Opinion: Hi marketers, are you ready for MeWe?

There is a trend happening as people are moving from Facebook to MeWe in not only Hong Kong, but also other countries and markets. MeWe gained 2.5 million new members in the week of 11 January and has already amassed 16 million members, according to the company. It's expected that the figure will increase rapidly, and MeWe has become one of the top apps on iOS and Android.

Where there is a demand, there is always a supply. Marketers nowadays are closely following the "MeWe migration" trend and we are all facing similar questions: Is it about time to sign up a WeMe page for our brands? Should we somehow give up the well-developed Facebook pages? Should we just wait and see?

Undoubtedly, Facebook is a very important platform for marketers. They are getting used to reaching both fans and potential customers by using Facebook. With the decreasing organic reach, marketers have to spend some money on Facebook to make sure that their ads can be seen by audiences.

Many marketers keep increasing their marketing budgets on Facebook ads every year. To some extent, Facebook gradually becomes a paid media, evolving from an owned or earned media touchpoint. Netizens love using Facebook, so marketers have no choice to turn around the situation.

The ad-free platform MeWe aims to compete with Facebook as the giant platform collects data from users for targeted advertising. At the same time, WhatsApp has recently announced an update on its terms and privacy policies for better personal data sharing with Facebook, which has become a global PR crisis.

As marketers, we are all open to anything shaping audiences' behaviour. Some platforms in Hong Kong have taken one step ahead by setting up their WeMe pages to prepare for their audiences' changing habits, such as Apple Daily, Price.com.hk, LIHKG, 100Most, ViuTV, OpenRice, she.com, BeautyExchange.com and unwire.hk. However, not many product brands have started running their MeWe pages at this moment. A quick study was conducted by checking the MeWe pages on the above platforms and comparing these pages with their Facebook pages. Here are some findings:

• Many platforms re-publish their Facebook content on MeWe. For example, the same content or posts for both platforms
• The content on MeWe enjoys higher interaction than Facebook, given the fact that MeWe pages normally have fewer followers
• Newspapers' number of interactions is much higher on MeWe. For example, a live news post on Apple Daily's MeWe page had 13 times higher interactions than the same content on the Facebook page (Apple Daily's Facebook page has 2.6 million fans but only about 170,000 on MeWe).
• The interaction rate (that is, the number of interactions compared to the number of fans) on MeWe pages could sometimes reach more than 5%, but most Facebook pages failed to achieve more than 0.3% of interaction rate.

To conclude, although MeWe users are fewer than those on Facebook, both interaction numbers and rates are much higher on MeWe pages. In other words, MeWe pages offer higher organic reach and interactions than Facebook pages.

Digital marketers, are you ready?

This article is contributed by Wilson Wong, associate marketing director of Price.com.hk.