1.2 Introduction of WeChat

WeChat is the most popular mobile application in relation to mobile social media in China today. It was developed by Tencent in China and released in January 2011. WeChat provides users with multimedia communication functions including speaker phones, photo and mood sharing, text messaging, corporation official accounts[3], location sharing, and location-based searching and services. The latest version of WeChat added more functions such as game centers, online payment, an emoticon shop, street-view scanning and scanning for translation. It serves different countries, languages, operating systems, and network formats.

On April 11, 2014, Tencent QQ, the first instant messaging and social media software in China, reached a new concurrent user record of 200 million. Tencent took advantage of QQ’s huge volume of users and allowed users to sign into WeChat using QQ ID. In May 2014, Tencent announced that WeChat had climbed to 396 million monthly active users. Besides the quantity advantage, WeChat is able to achieve this business model as its parent company Tencent already owns a complete line of e-commerce and e-payment services including the QQ Online Shop and Yixun.com. These facilities and expertise will provide strong backing for the future growth of WeChat. Therefore, nowadays the official platform of WeChat, which is highly appreciated by companies and brands, is probably going to dethrone the dominance of Weibo. Today in China, WeChat users number is more than 600 million. Moreover, the overseas user numbers broke through 100 million by the end of 2014 （Tencent, 2015）.