WeChat is more ‘sticky’ than Facebook

Photo credit: Tech in Asia / Steven Millward.

In China, where Facebook is blocked and WhatsApp never took off, homegrown messaging app WeChat is still growing strongly. More importantly for the social network, it’s more sticky than ever – creeping into new aspects of daily life and being used for an ever longer period of time.

WeChat is now used for more than four solid hours per day by one-third of its users, up from just 16.3 percent in 2015, while lower usage times – up to one hour – are increasingly rare, according to a report out today.

Among its almost 900 million monthly active users, the average daily time spent in WeChat is up slightly, now at 66 minutes. At the last count, Facebook hogged 50 minutes of the day of its average user.

In the office

The Chinese messaging app, already the most-used app in the nation, cemented its domination in the past year.

WeChat’s average daily usage time is now 66 minutes.

“Having already established a close network of friends, new WeChat contacts are increasingly just casual acquaintances” – particularly ones related to work and business, says the China Tech Insights report, which collated data from Penguin Intelligence and a few other sources. 45 percent of WeChat users in a survey now have more than 200 contacts – up from just over 10 percent a few years ago.

82 percent of people have done office work or personal business on WeChat, mainly coordinating tasks, transferring files, taking video calls, and making transactions using the cashless WeChat Pay system.

Image credit: Tech in Asia / Centaine Lim.

The data vindicates WeChat’s speedy rollout of new features in the past few years, covering online shopping, payments, and refinements to news/media, to name but three. It has also embraced third-party services so that the app and its mobile wallet system can be used to hail rides, book hotels, order takeout, and a ton more.

Despite more of the workplace creeping into the app, WeChat’s broader social network, a Facebook Newsfeed-esque tab called Moments, is still mostly devoted to thoughts, photos, and articles of personal interest. Still, 33 percent of users post work-related Moments, whereas only 24 percent expressed an interest in seeing work-related stuff being posted to the stream.

WeChat’s biggest recent gambit, its instant apps that are designed to usurp the apps you download from app stores, has received a lukewarm response. The feature, launched early January, has totally flown over the heads of 33 percent of WeChat’s devotees, who say they’ve never even heard of it. 47 percent have heard of what WeChat calls “mini programs” but never used one, while only 20 percent are active users.

This post WeChat is more ‘sticky’ than Facebook appeared first on Tech in Asia.

from Tech in Asia https://www.techinasia.com/sticky-wechat
via IFTTT