WeChat Africa, a joint venture between Naspers and Tencent, has announced its investment in South African micro-jobbing platform M4JAM (Money for Jam). The investment follows the platform's launch on WeChat in August 2014.

"Its disruptive business model has turned 'business as usual' on its head from both the end consumer and the brand's perspective, resulting in a rapid and overwhelming demand from both users and companies to be on the M4JAM platform," says Brett Loubser, Head of WeChat Africa.

"M4JAM challenges the status quo enabling companies to rapidly gather data, perform mystery shopping, manage merchandising audits, improve product education and promote brand activation whilst soliciting real consumer insights at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods," says Andre Hugo, co-founder and chief jammer at M4JAM. "With the opportunity to earn extra cash and supplement their incomes, our jobbers are strongly invested in the platform, providing more authentic information than ever before and begging the question of other brands – can we afford not to be on-board?"

In a media statement the companies claim the investment will allow M4JAM to scale the business locally and expand it globally, positioning M4JAM as a digital game-changer for consumer brand engagement, creating real time business solutions whilst solving real world problems.

Of the investment Hugo says, "WeChat's investment allows us to focus on building our business while they provide the community that helps enable our success. We launched M4JAM on WeChat because the social communications app offers a fast and easy deployment platform."

"M4JAM is part of the social conversation, which is good news for WeChat users as they will have access to the service without having to download another app. It also benefits M4JAM as we are able to tap into an existing user base, which will be a huge benefit when moving into new markets where WeChat already has a strong presence," says Hugo

"WeChat is on a path to deliver value for users via multiple Official Accounts like M4JAM. We're supporting their growth to demonstrate that through the right partnerships, WeChat can deliver value, not only for users but for brands as well. We have several other start-ups launching on the platform this year that will help us show the true power of an integrated mobile social platform," says Loubser.