WeChat has grown into the most popular and influential social network developed by Tencent in January 2011.
WeChat Official Account can only be applied if you own a legitimate business, it builds trust among users and it becomes a practice of having a WeChat Official Account QR Code on a business card to penetrate into China Market.
There are two types of WeChat Official Accounts through which WeChat Marketing can be done.
WECHAT SUBSCRIPTION ACCOUNT
WeChat Subscription Account is the most basic form of the WeChat Official Accounts. WeChat Subscription Account allows you to push content to your followers once a day. The account members will see the broadcast messages under subscription tab. Subscription Account allows sending out messages to members much more frequently.
WeChat Subscription Account is used for news updates and information broadcast. WeChat Subscription Accounts can be used to advertise the ongoing promotions on a daily basis. This is an advantage of the subscription accounts.
On the other hand, Subscription Accounts have some limitations like less integration and advanced functionality options. The messages are displayed will be grouped into one folder containing all the Subscription Accounts instead of being pushed to user's inbox directly. The followers have to go into that folder to retrieve the delivered content. Followers are not sent push notifications upon receiving a post from Subscription Account.
WECHAT SERVICE ACCOUNT
WeChat Service Account is best for business and organization who want to access to advanced WeChat Official Account features. Service account provides more integration and advanced APIs than subscription account. Companies can build its application, get inquiries and broadcast promotion to followers.
The advantages of WeChat Service Accounts are that the broadcasted messages are displayed in the user’s inbox directly. Users can receive push notifications, and you can reply to any user’s message from time to time.
However Service Account has few limitations like it allows you to broadcast four messages per month, i.e. one message per week. The Official account cannot promote offers or news on a daily basis. However, the design of the WeChat Service Account is for providing services instead of message broadcast. If the goal is to provide a higher degree of functionality to users through customized menu or offer integrated services, WeChat Service Account should be the one considered.
In short, Service Accounts are for companies providing a wider set of services through WeChat and Subscription Accounts are for businesses providing more information to the customers through WeChat.