Twitter has ditched the bird logo and is now X. Elon Musk is hoping to turn the platform into a super app like WeChat, which is owned by one of China’s biggest companies, Tencent. But what exactly does that look like? Here are five things to know about the Chinese everything app Twitter is trying to emulate in this week’s Five For Friday.
5: Messaging and communication
Peer-to-peer messaging is a big part of WeChat. It makes sense, since chat is right there in the name. At its core, it’s similar to Meta-owned WhatsApp, but there’s so much more to it.
With Moments, users can post images, text and videos as well as share links. The experience is a lot like what a user would get from Facebook or Snapchat. And just like those sites, friends can interact with posts to give the user that endorphin rush they desire. One thing to keep in mind is that friends of friends cannot react to posts, so networks do have privacy limits within WeChat.
The Channels feature operates like Instagram with images and TikTok-style videos. For some reason, though, the videos can be an hour long.
4: Payments and e-commerce
WeChat is a huge player in payments and e-commerce. Initially, WeChat Pay was similar to Venmo, allowing peer-to-peer transactions. But it expanded as WeChat developed apps within the app (hence the super app). Now users can shop and buy all kinds of products through these mini programs.
WeChat Pay eventually moved out of the app and can be used nearly everywhere for point-of-sale transactions. It works a lot like Apple Pay in that way.
Users can also do their banking within WeChat, but that does seem like a lot of personal information within a single app. That’s just the price some are willing to pay for convenience.
3: Services
Public accounts are where the “everything” portion of WeChat really comes in. There are services on the app that allow the user to book a car, make dinner reservations and even find a job. It’s like Uber, Open Table and LinkedIn rolled into one.
Users can also apply for a travel visa or file for divorce with a click.
2: Limited competition
WeChat is just the fifth largest social media platform on the planet with 1.3 billion monthly active users. That’s less than half of what Facebook has, but Elon Musk would surely accept that number of users.
But it isn’t necessarily preference that made it so popular. Most popular Western apps are banned in China, giving the population far fewer options. Unlike WeChat, Musk and X have a free market to contend with in growing its user base.
1: Banned from everything
It seems extremely convenient to be able to do so much in a single-app ecosystem. But what if a user gets banned? It happens with WeChat, where users can be blocked for expressing displeasure with their government.
Doing so cuts them off from friends and family, ostracizes them from coworkers and even stops them from ordering from their favorite delivery spot. Getting bounced from WeChat seems much more detrimental than the likes of Tila Tequila getting banned from Twitter after appearing at a white nationalist convention.
