Recent years, WeChat, a cross-platform instant messaging service created by Tencent in Shenzhen, China, has become the most popular social media platform for Chinese people to use. Over 1000 million people spend over hours on WeChat daily. WeChat is a multifunctional social media tool that brings convenience to people’s life.
Firstly, WeChat is similar to other popular social media platforms, which offer people a space to share and express opinions, videos, pictures in public but only those people you are friends with. You can follow some public pages that provide educational information, such as some free online courses and meaningful articles, which benefits people. Take myself as an example, I took a three month GRE courses on WeChat, which was very good assistance for me to pass the test. We watched some videos about how to solve math problems on the WeChat platform. The teacher gave us homework to practice. What is more, WeChat allows people to create a group to study together too, the maximum number is 500 people; it also provides a chance for people to have multi-people video talk. Additionally, you can learn many things on WeChat and you can find almost every information you need on it. For example, you want to learn about Chinese Spring Festival Culture and how do Chinese people celebrate the Spring Festival in China, then you can go to search for videos of how Chinese celebrate the Spring Festival and its history on those relative topic pages. I personally believe that the educational function on WeChat is effective for people to learn and get improved in certain areas.
Secondly, WeChat has become one of the most popular online payment tool, which brings lots of conveniences for people. It is easy to link your Bank accounts and cards to WeChat account then people can use WeChat payment to order airplane tickets and hotels, pay bills, taxis, shopping mall, pets caring, even little street food vendors, it is easy to pay via WeChat by scanning the WeChat Code. Well, honestly, Mobile payment service is everywhere in China.
Of course, WeChat fundamentally is an instant service that connects people, WeChat gives people more security and safety because it asks people the exactly ID number of the target person when you want to add or befriend with, however, in Facebook, you only need to know his or her name and can find him by searching his full name. Additionally, nobody else can your posts unless you “allow strangers to see at most ten posts”; you can also set how much of posts in timetable can be viewed by public, for example, you can set “only the recent three-days posts can be viewed by people”, “only the recent six-months posts can be viewed by people” and “all posts can be viewed by people”.
However, WeChat has some disadvantages especially for people who are crazy about posting videos. At the “Moment” section, the place people share and express their feelings and opinions in public, it does not allow posting a video that is longer than ten seconds, which is not always convenient for those adolescents who love sharing their selfie videos frequently. Also, WeChat payment only supports using Chinese dollars as the only currency; even though the range of usage and acceptance has reached to European countries and many American countries, people need to consider about the exchange rate from the Chinese dollars to the target currency. when they are using WeChat payment.