A new messaging mini-program goes viral
WeChat team, Tencent and the TV program 见字入面 collaborated in building a simple but incredibly popular Mini-program.
The principle is simple:
- Write a letter to your friend via the Mini-program
- Record a voice message of you reading this letter
- Send it out to your friends via the WeChat Mini-program
The campaign was promoted Tencent with the help of some Chinese stars such as Yao Chen and Zhou Xun (who wrote and recorded their own letters). It was incredibly popular, generated 300 million impressions in total.
Tencent leveraged the combination of an old, more personal form of communication (snail mail) and adapted it to WeChat as a modern communication tool. Mini-programs were leveraged in order to provide a smooth and fast use experience, which was particularly important given the emotional nature of the campaign.
You can access this campaign by scanning this QR code:
A mini-program to manage your WeChat Official Account
Who said mini-programs were useless? Tencent recently released a very useful mini-program enabling you to manage your WeChat Official Account.
The mini-program enables to handle all of daily actions on the public account, such as answering comments and customer service messages.
The mini-program also enables to easily check the analytics of your WeChat Official Account and of your published articles.
The mini-program is a great tool compared to the desktop back-end of WeChat Official Accounts. However, it has downside compared to native Apps performing equivalent tasks:
- It can only be used for monitoring of comments and customer service, but not for sending out messages
- It can’t send push notifications to your phone when a customer is writing to your account
You can get the mini-program by scanning this QR code:
A mini-program to manage WeChat Groups profiles
A last honorable mention goes to the mini-program TeamUp which helps users fill profiles about their areas of interest/expertise which are then visible to people they share groups with.
Most of us joined dozens of active professional groups, and it is sometimes difficult to track who are the different members and what they’re up to. TeamUp gives a simple solution to do that: you can write your own profile and see the profile of people having completed their profile on TeamUp.
Although it is unclear how many people will actually keep an updated profile on the long run, this is another creative use of WeChat Mini-programs, showing that in certain situations they can actually add value over WeChat Official Accounts!
Conclusion
Although WeChat mini-programs are still mostly stuck in a limbo between native applications and WeChat Official Accounts (according to Newrank.cn, only 6 accounts out of 1,000 currently link to a mini-program), they are definitely moving forward.
Two types of innovations are helping mini-programs: upgrade of their feature by the Tencent team, and creative use cases by individuals and companies in the community.
As these trends keep playing out, we might see a significant increase in mini-program activity in the next few months.