What should official accounts do in 2023?

This article aims to answer the question of whether public account operators should continue to operate, considering the impact of the WeChat ecosystem adjustment on different gameplays. Through the analysis of video account diversion, third-party platform diversion, batch account creation and hotspot + search gameplay, readers can understand the challenges and opportunities that each gameplay may face in this adjustment. It is suitable for people who are interested in WeChat public account operation.

When I typed this topic, I was actually a little hesitant, because this topic has been discussed countless times over the past five years.

However, recently, the official WeChat official account has made a lot of adjustments, so I still want to talk about this issue. Here I will briefly summarize some recent changes in the platform.

1. All advertising platforms will be launched online, and it is clearly stipulated that starting from July, advertising can only be placed on the official platform. (Regulating advertising and charging tolls)

2. Changes to migration rules: Except for media and government agencies, subscription accounts cannot be migrated to service accounts, and only service accounts can be migrated to subscription accounts. (To combat the behavior of short-term cashing out after migrating to service accounts)

3. The revision of subscription account information flow will be further strengthened. (Reclaiming the control over traffic distribution)

Although these adjustments seem unrelated, they are actually all doing one thing, which is centralization. In other words, WeChat is gradually taking back the rights previously delegated to public account owners.

After this round of adjustments, WeChat will completely control the content distribution rights and commercialization rights of the public account ecosystem, which will definitely be of great help to WeChat in increasing revenue in the short term. For account owners, their interests in the short term will inevitably be damaged. The long-term development of the entire WeChat public account ecosystem is currently unpredictable, but I am not very optimistic.

So for public account players, is it necessary to continue doing it?

There is no need to elaborate on the overall trend. Today's public account market is definitely getting worse day by day. According to my understanding, there are only a few ways to make money on public accounts in recent years:

1. Video accounts direct traffic to public accounts, and then receive CPC ads to realize cash. Although the official permission for video accounts to be displayed silently was closed in August last year, there are still people doing related businesses. Some people acquire accounts that had permissions before, and others use platform loopholes to apply for permissions.

2. Use third-party platforms to attract public accounts and monetize through knowledge and advertising. This type of gameplay is usually for entrepreneurial and sideline accounts.

3. Create accounts in batches to get more traffic. Currently, there are more accounts in the emotional, social, and historical categories.

4. Account owners with a certain number of fans use the hotspot + search method. In this year's WeChat Open Class, the official focused on introducing the gameplay of Chuangyebang, and Qiuye and others have also been using this gameplay.

Among these four types of gameplay, which ones will be affected by this adjustment? Which ones will benefit from it?

01 Video account diversion

This method can quickly acquire traffic, but there are also obvious problems, that is, the traffic is usually not accurate, and many users of video accounts do not have the habit of browsing the content of public accounts.

Therefore, the public accounts that are diverted from such video accounts have a very low opening rate. The players I have noticed who do this kind of gameplay generally do not have the ability to produce content, which also makes it difficult for the content of such accounts to have an advantage in the subscription account information flow recommendation, so this revision will have a relatively large impact on this kind of gameplay.

At the same time, in the long run, the content threshold requirements of the video account platform will become higher and higher, and the cost of gaining traffic for the video account is also increasing.

The traffic of short videos is essentially a probability problem, so the prerequisite for this type of gameplay is to have a relatively large number of matrix numbers. In this process, anti-platform risk control techniques will inevitably be involved, which all require experience and execution.

02 Third-party traffic diversion

With this type of gameplay, the content production capacity is absolutely guaranteed, and it also has certain advantages in information flow recommendations, but their performance will definitely be affected in the short term.

For this type of players, the ability to produce content on multiple platforms is the core competitiveness. How to ensure stable and high-quality content updates actually tests the players' professional knowledge reserves.

03 Take a look at the account

Almost the biggest beneficiary of this revision, this type of gameplay mainly relies on traffic to monetize.

As long as there are enough accounts and the content is published diligently, there will always be a lot of content every day, and the income of the traffic owner will naturally not be bad.

However, the difficulty of this type of gameplay lies in how to ensure the daily operation of a large number of accounts. (Imagine that you need to operate more than 20 accounts every day, and each account publishes 8 pieces of content every day. You can reprint but there must be no copyright issues. Isn't this very difficult?)

04 Hotspots + Search

Usually, players who use this gameplay already have a certain number of fans. Changes in the distribution mechanism will have an impact on the subscription traffic of these gameplays. However, because Kankan traffic tends to be more inclined towards hot content and content with good basic interaction data, the content of these players is more likely to appear in a better position in Kankan recommendation.

At the same time, WeChat has been paying more and more attention to SouYisou traffic, and account permissions and content basic data will have a strong positive impact on the ranking of SouYisou results, so the content of these players is likely to experience a fluctuating increase in the short term. (The number of views of a certain article suddenly increased a lot)

No matter how it is adjusted and iterated, WeChat official accounts are still a content platform with more than 300 million daily active users. Opportunities still exist objectively, but the difficulty is indeed increasing sharply.

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