.

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