The Charlesworth Group develops Dove Medical Press Ltd. WeChat mini-program to help increase engagement with Chinese authors
The Charlesworth Group extends the scope of its WeChat account management service for Dove Medical Press Ltd, part of the Taylor and Francis Group, with the launch of a new WeChat mini-program, designed to help Dove increase engagement with its Chinese author community. The mini-program provides a video platform for Dove author videos with liking and voting functionality, allowing the Dove WeChat community to rank the videos by popularity, with an annual prize for the most voted-for content.
WeChat mini-programs are sub-applications within the publisher’s official WeChat account ecosystem. Their use by marketeers has grown dramatically as they introduce more functionality, more dynamic navigation and more flexibility than provided by the main WeChat menu structure. Mini-programs allow followers to be kept engaged in the publisher’s WeChat environment longer, encouraging engagement with other publisher resources, news and journal content within the publisher’s WeChat channel. This helps to convert more followers and post sharing with colleagues and friends. In 2018, Charlesworth launched their own WeChat mini-program platform, currently used to deliver author education, and the Dove mini-program was developed utilising this proprietary platform by Charlesworth’s in-house technical and marketing teams.
This mini-program extension to Charlesworth’s WeChat management services, follows the effective integration of Dove’s manuscript submission and peer review system into The Charlesworth Group’s WeChat Gateway messaging platform in September 2018. The integration allows Dove to continually engage with their authors and enhance their experience by providing paper status notifications directly to authors’ phones via their personal WeChat accounts.
As part of their commitment to the fast-paced tech driven China market, The Charlesworth Group continues to invest in software developments, providing technical solutions for publishers which complement and extend their WeChat account management and China marketing services offering.
Angela Jones, Dove Medical Press General Manager, comments:
“Enabling our authors to share their high-quality, peer-reviewed articles and providing them with the best service is at the heart of what Dove Medical Press, as a part of the Taylor & Francis group, offers. We are therefore always searching for new methods to help our authors reach new audiences and increase the impact of their research. Launching our new WeChat function is the latest in this offering and we are delighted to see its launch.”
The Charlesworth Group’s CEO, Michael Evans comments:
“With 20 years of expertise in the Chinese scholarly community we are aware of how integral WeChat and the mini-programs are to Chinese daily life. WeChat has transformed the digital landscape of how publishers can market to China. We’re continually developing technical solutions to support our publishing clients. We’re proud of how our inhouse technical team have supported Dove through the development process. The potential of these mini-programs for publishers is substantial, and we’re delighted to help Dove improve and extend engagement with their Chinese author community via a software development solution.”