Your WeChat account is a CRM you are running as a magazine

A WeChat official account looks like a publishing channel and is set up like one: an editorial calendar, a post or two a week, a metric that counts reads. Run that way it decays, reliably, and the usual response is to publish more.

What it actually is

The account is a permissioned list of individually identifiable people who chose to hear from you, sitting inside the environment where they also transact, book, ask questions and complain. In any other market a brand would call that a CRM and treat it accordingly.

Treated as a CRM the questions change. Not what do we publish this week, but what does this segment need to hear next, and what does their last interaction tell us about it.

Three shifts that move the numbers

• Segment the followers. Most foreign-brand accounts broadcast one message to a list that contains customers, prospects, distributors and job applicants.
• Use the menu, not the feed. The persistent menu is the part of the account people return to; it is usually the part nobody has touched since setup.
• Instrument the service side. Questions arriving through the account are the highest-intent signal the brand receives in China, and they are typically routed to nobody.

— Brandigo, Shanghai