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Why WeChat Matters for Universities

With coronavirus dominating the headlines recently and disrupting daily life for millions of people in China and beyond, there has been renewed attention to the significant role the platform WeChat plays in information sharing in China.

What is WeChat?

In short, WeChat is a social media network, messaging app, e-commerce platform, and more, all in one app. It’s become ubiquitous in daily life in China – with more than 1.1 billion active users.

WeChat logo

How do universities use WeChat?

Importantly for communicators, WeChat is also the first place many users will turn for official news and updates – before looking at an institution’s website, or checking their email.

At Duke, we have more students and alumni from China than from any other country outside of the United States. Because Chinese internet restrictions generally prevent prospective students, parents, alumni and others in China from accessing our other social media channels, we’ve been active on Weibo (another prominent Chinese social network) since 2011, and we launched our WeChat presence in 2015.

WeChat post screenshot

In addition to posting stories and updates and promoting admissions information sessions in China, we’ve successfully used WeChat groups to host live chat sessions for admitted students – most of whom aren’t able to visit campus before enrolling – who are eager to learn more about life on campus or connect with other students. And it’s an important way our Chinese alumni community stays in touch with one another and the university – there are a number of active Duke alumni chat groups in which members are sharing news and information with each other on a daily basis.

WeChat post screenshot

For our communications colleagues at Duke Kunshan University, a joint-venture university founded in 2014 in Kunshan, China, WeChat is even more critical to their work. In addition to sharing stories on the university’s public-facing profile on the platform, the university uses private WeChat groups to connect incoming students, communicate quickly with and build community among parents, and as a practical tool for the small but growing staff and faculty community to share news and updates.

In addition to its instant-messaging function, another useful component for communicators is WeChat Moments. Similar to Facebook, users can post pictures, story links and other updates to their feed for all (or selected) connections to view, “like” and forward, potentially boosting the reach of their content.

If you’re curious about how you might use WeChat to support your connections to Chinese students, parents or alumni, I’d encourage you to talk with your students and alumni who are active on WeChat to learn how they use it. You can dip a toe in the water by following some brands (many American and international brands are quite active there) and universities to get a sense for how they are using the platform. And don’t hesitate to reach out to our team (socialmedia@duke.edu) with questions about this work.

Follow Duke University

Duke University QR code link to WeChat

Follow Duke Kunshan

Duke Kunshan University QR code to follow on WeChat

Lessons in Social Media and Life

As we all know, social media doesn’t take days off. So when a number of professional opportunities recently left our team understaffed for a month, I decided to cover day-to-day management of our social content and engagement.

Some people laughed when I told them. Others gasped. And they all asked – how I would do this in addition to my own full-time job?

I’ll admit I was concerned. Although I had been part of the social media team since 2016, I had only occasionally actually pushed the buttons to control our accounts, and certainly not for an extended period of time.

But as is common with professional “opportunities,” this was a valuable learning experience for me, and a chance to realize just how many life lessons also apply to running social media, for example:

Mistakes are inevitable. Own them, learn from them and move on.

“It’s a rite of passage,” my colleague said when I texted her in a panic one evening, after a Twitter follower pointed out that I had linked to the wrong story from a tweet. The follower’s #loveduke response to my correction was a welcome affirmation of the community we engage with on our social channels. I made other mistakes after that, but never again failed to double check my links.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

We generally post to our Instagram feed and story once a day during the week, and I was fortunate that colleagues from our digital team – skilled photographers, videographers and designers – were happy to plan and create our content for the month. They recommended photos for the feed and pulled together slides for our daily stories for me to post.

When I realized my Insta caption skills weren’t really going to cut it, and that I risked spending many long hours agonizing over captions, our student social media team jumped in and suggested captions that resonated with our followers. (Pro tip: this caption business is way harder than it looks.)

Quality output requires real investment.

We can – and should – find ways to be efficient in our work, but there are no shortcuts to quality.

Last year we adjusted our strategy for the @DukeU Twitter feed, vastly reducing our retweets of other Duke accounts and increasing the volume of original tweets. While that’s helping us support important institutional goals, it has also added a solid two hours to our daily workload.

Managing all of our channels, monitoring and responding to hundreds of mentions and messages a day, and trying to get my other work done meant that I had to reduce the volume of our tweets in order to get it all done. As a result, our posting volume and engagement measures were significantly down for the month I was trying to do it all.

We have a small but mighty social media team, and although it was a good test to see what we could get done with fewer human resources, it was also a clear demonstration of the resources our team needs to deliver the best results for the university.

We’re back to full staff now, and I’m happy to have real pros managing our channels again. I’m also grateful I had this opportunity and glad I took the leap to do it, even if my Instagram captions still need some help.