Chinese Social Media Platform WeChat Reaches One Billion User Accounts Worldwide

Img: Sinchen Lin 

While in the western world we rely heavily upon platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, over in China Tencent’s WeChat rules the social media roost. The network has gone from strength-to-strength in recent years, and has now reached the significant milestone of one billion registered accounts, as reported by the Financial Times.

There are a number of contributing factors to WeChat’s success. First of all it’s important to note that the above figure relates to the number of registered accounts globally; users are free to make more than one account and are likely to do so in order to keep work communications separate from private ones, for instance. As such the number of registered accounts exceeds the platform’s actual daily user count.

WeChat are also aided by China’s strict censorship laws, under which popular western platforms including Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are blocked. This forces Chinese users to seek out other options, and WeChat provides a more-than-agreeable alternative. In many ways, it is often cited as being superior to our own favourite apps and networks.

On that note you cannot discount WeChat’s own business savvy when citing reasons for their success. The platform is often lauded for the wide variety of services it offers, acting as a form of digital one-stop-shop for the needs of many users. WeChat now boasts 902 million daily users sending approximately 38 billion messages per day, so the company are clearly doing something right.