

Individuals or institutions can create a public account to provide news and other contents. In the beginning, WeChat was just a social media app developed for mobile devices, but it soon became a comprehensive platform integrating many features such as public account, news feed, online payment and a portal to host other applications.

However, WeChat is more than a mere person-to-person messaging platform. WeChat users can engage in social communication with a reduced cost of admission ( Zhang, 2017).

It has become a global social media platform with more than 70 million overseas users, available in over 200 countries and supported over 20 languages.
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WeChat is free to install, use and download, and it supports all smartphone platforms and Windows Phone operating systems. Weibo (Microblog in English), the previous dominant SNS in China before 2011 with similar functions as Facebook and Twitter, had only 297 million active users as of the third quarter of 2016 ( CIW Team, 2016). Meanwhile, having integrated many other functions especially payment, purchase and games, WeChat has evolved into a “must-have” app for most Chinese mobile phone users. WeChat had soon become the most popular Social Networking Site (SNS) application with more than 846 million active users in China, as of the third quarter of 2016. The WeChat mobile application was released by Tencent (2017), a leading high-tech Chinese company, in January 2011. It is noteworthy that WeChat has already become the No.1 social media platform in China since 2011. In China, WeChat (Weixin in Chinese) (2017) and Weibo/Microblog are the two major social media platforms, with communication features similar to WhatsApp, LINE, Twitter, and Facebook. As mobile-oriented services such as WhatsApp, WeChat, and Facebook Messenger are the most popular social media platforms in some economies, it is clear that much of our digital behaviour is now converging around mobile devices ( Kemp, 2015). Among these accounts, 1.685 billion were active mobile social accounts. By January 2015, there were 2.078 billion active social media accounts for 7.2 billion people around the world. It has become a common platform for users to exchange information and share their experiences and ideas. Social media has become an important part of daily life for people across the world, especially millennials.
