Spring Festival (春节 chunjie) is just 2 days away, and WeChat just announced the launch of “Spring Festival Shake (新春摇摇乐)” promotion.
The forthcoming “Spring Festival Shake (新春摇摇乐)” is an attempt for Tencent to keep its first place in hongbao war, and is the upgrade version of “Weekend Shake (周末摇摇乐)” which WeChat rolled out in January. Its activities will extend from previously a two day event to seven days, during the Spring Festival holidays.
From February 14 to 20, WeChat users can use WeChat to pay over RMB 2 ($0.3) at the offline sites where WeChat Pay is aligned with. Users have three chances a day to participate in lucky draws to win two kinds of red envelopes: free purchase (免单) or up to RMB 200 ($31.6) in red envelope (到店红包) that user can use in offline stores using WeChat pay.
During the “Spring Festival Shake” event launching on the 14th, WeChat will also hand out different daily digital blessing eggs (祝福彩蛋) to users. In Chinese tradition, eggs have a meaning of blessing. In China, it is common to hold at the baby’s first-year birthday a red egg and ginger party. When Chinese couple get married, they hide colored eggs around their bedding, and let children look for eggs.
There has been various speculation on what Alipay would do during the Chinese New Year’s day including a gold hongbao feature, last year’s augmented reality hongbao campaign, red envelopes and gifts to viewers during the CCTV Spring Festival Gala. However, Alipay’s operator Ant Financial told TechNode that they are not commenting on this at the moment. Last year’s hongbao war winner went to WeChat, who sent out 14.2 billion red envelopes on New Year’s Eve, up 75.7 percent in comparison with the same period in 2016.