WeChat Releases Spring Festival Holiday Data Report

On Tuesday, WeChat, Tencent‘s social app, released a report for the Spring Festival holiday in 2022 (from January 31 to February 5). The report shows some new consumption and usage habits of the Chinese people.

This year, WeChat’s “blessing function”, performed by way of sending red envelopes, was upgraded. The popular function introduced specially-designed and customized red envelope covers and enabled users to send red envelopes through WeChat’s video account.

According to the report, during the Spring Festival holiday, over 380 million red envelopes were received through the platform, while the total number of red envelopes with special covers were exchanged more than 5 billion times. The most popular greeting this year was “getting rich overnight”, which seems to reflect everyone’s expectations for the new year.

During the four-hour live-stream of the Spring Festival Gala, more than 120 million people watched on WeChat video’s vertical form, a feature that won praise from viewers. At the same time, the trend of recording Spring Festival with short videos and sharing them with relatives and friends became more commonplace this year.

Buying stuff for family during the Spring Festival has always been a tradition. Wechat’s report shows that the transaction volume of its mini programs increased by 51.8% year-on-year, while the volume of visits to the mini programs of shopping centers increased by 25.5% year-on-year. On New Year’s Eve, the food take-out transaction on WeChat increased by about 13.8% compared with that in 2020.

During the Spring Festival, mini programs for government affairs helped prevent and control the epidemic during the holiday travel rush. The report shows that the number of visits to mini programs for travel histories and medicine increased by 248.8% and 62.7% year-on-year respectively.

SEE ALSO: Meituan Sees Average Daily Orders Using Digital RMB Increase During Spring Festival

Chinese people’s way of celebrating the New Year on WeChat seems to be becoming much more low-carbon and environmentally friendly. Data shows that the number of paperless boarding and hotel check-ins through mini programs increased by 82.3% and 22.2% year-on-year respectively.

In addition, the report shows that more people started using WeChat’s “caring mode” during the Spring Festival, seeing over 11 million users sign up for the feature, a 179% increase compared with the National Day holiday in 2021.