![]() With each side striving to play catch-up to the others’ strengths, WeChat will have to extend considerable effort to stay at the top of its game: However, WeChat and LINE also come with significant differences: while LINE is far ahead of WeChat in terms of gaming and entertainment functions, WeChat boasts more practical features. In addition, both apps are available on computers for complete accessibility. While large-scale illustrated emoticons called “stickers” used to be LINE’s signature, WeChat followed suit by launching its sticker shop on August 5, showing that it’s definitely keeping a close eye on LINE. For people-finding features, users of both apps can exchange account IDs, invite friends via QR code, or simply shake their devices together (“Shake” on WeChat “Shake it!” on LINE). Like WeChat, LINE provides various communicative functions: calls, messages, voice messages, photo and video sharing, group chat, newsfeed (“Moments” on WeChat “Timeline” on LINE), location sharing, and emoticons. You can expect to do almost everything you can on WeChat on LINE as well. Nearly 20 percent of the luxury brands analyzed by L2 Think Tank have accounts on WeChat, including Clarins and Coach, while two percent are on LINE, including Clinique and Uniqlo. As Alexis Bonhomme from Curiosity China Limited noted, this “exclusive communication” feature “encourages brands to have a strong CRM policy by first connecting online through the subscription account in order to influence e-commerce and offline brick-and-mortar retail performance.” According to L2, many luxury brands have already seen the marketing potential of subscription accounts on both WeChat and LINE-but WeChat is way ahead right now. Both WeChat and LINE have “subscription accounts”-a feature for brands to directly engage customers and for celebrities to interact with fans. Users are perhaps more interested in tapping on phone notifications for social app programs like WeChat and LINE rather than on those for Facebook because they know notifications from either green icon mean hellos from their “real” friends rather than some guy they used to work with “liking” a photo. Unlike Facebook, which creates weak social ties, these two apps effectively exploit circles of strong ties built chiefly among close friends and family members. Both WeChat and LINE users can create accounts using their mobile phone numbers and import contacts from their phone’s contact lists. The two apps are now the most rapidly growing social networks in the globe-WeChat’s year-to-year growth is 500 percent, and LINE’s is 200 percent-according to an Intelligence Report by L2 Think Tank.Ī closer look at WeChat and LINE’s similarities will perhaps give us more ideas on how the competition is heating up between these two apps in China: Just four months since its launch in the country, the Japanese app climbed its way up to the first place among the top free apps in Apple’s China App Store in early April. It is not an unfounded speculation that LINE could become WeChat’s biggest rival. ![]() ![]() Last December, WeChat’s Japanese counterpart-the smash-hit social app LINE-launched its Chinese version Lian Wo (“link me”, 连我) in China, going head to head with WeChat. Since its launch in 2011, Tencent WeChat has taken its home turf by storm, growing so quickly that its name is now an interchangeable term for “social app” in China.
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