WeChat quietly launched new regulations, making it difficult to migrate subscription accounts to service accounts!

WeChat recently introduced a new rule that restricts subscription accounts from migrating to non-government media service accounts. This rule has sparked heated discussions among social media practitioners, with some supporting it and others opposing it, as it may affect their business operations and promotion. What are the impacts of restricted migration? Let's take a look at the analysis in this article.

Recently, many friends received the following prompt when migrating their subscription accounts to service accounts:

Migration of subscription accounts to non-government media service accounts is not currently supported. Please change the target account.

After confirming the news, some people were worried, while others applauded.

01New rules are launched: Subscription accounts cannot be migrated to service accounts for the time being

This is the new rule that WeChat launched last weekend. A fourth rule has been added to the conditions and process for migrating public accounts in Tencent customer service:

Migration of subscription accounts to non-government/institutional/media service accounts is not currently supported.

According to the official response from WeChat, the validity period of this new regulation may be longer than we thought. According to business strategy adjustments, the migration of accounts (non-government, media, and public institution accounts) from subscription accounts to service accounts will no longer be supported.

This means that the threshold for migrating subscription accounts to service accounts has been raised again, and it will not be so easy for account owners to join the user list and increase traffic through migration.

Although the new rules were not noticed by account owners who needed to migrate until they were implemented, in fact, the adjustment did not start with service accounts.

On May 30, the WeChat team released a "Notice on Optimizing the Customer Service Message Interface Capabilities of Official Accounts" in the account background. It mentioned that some official accounts frequently sent marketing content to users through the customer service message interface without users asking for customer service or requesting services, causing harassment to users.

To this end, the platform optimizes and adjusts the customer service message interface:

The limit on the number of customer service messages that developers can send to users in payment scenarios has been canceled. At the same time, in the scenario where users reply to messages, the limit on the number of customer service messages that developers can send to users within 48 hours after receiving an event notification has been reduced from 20 to 5. The rules for the three scenarios of clicking on the custom menu, following the official account, and scanning the QR code remain unchanged.

At the same time, WeChat stated that once abuse is discovered, the public account will be banned based on the severity of the violation.

Based on this, we can speculate that the new rules may be due to the abuse of the path of subscription accounts to become service accounts, and they were launched out of consideration for user experience. After all, it is not the first time that WeChat has added the "Do Not Disturb" function to service accounts.

02The bumpy service number

The last time a service account caused an uproar was in May last year, and it was still related to the “Do Not Disturb” user experience.

Since then, WeChat has been updated to the latest version. After users set "Do Not Disturb" in any service account, the message reminders of all service accounts they follow will be turned off with one click and displayed as a small red dot in the message list. If you need to turn on reminders for a service account, you need to find the service account and turn off "Do Not Disturb" for it separately.

Going back further, in January 2021, the WeChat team issued an announcement stating that due to the possibility that the service account template message capabilities may harass users and fail to meet some business needs, it began grayscale testing of the service account subscription notification function. That is, if a user clicks on the subscription once, the developer can only send a message to the user once, and so on.

This is a "blow" to service accounts. After all, template messages are an important function that makes service accounts popular among operators and able to reach users.

As early as 2018 and before, the function of upgrading subscription accounts to service accounts was repeatedly jumping between online and offline:

• On May 18, 2016, the upgrade function was taken offline for the first time without any explicit notice. The upgrade entrance below the public account information and the question page about “how to upgrade a WeChat subscription account to a service account” disappeared directly.

•On September 12, 2016, the entrance for upgrading subscription accounts to service accounts was reopened in the background of the official account.

•On December 27, 2018, the WeChat team announced that the subscription account upgrade to service account function will be offline. If you need to change the account type, you need to migrate.

The 2018 feature decommissioning notice explained that the feature would be decommissioned because it was discovered that the feature was being abused and the switching of message reminders during upgrades caused harassment to users.

Schrodinger's user experience, the "Do Not Disturb" function is unavoidable. Based on this consideration, WeChat has made many moves on service accounts in recent years. When the function was upgraded offline, a migration path was left for everyone to change the account type. Now it has been cancelled again in writing, which shows that the management is even more slack.

03What are the impacts of migration restrictions?

After the new regulations came into effect that subscription accounts do not support migration to non-government/institutional/media type service accounts, some people are happy while others are worried.

From the user's perspective, fewer service accounts have been migrated to the chat list, which is a good thing and keeps away from malicious marketing.

But from the perspective of the account owner, the one-size-fits-all new migration rules will bring operational constraints.

At a time when information flows are taking off and public account readership is suffering, many account owners will choose to change their account type, migrating from subscription accounts to service accounts, in order to get closer to users and reach them through daily marketing push.

However, after the new regulations, this convenient path no longer exists. The subscription account is trapped in the subscription account list, and the difficulty of user operation has also increased.

From one-click upgrade to migration, and now to the reduction of migration service account types, WeChat has been very strict in managing service accounts. Service accounts have also gone from being a tool to connect account owners and users, to a period of wild development with marketing everywhere, to now becoming increasingly "silent".

The trend of industry development is irreversible, and we can only keep adapting to the ever-changing new regulations. The platform always stands on the side of the majority of users, and what practitioners can and need to do is perhaps to adjust themselves.

Author: Chen Chumu

Source: WeChat public account "Weiguojiang (ID: wjam123456)"