Video Account, poached a “number one female celebrity” from Douyin?

The author of this article was guided by a live-streaming blogger to show how WeChat Video Account is operated and promoted step by step. Let’s take a look.

"I have so many connections and resources. If you are smart, wouldn't it be faster for you to step on my shoulders and climb up? Wouldn't it be better for you to use the rent I collect every month to start your own business? It's not that I don't support your career, I just don't support you working as a worker."

In a 2-minute video, a beautiful young woman is talking to her husband off-camera.

You can quickly get a lot of information from it: she graduated from a prestigious university, her husband is from a wealthy family. Now she is a mother, but she suffers from postpartum depression. What makes her most painful is that it seems that "if you can't make money, you are nothing."

This video that magnified the "dilemma of young mothers" quickly received more than 100,000 "loves", becoming an opportunity for Guo Yiyi to become popular.

On March 6, 2023, Guo Yiyi started live streaming on Video Account, and the first live streaming achieved a GMV of 1.23 million yuan. In the second live streaming, the GMV doubled to 2 million, and in the third live streaming, it continued to grow to 3 million. During the 618 shopping festival last year, Guo Yiyi had become a key figure supported by Video Account, with a single GMV of more than 20 million. During Double 11 of the same year, the single live streaming exceeded 50 million.

Such a growth rate can be regarded as the absolute "leader" among video accounts that have not yet been fully commercialized.

According to official data, when Guo Yiyi achieved the "20 million GMV in a single game" in June last year, her account had only about 400,000 followers. In fact, the platform Guo Yiyi first chose was Douyin. She was only a "mid-level talent" on Douyin, but she unexpectedly became a "dark horse" on Video Account.

Video accounts, which have been online for 4 years, once wanted to take a completely different path from Douyin - not relying on algorithm recommendations, but through "social recommendations" to achieve content differentiation. Against this background, in the 1.0 era of video account e-commerce, the linkage between public and private domains is the most attractive growth path. Brand merchants with private domain advantages are therefore like ducks in water. Through "video accounts diverting traffic to public accounts, mini programs, and corporate WeChat" to achieve transactions and repeat purchases, brands quickly tapped into the "bonus" here.

However, such an ecosystem was not friendly to talented anchors who had no private domain accumulation at first. The small proportion of "algorithm recommendation" means that the public domain traffic pool is small, and it is difficult for experts to get the "public domain traffic" of the platform simply by relying on "content". As video account e-commerce enters the 2.0 era, the situation is changing. According to a research report released by Guohai Securities, since 2021, the proportion of social recommendations for video account followers and friends' likes has continued to decline, and the proportion of algorithm recommendations has increased. As of Q3 2023, the proportion of algorithm recommendations has exceeded 50%.

Just like Li Jiaqi to Taobao and Luo Yonghao to Douyin, a benchmark anchor who can carry the "face" is the fastest way to amplify influence. If you want to attract more merchants, open the upper limit of e-commerce business, release more public domains, and allow more influencers who value public domain traffic to settle in and grow, it is a step that video accounts must take. And Guo Yiyi is an observation sample.

1. The video account is becoming more and more like TikTok?

Guo Yiyi’s rise is attributed to the success of his “personality”.

According to Yibang Power, at this year's WeChat Open Class, the relevant person in charge said that female consumers accounted for 78% of video accounts, consumers in first-tier, new first-tier and second-tier cities accounted for more than 60%, and people aged 30-50 contributed 40% of the increase in video accounts. This group of people also perfectly fits the user portrait that Guo Yiyi's "Bao Ma" persona has attracted - middle-aged women in their 40s who are rich and have free time. They have strong consumption power and low product return rate. They are the incremental population that has hardly been "washed" by Douyin and Kuaishou.

In the experience presented by Guo Yiyi, the logic of the content is also very simple: create a "life you want to have".

Image source: WeChat Open Class official public account WeChat video account

In the second half of the video that went viral, Guo Yiyi wanted to go out to work and realize his life value on his own.

After repeated persuasion failed, the husband had to ask her: "What are you missing?" Guo Yiyi's answer was also very direct, saying that she "lacked a sense of security." At this time, a dramatic scene appeared: the husband took out the property certificate of 1/3 of the family and handed it to Guo Yiyi. Guo Yiyi's husband Jiang Bin is reportedly engaged in real estate and investment, and is considered by Guo's fans to be a typical "rich family." Guo Yiyi's content about the second child's surname to the mother's family and how to sign a prenuptial agreement, which are both popular, also attracted a lot of attention.

Female fans think Guo Yiyi has "high emotional intelligence" and "good at controlling her husband", while male fans like Guo Yiyi's "gentleness and generosity". Guo Yiyi, who has successfully started a new live broadcast business, gained empathy from users by starting her own company as a "baby mom". After starting her own company, she directly addressed the family and career balance issues that "Chinese women" are troubled by, and consolidated her identity as a "winner in life" through family stories such as good husbands and good mothers-in-law. In her comment section, it is not difficult to find discussions such as "women with high emotional intelligence have the best life", "support women's entrepreneurship", and "women should be financially independent".

A personality that is attractive enough to fans and can continuously generate emotional value is the key to successfully selling products on a video account.

Video accounts pay more attention to "people" and the establishment of social relationships. In comparison, Douyin pays the most attention to "content" and is good at using content to increase traffic and achieve "creating gods". Specifically: an account with 0 fans and an account with 1 million fans have the opportunity to publish videos that become popular on Douyin. This makes Douyin's content creation more and more "popular" and the content recommendation algorithm more and more accurate. But for businesses, this also means that competition has become fierce and profits have gradually become thinner.

As long as there are popular content and high-quality products, merchants can compete and lower prices endlessly in the same category.

However, in the video account, an account with 1 million fans can complete the cold start of the video content through the accumulated 1 million fans, that is, the accumulated private traffic, and then leverage the traffic "snowball" to achieve communication fission. The disadvantage of this path is that an account with 0 fans, even if the content is exquisite, still finds it difficult to break through the circle by relying solely on natural traffic. But the advantage is that as long as the account is "established", the fan base of the video account can be transformed into real "popularity" and "traffic".

This is also the reason why businesses that originally had accumulated private domain traffic were the first to develop on video accounts. At that time, the migration cost for influencers without a fan base to enter video accounts was high, and the development speed was difficult to compare with brands with accumulated members.

However, in August last year, Video Account issued new regulations, stipulating that "live broadcast rooms, homepages, and top links of short videos cannot be added to corporate WeChat accounts." At the same time, the proportion of public domain traffic recommended by algorithms continued to increase, which actually broke the restrictions on non-private domain players in the operation of Video Accounts, making Video Accounts more and more like Douyin. In comparison, social recommendations are likes and recommendations from friends, while machine recommendations follow data. Whether data such as completion rate, number of likes, number of comments, and number of reposts are eye-catching affects traffic distribution.

Experts like Guo Yiyi, who are good at managing their personal image and familiar with the rules of the public domain, quickly seized the window of opportunity of "gradually releasing public domain traffic" of the video account, built a more solid personal image, accumulated a fan base, and became one of the first experts to become popular.

2. Don’t “create stars”, but target “amateurs”

Despite the trend of becoming "TikTok-like", Video Account still has its own "stubbornness".

Looking back at the development history of Taobao Live, Douyin, Kuaishou and even Xiaohongshu, in the early stages of platform development, introducing celebrity resources to form a public domain traffic pool was the fastest path. For example, Xiaohongshu, which has been focusing on e-commerce since last year, calls itself a "buyer e-commerce". Its idea of ​​developing live streaming to bring goods was to first set up benchmarks for celebrity live streaming rooms such as Dong Jie, Zhang Xiaohui, and Zhang Jingchu.

However, the benchmark cases of e-commerce that Video Account has created so far tend to be more about "amateurs".

Zhang Xiaolong, the founder of WeChat, once said publicly in the 2021 WeChat Open Class, "At the beginning, we wanted to invite celebrities to join Video Account, but the celebrities said they didn't want to come without a signing fee. We said, don't come if you don't want to. I believe that ordinary people have great creativity. On the contrary, purchased content may not necessarily impress people." In Zhang Xiaolong's product philosophy, the underlying logic of Video Account and Douyin may be fundamentally different. This also makes the two sides differentiated in team building, product iteration and other aspects.

Ma Huateng said that under the trend of "Internet +", Tencent is increasingly like an infrastructure that provides water and electricity, supplying water and electricity to all walks of life. Among them, public accounts and mini-programs are the connection between content and services, and "video accounts will become a lot of infrastructure." Zhang Xiaolong believes that the value of WeChat lies in being a "social and communication ID." On this basis, the birth of the video account was originally based on the migration of user habits-sharing life through videos and becoming another "circle of friends." Therefore, it is different from Douyin. Compared with Douyin, which has not yet been listed, it does not need to consider how to find a way to survive with a business model, nor does it undertake the mission of strong revenue.

Southern Weekend reported that by the beginning of 2023, the entire Douyin ecosystem had 20,000 employees, but Video Account had only a few hundred. In the increasingly mature Douyin e-commerce, merchants can enjoy the "personal service" of official operators, but in Video Account, both the response efficiency and the docking efficiency are low. "WeChat product managers have more say, and Douyin operators have more say", which is essentially because Video Account still wants to continue the underlying logic of "strong instrumentality" inherited from WeChat.

This is also the reason why most of the anchors popular on video accounts are "ordinary people". On the one hand, it is because the product logic of WeChat and Douyin is fundamentally different. On the other hand, it is also because "ordinary people" build their own personalities, share their lives, and finally run the path of live streaming to sell goods. Compared with live streaming in the form of shopping malls, the commercial atmosphere is relatively low, which can guarantee the user experience as much as possible.

Guo Yiyi is still updating TikTok

However, although Video Account wants to take a different path from Douyin, as the status and value of Video Account at the Tencent Group level increase, Video Account, known as the "hope of the whole village", has gradually shouldered the task of "growth". Tencent's financial report data for the second quarter of 2023 showed that Video Account contributed 3 billion yuan to advertising revenue, accounting for 12% of the advertising business. By the third quarter of the same year, Tencent first proposed the concept of "WeChat pan-internal circulation advertising revenue (referring to advertising revenue with WeChat applets, video accounts, official accounts and corporate WeChat as landing pages)". This part of revenue increased by 30% year-on-year in the third quarter, contributing more than half of WeChat's advertising revenue.

E-commerce is the business that can drive "growth" the fastest. In the past two years, the "Buddhist" video accounts have begun to learn to build e-commerce systems, introduce service providers, and continuously optimize recommendation algorithms. Now, represented by anchors such as Guo Yiyi, they have begun to complete the talent ecosystem.

In January this year, in his speech at Tencent’s annual meeting, Ma Huateng said:

"A year ago, I said that Video Account was the 'hope of Tencent'. After more than a year of development, it has lived up to expectations and given us many surprises in the process of growth, giving us a solid foothold again after the failure of short videos in the past. The most important thing is that we are not following others to do the same thing, but combining our own characteristics to make short videos for acquaintances to socialize. The consumption capacity of our user group is very strong, but we still need to make up for the e-commerce knowledge we lacked over the years, so what we can fully develop this year is the video account live e-commerce. E-commerce and advertising complement each other."

As Video Account begins to bet on e-commerce and gradually takes on the shadow of Douyin, how can Tencent find its own "balance" in WeChat, a social communication software with over 1.3 billion monthly active users, and explore the key compromise between user experience and business growth? It is foreseeable that this will still be a difficult problem facing Tencent, which requires caution and constant exploration to find a solution.

Author: Wang Yaqi Editor: Si Wen

Source: WeChat public account "E-commerce Online (ID: dianshangmj)"