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WeChat’s Straightforward Contact-Organization System

WeChat has many fantastic features within the field of communication and networking. The Super-App is how people in China, from locals to expats, maintain contact with each other. As a platform, its usage dominates the person-to-person field, unlike Western communication platforms, which are fragmented into different platforms for different purposes and audiences, sometimes in competition with each other: for example, one might have two phones, a personal Facebook, a professional LinkedIn, multiple email accounts, and communicate with coworkers through Slack or Google Hangouts.

Conversely, communications in China tend to orbit around WeChat. While it is not a singular monolith, as other social media and networking platforms exist and are popular, WeChat is certainly the most popular and ubiquitous in China. An individual's WeChat represents their entire social network--from family to coworkers to leads and acquaintances.

WeChat may very well be the most important app in China, using it in a professional environment necessitates the organization of WeChat contacts. Organizing your WeChat contacts is important because it helps you find contacts quickly without the headache of searching through your entire list and helps you send out messages and push documents to targeted groups of people.

To organize and categorize a contact, first go to their profile by tapping the ellipsis (...) icon in the top right of your conversation. Next, tap on “Set Remark and Tag.” There, you will be able to access WeChat’s organizational features.

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Tags

Users can categorize (tag) contacts and disseminate information or documents to individuals within these groups, similar to how Bcc works on email. It will not initiate a group chat or show recipients that they’re tagged as something specific. Therefore, if you want to send an update or document to a specific group of people without initiating a group chat, consider assigning them a tag when you add their WeChat.

While it may be helpful to have established tags before adding new contacts, WeChat gives users the ability to create a new tag upon connection. This is useful for adding contacts in new situations, events or contexts.

If you want to send a message, link or document to a specific segment of your contacts, you can use tags to do so. While group chats may be an efficient way to engage with all selected contacts at a given time, it will be chaotic and you might not want all of your contacts to be connected with each other. Personalized messages, while being less spammy, are optimal if the amount of contacts you need to message are manageable, otherwise, it may take a long time to deliver a personal message to each specific contact. Pushing messages, links or documents through tags is a great way to disseminate the same information quickly and simultaneously to many specific contacts. Multiple tags can be leveraged to further specify the target audience.

Suppose you want to send out a message to all your leads in New York, but you have hundreds of leads and thousands of contacts in New York. You can use multiple tags to target your message to your leads in New York. This will individually send the same message to contacts that are categorized as being under both tags.

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Alias

It’s very common for WeChat profile pictures or even usernames to be complete misrepresentations of the actual user. Upon adding a professional contact on WeChat, you may find that they’ve decided to portray themselves as a smiling sunflower under the username Kittykat123. In these situations, by going to “Set Remark and Tag,” you can rename them and add their picture. By inputting their real name under “Alias,” you will save yourself the frustration and time of having to confirm their identity by looking at the context previous conversations before contacting them. The alias you set for them will appear as such in your contacts list or contact searches and will therefore be easier to locate them when you need to.

Description

Descriptions can be searched for and can contain more information compared to tags.

Name Card or Photo

If you happen to have the contact’s business card with detailed information, consider snapping a picture of their card and adding it to the photo section.

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