8 Million
Like most of the internet that has any interest in bots (which seems to be almost everybody in tech these days) I read Dan Grover’s excellent post last week.
Lots of great insights and hilarious metaphors, like “information nacho” and the “info burrito”, but one thing that I actually had known before but for some reason it popped out at me was this line about WeChat.
The Official Account platform was a rousing success; there are over 8 million of these accounts today.
8 million official accounts? How did they get all of those businesses to sign up? I can’t think of any western messaging platform that has any significant number of businesses signed up for their service, but then again I don’t think there is an equivalent of “official accounts” out there either. I don’t think I’ve read any detailed account on what lead to that mass adoption in China. Dan Grover covered it in one sentence and Connie Chan writes a paragraph on their success (though she says it’s actually 10 million accounts) and how they differ from “verified accounts” in the US, but nobody really answers why so many businesses signed up for it.
I personally think that is where the gold lies. If WeChat did not have those 8 million official accounts, then it would be no different from every other major messaging platform out there. The mass signup for their payment system has a great story with the red envelopes, but I don’t think I’ve heard one for official accounts.
What follows is purely conjecture on my part, so it may be total hogwash or maybe there is a kernel of truth in it.
China came to the internet very late, so it missed the initial dot-com boom and the internet didn’t really come into mass adoption until much later when mobile took off. So from a small business standpoint, there wasn’t really a time where there was a need to have a website, where in the US for a while every business needed to have a website.
Facebook and Twitter are blocked in China, so you could not setup a Facebook page or a Twitter account for your business in China. I am not familiar with the Chinese social networks, so I can’t say much about that, but the whole phenomena in the US where you saw everybody’s Facebook/Twitter handle on all of their marketing campaigns, never happened in China.
So with those two situations, my guess is that there was a huge opportunity to help Chinese businesses establish their online presence, which I imagine WeChat’s official accounts took full advantage of when they launched. In addition to that, my guess is that QR codes are popular in China and Asia in general because the keyboard is a western creation. It’s easy enough to type in a Facebook/Twitter handle if you speak English or some Roman alphabet-based language, but not so easy if you have a completely different character set like Chinese or Japanese. So QR codes helped solve that issue for Asian users. QR codes also have the nice property of connecting the offline world with the online world.
Again, this is all conjecture on my part, but if this is true, then I think the US will have a hard time trying to get 8 million businesses to sign up for FB Messenger or some similar messaging platform because they already have a website, a Twitter handle, a Facebook page (which I think is different from FB Messenger), and a Yelp page to manage. Each have a way for customers to communicate with them on top of email, so adding one more communication channel for businesses to manage maybe asking too much. In China, they didn’t have all of that legacy, so signing up for a WeChat account had no real competition and only having to manage that one channel isn’t so bad.
So whoever makes their chatbot, messaging platform, or whatever it is, into a must-have for businesses and overcomes this legacy will be the one that will win this “conversational UI/commerce” battle in the US. And like Dan and Connie have said, it may not be chat per se that wins in the end, but all of the widgets that go along with it.
