The Chinese app is branching out into business and short videos
In a bid to capture yet more of China’s booming online market place, WeChat is offering business accounts for its corporate clients and Vine-style short videos for consumers.
The new business accounts are meant to ease communication between travelling team members and offers a host of new functionalities, including secure messaging, which disables screen capture and ensures the correspondence can be seen only by the recipient. WeChat is also offering file transfer, tags and contacts management for its business customers.
Both domestic and international brands have become early adopters of the technology, with China Mobile, Haagen-Dazs and China Eastern Airlines already signed up.
The fast-growing web company is adding a feature that allows users to record and send 6-8 second-long videos to each other through a service is calls “micro-video”. This can then be quickly shared through WeChat, but not other social networks like Weibo or QQ and does not include any basic editing software.
The additions come just weeks after WeChat launched a “card payment” feature to facilitate speedy transactions at the nation’s most popular retail chains.