WeChat ranks as the third most popular messaging application behind WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, but the actual lifestyles of its users are somewhat different, as WeChat has recently revealed. According to the company, an average of 570 million users log in to WeChat each day as of September 2015. Its number of daily active users have grown by 64 percent since last year.
The base is spread out over many different ages on the younger end of the spectrum, who also happen to be very social — 60 percent of users between the ages of 15-29 years old have an average of 128 WeChat friends. In addition, more than 280 million minutes of video and voice calls are completed on WeChat each day, with the most popular calling destinations outside of China consisting of USA, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan.
It’s not just about calling and messaging though. Games are an important part of the WeChat experience with 15 percent of users playing games via WeChat each day. More than 75 percent of gamers play for more than 10 minutes per day with board games topping the charts as one of the most popular types. Shopping is also a growing trend in the app — the most popular purchases last month were phone chargers, winter clothes and selfie sticks — while WeChat stickers remain one of the most popular parts of the experience. Bubble Pup and a variety of localized stickers top the list as the most popular sets and WeChat recently launched a Bubble Pup 2 set.
Fitness is another activity that users participate in quite a bit each day, with the newly-launched WeRun Official Account (available by searching the ID: “WeChat-WeRun”) at the helm, helping users track their steps and meet goals with friends. WeChat found that users are most active during the weekdays and least active on the weekends, with peak hours between 8-9 p.m. daily.
Another big part of the Official Account experience is reading online articles. Every month users read the equivalent of one novel on WeChat, reading an average of seven articles per day. The category of content they read; however, “varies based on generation.”
WeChat is available on most major mobile platforms.