september 2019

As you know, I am testing WeChat at the moment. One of its features I am curious about is the WeChat shake functionality.

What value can this give to the user and is there a business case?

I will discuss this in this article.

What is WeChat shake?

When this feature is selected, just shake your phone. You will be connected to someone else in the world who is shaking his/her phone at the same time. Then you can choose to ignore or respond to this user.

The value

WeChat shake can be a great way to meet new people while using your phone. This can help user feel less lonely.

But is there also a commercial use case?

duplicating the Chinese digital ecosystem in Europe

In China WeChat shake is very popular and not only because it helps against loneliness.

There is also a commercial benefit. In shops where the WeChat shake-logo is present, customers with the WeChat app can shake their phone and then get the offers/coupons from this store on their phone. This is already present and used a lot in far away China, but also will be implemented in Europe.

It seems this feature of WeChat is based on iBeacon-solution, but I am not sure yet, because recent online documentation is scarce on this part. So this will be a future research project.

Let’s see how this implementation of WeChat shake will continue in Europe and if the Chinese tourists will use it.

To be continued ….

A TestingSaaS guestblog on A/B testing by Ilan Nass, Chief Strategist Taktical Digital

Facebook is a valuable marketing tool. With approximately 2.38 billion active monthly users, the platform gives you access to many potential leads.

But if you think Facebook Ads are something you can set and forget, think again. To get results you desire for a sane amount of ad spend, you need to study your results and optimize accordingly. There are a lot of metrics to track when it comes to creating ad campaigns that slice through the noise. Once you’ve decided on a smart metric, it’s time to design an A/B test. This simply involves testing multiple versions of an ad or campaign to determine which is most effective. The following points will help you better understand how to go about this process on Facebook.

What Not to Do

Before exploring how to properly A/B test, it’s important to brush up on mistakes you should avoid. They include:

• Testing too much content at the same time: If you test too many ads or pieces of content at once, it will be difficult for you to confidently identify which content yielded results, and which failed.
• Testing minor changes: When A/B testing ads, they should be different enough that you can glean genuine insights from their performance. Simply changing one line in an ad isn’t enough to help you understand what does and doesn’t work.
• Not providing equal opportunities: You need to design your test so that both ads involved have the same opportunity for success. For instance, if one had a higher budget or was targeting a stronger audience, it might outperform the other, despite not truly being any better.

Instead, follow these tips to A/B test effectively:

Only Test a Single Element

Again, it’s important that your ads be noticeably different when A/B testing on Facebook. That doesn’t mean you should make every element different. You’re better off changing one element when generating multiple versions of the same ad. Change the ad copy, or the image, or the audience, etc. While the changes need to be substantial enough to make a difference, they do need to be restricted to a single element.

Don’t Test Merely Two Ads

The name “A/B testing” implies testing only two versions of a given ad at a time. In some instances, this may be appropriate, but you can often get more valuable insights if you test three to five versions of an ad. When doing so, you may want to make the ads significantly different.

For example, maybe you’re running an ad promoting a product. One ad may feature an image in which the product is foregrounded, with accompanying text explaining its features and benefits. Another ad may include minimal text, with an image that shows the product in action. Yet another might include substantial text in the image, with the product itself taking up less space. This gives you three ads that are different enough from each other to offer valuable information.

Don’t Draw Conclusions Right Away

You need to give your ads a sufficient amount of time to reach users before drawing any conclusions. For example, if you ran an ad asking people to sign up for your email newsletter, with one slightly outperforming the other after a week has elapsed, you might assume that ad is stronger. Although this may be true, it’s smarter to wait two or three weeks to start analyzing data. The more data you have, the more confident you can be in your insights.
Keep in mind that A/B testing does require you to invest some time and money. However, in the long run, the value is worth the investment. Knowing what types of Facebook ads resonate with users is key to optimizing your return-on-investment.

Do you also want to guestblog on TestingSaaS?

Contact me now and let’s start blogging.

Testing the messaging-app WeChat outside China is not easy.

This article shows my experiences with WeChat while I use it in the Netherlands.

What is WeChat?

WeChat (Wēixìn; literally: ‘micro-message’) is a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media and mobile paymentapp developed by Tencent. In China it is known as Wēixìn (‘micro-message’).

It was first released in 2011, and became one of the world’s largest standalone mobile apps in 2018, with over 1 billion monthly active users.

That’s a lot of users and that’s why I am interested in this app. Why is it used that much? Ok, there are a lot of Chinese people, but is that the main reason?

Can I, as a non-Chinese, download it on my iPhone and use it in the Netherlands?

Downloading WeChat

WeChat is freely available in the Apple App Store and can be downloaded from there on your iPhone.

Onboarding WeChat

Onboarding is very easy when you use the following steps

Here is the list of these steps:

• Register your account
• Add your friends
• Basic usage WeChat

The steps are pretty straightforward. Mind you, it is a Chinese app, don’t get discouraged by seeing Chinese characters.

My experiences with testing WeChat

I downloaded the WeChat 7.0.5 version on my iPhone 7 with software version 12.4.

Adding friends was not hard. You can look in your mobile contacts who use WeChat, and afterwards you can add them. You can also ask for help by chatting with the WeChat Team.

Group chatting is also a feature. And you can search and manage your contacts by using tags, which is handy when you have personal and business contacts like me.

An interesting feature for me to test is the WeChat Pay, which is the Chinese competitor of Alipay. It seems I have to do additional steps to enable this within WeChat. That’s for another time. There are more than enough other features to test.

One of these features, which could be of value is the Discover tab. With the Discover tab I have access to Moments, a QR code scanner, Shake, People Nearby and a Search-facility for moments, articles and official accounts. It seems you can also have access to WeChat Games, but I did not have this feature.

Let’s investigate the items of the Discover tab.

WeChat – Moments

Moments is the social feed of your friends updates. Here you can place photos or videos, including a cover photo. All photos can be retrieved from the iPhone photo album, or you can take a picture or video. With every photo/video you can add a remark, location (you get a list of nearby places), mention a WeChat comment or share it with your WeChat contacts. Because WeChat is a social app, you can also like or comment a photo.

Funny thing is, when opening your iPhone photo album, Chinese characters are shown in your photo titles.

WeChat – Scan

With the feature Scan you can scan a QR code and even align Chinese/English text and make a photo of this – the translate function.

Both features I tried and it works well, although I can not be sure the English text is translated in correct Chinese.

WeChat – Shake

When this feature is selected, just shake your phone. You will be connected to someone else in the world who is shaking his/her phone at the same time. Then you can choose to ignore or respond to this user.

I tried it and it works. Crazy feature, because you never know who is also shaking.

WeChat – Search

Regarding the Search-facility, this seems interesting, because the search results show a lot of Chinese characters. It is surely curated by WeChat. But that’s for another investigation, another article.

WeChat – People Nearby

With this feature you can browse and connect to WeChat users nearby. I have to dig in deeper to see what I can do with this.

Wrap-Up

This article showed you my first experience with testing WeChat.

WeChat is truly a multi-purpose messaging app and I will certainly test more of its features.

I only have to work on my Chinese characters, because there are a lot of them in this app. Or should I use the WeChat translate function?

Stay tuned for more TestingSaaS testing WeChat articles.