Service Account Folding: It has to change, but it’s a dead end!

Among the types of public accounts, service accounts are a special type, mainly used for business operations. Originally, service account messages were displayed in the list, and recently the messages were folded. But if this continues, the original advantages of service accounts will disappear.

During this period, the hottest news about official accounts is that the service account folding is undergoing grayscale testing.

Such adjustments have caused dissatisfaction among many businesses and account owners. Some people have written articles to criticize, some have complained in groups, and some have even organized other businesses and account owners to post feedback in the WeChat open community.

However, in my opinion, these complaints and resistance are actually meaningless, because for WeChat officials, the folding of service accounts is an adjustment that must be made.

01 Interest distribution is a road of no return. Once the bow is drawn, there is no turning back.

When a public account goes downhill, the first reaction of many account owners is to criticize the platform for inaction.

This kind of questioning is unfair. Any Internet product has its life cycle , which is determined by objective laws. What WeChat officials can do is to find ways to slow down the speed of product decline and extend the product's survival cycle.

In fact, WeChat has indeed done so. They have come up with many different ways to optimize and iterate, such as folding subscription accounts, adding interest tags, and the most subversive introduction of interest distribution.

Since the introduction of interest distribution around 2018, the proportion of interest distribution in the distribution mechanism of public accounts has been increasing little by little. At first, it was to increase the number of "take a look", and then to distribute subscription accounts in random order... There are many different measures.

According to the current progress, the interest distribution algorithm of the official account has been completed by more than 90%, and the remaining 10% is the service account.

From the perspective of practitioners, the entire advancement process is accompanied by loss of control, at least temporarily.

For example, when the platform was first opened up, a large amount of low-quality content appeared on it. Another example was last year when interest-based distribution was fully opened up, the number of readers of large accounts was halved.

However, for content platforms, interest distribution is a road of no return. Once chosen, there is no turning back. After all, machines and algorithms cannot be controlled.

02 After the folding, the service account becomes useless and the ending is doomed to be a dead end

WeChat Service Account is actually a by-product of WeChat. In the early days, this product was designed to be similar to the current corporate WeChat functions, but later it evolved into a marketing tool for businesses.

In the past few years, service accounts have gained more favor from businesses due to their higher customer reach rates. Especially in the context of the collapse of subscription accounts and the increase in followers of public accounts becoming empty talk, service accounts have become very popular. Before the rules prohibited it, a large number of subscription accounts were changed to service accounts through migration.

When the service account is folded, its advantages compared to the subscription account no longer exist, because the number of notifications is only 4 times per month, so this product is even worse than the subscription account, and because of this, the service account becomes quite useless.

Once such an adjustment is made, it means that the service account will be almost completely abandoned.

03 Should we start a service account, subscription account or not at all? The key is to look at the needs of the enterprise

Does that mean that service accounts are completely out of the question? Should companies return to subscription accounts? Or should they give up on both and choose other platforms?

In fact, this is a question that is difficult to judge from a single dimension, and it depends on the specific needs of the enterprise.

Whether it is a service account or a public account, the biggest advantage has never been the so-called subscription-based distribution, but that they rely on WeChat, the national social product, and are part of the WeChat ecosystem.

Since it is an ecosystem, you cannot expect to achieve your entire business goal by simply using one of the products.

Before 2020, you could treat the official account as a product and make money just by doing a good job. But now it is different. You can only treat the official account as a tool to serve your business model.

For small and micro enterprises, you can obtain public domain traffic through video accounts, use official accounts or corporate WeChat to carry this traffic, and then use the content of the official accounts to improve the conversion rate of private domain users.

For large enterprises, official accounts and video accounts are the basic components for building brand moats, and enterprise WeChat is a good choice to increase repeat purchases.

After all, new media marketing has been developing wildly for so many years. It is time to return to the product and the business itself. The era of mindless and extensive operations has long ended.

Author: Cai Zhao WeChat public account: I am Cai Zhao