WeChat has been iterating quite fast in the past six months

This article deeply analyzes the changes in WeChat's product iteration and the business logic behind it, providing a reference for Internet practitioners who want to understand the development direction of WeChat.

Hello everyone, recently a friend asked me to talk about the changes in WeChat. It just so happens that it is the 11th anniversary of the official account, so today I will talk about WeChat, but it is difficult to comment on it.

Everyone should be able to feel that WeChat has been significantly more active this year. I don't know if it was due to Pony Ma's pressure, but the WeChat team immediately changed from a so-called restrained personality to a radical and crazy one.

In January this year, WeChat began to charge video account merchants a technical service fee of 1-5%; in March this year, WeChat for Business, which had been free for seven years, also began to implement new charging standards; in June this year, the public account mutual selection platform also began to tighten advertising placement... This series of charging and advertising management policies all show that WeChat is starting to make money, and it wants to make money quickly.

You can’t just do infrastructure without making money, that wouldn’t really be a charity. You use WeChat products for free every day, and use WeChat to divert traffic, sell courses, and do micro-business. In the past, Brother Xiaolong may have been arrogant and didn’t care, but Brother Xiaoma can’t stand it anymore.

After all, no matter how awesome you are, you still have to follow the KPI set by Pony Ma. You can't just rely on product ideals to support 100,000 employees.

You see, after experiencing the disillusionment of Weishi, Pony Ma had a great enlightenment and pointed out that Video Account is the hope of the entire Tencent village. Now Video Account has begun to develop at a speed visible to the naked eye.

According to Tencent's recent financial report, video account advertising revenue exceeded 3 billion yuan in the second quarter, becoming an important growth driver of Tencent's online advertising business. Tencent also said that the total user usage time of video accounts almost doubled year-on-year.

In addition to high-frequency commercialization actions, there are even more iterations and upgrades at the WeChat product level. I think this year's product iteration changes may be more drastic than in the past three years.

In the past few years, WeChat always liked to come up with some self-indulgent and unnecessary features, the most typical of which was the emoji animation. Apart from causing chaos and bomb throwing in WeChat groups for a few days, it was useless. I actually have no idea why WeChat created this kind of feature.

Another example is that WeChat launched “WeChat Circles” a few years ago, which seemed to be a product similar to Knowledge Planet. However, WeChat did not operate or iterate the product after launching it, nor did it connect with the official account creator system. Did the official just want to wait for the community to form? It was really inexplicable, and in the end, “WeChat Circles” was naturally thrown into the product trash can by everyone.

To be honest, I think the reason why WeChat’s products were so self-satisfied in the past few years was that the team was living too comfortably and stayed in their comfort zone for too long.

After WeChat established its status in mobile social networking and mobile payment in its early years, there was basically no possibility of being disrupted. As for the emergence of short videos and grass-planting notes, WeChat may feel that they have little to do with itself, thinking that those are things that other product departments of Tencent need to consider. As a result, the team may have started to enjoy a leisurely life, playing golf or something.

But the situation has reversed in the past two years. The chill from another Shenzhen company has spread to the Internet industry. Tencent also has to consider reducing costs and increasing efficiency, and WeChat also has to step out of its comfort zone.

WeChat products have embarked on a crazy iteration journey, with radical iterations in sections such as Official Accounts, Video Accounts, Search, Watch, Little Green Book, Audio, and Ask.

I can't help but sigh that the Tencent that only made connectors is gone forever, and now WeChat is going to swallow everything.

01

Although there is no exact data, it has become a consensus that the opening rate of public accounts has been declining. Many young friends around me have told me that they rarely read public accounts now.

Official accounts are facing the diversion of attention from platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu. Official accounts have always been deeply branded with long pictures and texts, and short videos have obviously had a huge impact on long pictures and texts.

We can make a rough judgment through a simple phenomenon - in the past, we could see some joke-like entertainment content on official accounts, but now these funny contents have obviously become less, and at the same time, everyone is more willing to watch jokes and funny skits on short video platforms.

This shows that the content of many public accounts with long pictures and texts has shifted to short video content, and the content volume and richness of public accounts are actually shrinking - and this is a typical characteristic of products in the aging stage.

Zhang Xiaolong once regretted that the WeChat official account was originally intended to be a short content platform, but accidentally became a carrier of long pictures and texts. But in my opinion, when WeChat official accounts were first launched in 2013, the public's content demand was long pictures and texts. WeChat official accounts met user needs and achieved success, but this is also the reason why they are facing challenges now.

As far as I can remember, the traffic mechanism of official accounts has undergone two major changes, and other product iterations are based on these two changes.

The first time, subscription accounts were unified into “subscription account messages”, which also separated subscription accounts from service accounts. However, this revision caused complaints from public account creators, because subscription accounts no longer appeared at the user’s first-level entrance, and the content was further away from users.

The second time was when the content of the subscription account was changed to an information flow display. As a result, the subscription account creator's control over traffic was reduced, and operational details such as push time began to become less important.

Now, the "Take a look" recommended content often appears in the information flow of public accounts, which shows that WeChat officials have begun to further reclaim the right to distribute traffic and directly recommend content that they think users are interested in to users. This change has completely different feelings for new and old creators.

For veteran creators, WeChat's direct distribution of content traffic means that the private value of public accounts is broken. The large number of readers and fans accumulated in the past may continue to depreciate in the future. The most extreme case is that it becomes like TikTok, where traffic is basically affected by the platform and has nothing to do with whether you are a big account or not.

What’s even worse is that if you are an enterprise and want to convert all your fans and users into private traffic for WeChat for Business, then sorry, WeChat for Business has also started charging fees, and you still have to pay Tencent. After all, paying money can solve most of the world’s troubles, especially in the Tencent ecosystem.

But for new creators, appropriate platform traffic allocation can help excellent creators stand out and achieve a faster cold start of the official account. Otherwise, in such a closed ecosystem of official accounts, it is really difficult to break the circle by relying on forwarding in the circle of friends of oneself and friends, which greatly dampens the creator's enthusiasm for creation.

In my opinion, the public account ecosystem has been dead for several years. The head effect is obvious, and it is difficult for new creators to find a living space. In addition, the commercial situation of public account creators is getting worse and worse. Brands have moved a large amount of advertising budgets to short video platforms. A large number of creators are basically generating electricity with love.

Many of the public accounts that I follow, which I think are high-quality, have stopped updating in recent years. The reason must be that they cannot bring positive feedback for their creations, and I feel that there is no point in writing for a while.

I guess the reason why the traffic distribution of public accounts has not changed for a long time is because of Zhang Xiaolong’s product fundamentalism. He hopes to achieve ecological prosperity with minimal platform intervention.

But everything has a limit. In the early stage when creators were in short supply, less intervention from the platform could allow for a flourishing of content. But in today's stagnant content ecosystem, appropriate platform traffic allocation is indeed necessary, and is expected to activate the vitality of the content ecosystem.

Recently, I have found that public accounts have significantly strengthened the distribution of traffic recommended by platforms. For example, my public account called "You're Welcome" has not many fans, but the number of article readings has soared to thousands or tens of thousands, and most of the readings come from article recommendations on the platform.

It’s just that I feel like it took the WeChat team too long to realize this, and they seemed to be forced into making the change.

02

Although public accounts have long had the function of publishing pictures and texts, the short content ecosystem of public accounts has never been well built up, which is also a hidden pain in Zhang Xiaolong's heart.

This year, it is finally here, WeChat Little Green Book (short picture and text channel) is here.

When talking about the Little Green Book, we have to talk about the Little Red Book first. Now the Little Red Book has become a kind of life encyclopedia community. A large number of users search for content in the Little Red Book. Whether from the perspective of content or search, there is a certain competitive and cooperative relationship between the Little Red Book and WeChat.

In addition, the content ecology of WeChat is too "middle-aged and elderly". You will probably find that the official accounts will be laughed at by young people. In contrast, Xiaohongshu has attracted a large number of young users and has created many new lifestyle trends.

From this perspective, Little Green Book has multiple goals. On the one hand, it complements the short content ecosystem, on the other hand, it attracts young users back, and at the same time, it can also collaborate with WeChat search and video accounts.

But at the moment, I am not very optimistic about the Little Green Book product.

Because from the experience of Xiaohongshu, short content needs to build a community ecosystem. Many short contents are actually presented through user interaction, and user comments are also part of the content.

For example, we can see in Xiaohongshu that many titles like "Let's talk about how much savings the post-90s generation should have" are actually to guide users to comment, and users are also happy to comment. This user interaction mechanism requires the support of platform operations and product design, especially the support of platform content operations.

In general, the official account is a content tool product, not a community product. Therefore, simply having short content cannot form a community atmosphere and content ecology for short content.

You see, one optimization that WeChat has always been able to make on official accounts is to allow account operators to create fan group chats. However, even though Douyin, Weibo, and Xiaohongshu all have this function, official accounts have yet to implement it, which makes it very troublesome for everyone to manually create and pull groups.

I think WeChat public accounts cannot carry the ecosystem of Little Green Books, because the creation and operation logic of short pictures and texts are different from those of long pictures and texts. They face two different scenarios and two different creators’ needs. So in my opinion, WeChat actually does not need to force Little Green Books into WeChat public account products.

WeChat not only has its eyes on the short content of Xiaohongshu, but also on the audio content: first, an audio content entrance has been added to the drop-down menu at the top of the WeChat conversation; second, video account creators can also directly publish audio content; third, public account articles can be read aloud with audio.

I have to say that audio has been very popular in the past two years, and podcasts are also very popular in my small circle. According to my observation, many public account creators in the industry find it too tiring to write long articles, so they start to turn to podcasts. At least the creative pressure is not that great, and it is relatively easy to create content by chatting with guests.

I guess the logic behind WeChat is that it hopes to attract industry creators who have gone to work on small-scale Himalayas to return to the WeChat ecosystem through audio content carriers, so that the audio content can complete a closed loop within WeChat.

At the same time, WeChat also began to focus on question-and-answer content and came up with a thing called "Ask a Question", which is a bit like creating a Zhihu in WeChat.

Of course, as a "Ask a Question" section in WeChat, it is obviously more inclined to short questions and short answers at present, and will not start with a long speech like "I'm in the United States, just got off the plane" and quote classics. However, since "Ask a Question" has only been launched for a short time, it is estimated that WeChat will carry out a lot of product iterations in the future.

In general, behind the high-density iterations of Video Account, Little Green Book, Audio Portal, and Ask, we can see the corresponding Internet products:

The video account is naturally a response to Douyin, the little green book is a response to the little red book, and the audio entrance is somewhat aimed at Xiaoyuzhou and Himalaya. The question obviously collides with Zhihu. It seems that WeChat is about to start an all-out war.

03

Behind WeChat’s crazy product updates, there are three core hidden lines in the Internet world: content, e-commerce, and search.

Almost all content ecosystems in WeChat will be connected to Video Accounts. As the hope of the whole village, Video Accounts are likely to connect everything in WeChat in the future, and Video Accounts will replace Official Accounts as the central hub for creators.

The commercialization of the video account ecosystem will also promote the development of live streaming e-commerce, thereby making up for the e-commerce capabilities that Tencent has always lacked and ignored, and driving the commercialization of the entire WeChat ecosystem through e-commerce capabilities;

Finally, search can almost link some content and products, becoming an information portal. In the future, it may even spawn Siri or GPT-style artificial assistants to complete a three-in-one closed loop.

In other words, WeChat is not content to be just a social tool, but hopes to accommodate everything and become the ultimate entrance to mobile Internet life. It hopes that all user needs can be met in the WeChat ecosystem.

Many years ago, there was a discussion in the industry about the "operating system" of super apps like WeChat. Now, due to the rise of Douyin and Xiaohongshu, WeChat is actually further away from being an "operating system", but judging from WeChat's various actions, Tencent is more eager to turn WeChat into an operating system.

Look, Luo Dayou once told us that we only realized that we had done a little homework when school was about to start. This is how WeChat has behaved in recent years. It is always slow to do things, and only thinks about making efforts to improve when the situation is urgent. The public account has been sluggish for several years, and the video content should have been dealt with long ago.

It can be said that the crazy iteration of WeChat is caused by the team’s loss of market acumen in the past few years.

Of course, no matter how WeChat tries, whether its product iterations are successful or not, WeChat's basic market is still very solid. At least in the foreseeable future, it is unlikely that a social product will be able to overturn WeChat's position.

The mobile Internet dividends accumulated by WeChat more than ten years ago will be enough for Tencent to reap for a long time.

Author: Zheng Zhuoran

Source: WeChat public account "Spread Gymnastics (ID: chuanboticao)"