Should WeChat open a first-level entrance for video accounts?

This article elaborates on the view that WeChat should not open a first-level entrance to video accounts from three aspects. It is recommended for those who want to explore the future development trend of WeChat public accounts.

One picture sparked heated discussions in the industry.

The core of the discussion is whether WeChat will and should open a first-level entrance to the video account. My answer to this question is: maybe, but not.

01 WeChat is under attack from all sides. The king of social networking needs a new story

Throughout the long river of history, there is no eternal king, but there will always be newcomers who dare to challenge the crown.

WeChat is undoubtedly the absolute king in the era of mobile Internet traffic. However, WeChat has never lacked challengers, such as Baidu and Alibaba in the past and ByteDance now.

Compared with Baidu and Alibaba, the threat ByteDance poses to WeChat is undoubtedly huge, and it may even make WeChat realize that the crisis will come soon.

The consensus in the industry is that Douyin’s daily active users have reached 800 million, although it is not as high as WeChat’s 1 billion.

However, as a social tool, WeChat also has its own shortcomings, that is, the length of time users use it.

According to the "2022Q3 Mobile Internet Industry Data Research Report" released by Yuehu Data, in the third quarter of 2022, the average daily usage time of Douyin per person has reached an astonishing 140 minutes.

If WeChat wants to compete with Douyin for user usage time, it must come up with a new strategy. Generally speaking, the way to beat magic is to use magic, and for WeChat, the magic is short videos.

Before the launch of the video account in 2020, Tencent Weishi was close to failure. WeChat was actually facing a dead end: Douyin had already formed its own ecosystem at the time, and completely copying its product strategy was doomed to fail.

Fortunately, WeChat has discovered its absolute advantage, which is social relationships. In fact, the reason why Video Account can break through is because of social distribution.

Social distribution is actually a new story that WeChat tells its users, and this story does sound beautiful.

Tencent’s 2022 financial report also shows that Video Account has indeed brought significant changes to WeChat and the entire Tencent empire. This change is the long-awaited rapid growth in advertising business and user scale.

02 Are WeChat public accounts and video accounts complementary or a battle of involution?

Since the birth of Video Account, the discussion about Video Account and Public Account has never stopped. At present, it seems that this discussion will never stop.

Within WeChat’s limited traffic pool, there is bound to be some competition between the two products, both of which are content platforms.

This includes the platform's promotion and the content entrepreneurs' proactive pursuit of change.

In the past few years, WeChat officials have actively weakened the status of public accounts many times, from disrupting the information flow, embedding video accounts in the subscription account information flow, to folding service accounts.

These adjustments have caused the monetization ability of the public accounts, the king of monetization, to decline sharply, and countless self-media companies that once relied on public accounts to make their fortunes have also had to make adjustments.

Since 2021, many of the top bloggers in the WeChat official account era have taken the initiative to start video accounts. These first beneficiaries of the WeChat content ecosystem have now given back to the platform, providing great support for the early development of video accounts.

In fact, the current success of Video Account is inseparable from the early cost-effective transfusions from Official Account.

The official positioning of the two products is that both are original content components within the WeChat ecosystem, which means they have the same status.

After experiencing many forced interventions and the rapid development of video accounts, today's video accounts are indeed close to being on par with official accounts.

In the past year, video accounts have begun to feed back to public accounts, so the official video account had to urgently remove the function of displaying public accounts by default last year. With the further development of video accounts, the two content platforms are likely to complement each other in the future.

Because of this, even if WeChat opens a first-level entrance, it should be open to both official accounts and video accounts. This first-level entrance cannot be simply named video account.

03 The battle between product concept and business, can the platform do whatever it wants?

Zhang Xiaolong’s product philosophy can be summarized in two words: restraint .

This can be seen from the version iteration trajectory of WeChat. Apart from UI optimization, the changes in WeChat's core page functions in the past few decades are almost few and far between.

In 2017, mini programs were also highly anticipated, and their value within the WeChat team at the time was probably no less than that of video accounts today. Even so, in order to promote mini programs, WeChat only opened a drop-down entrance on the homepage.

It’s just that this time is different from that time.

In 2017, WeChat is still the absolute king of the Internet industry, and its overall revenue growth is also at an ultra-high speed. As the founder of WeChat, Zhang Xiaolong naturally has absolute say in product iteration.

Today's WeChat has had almost no user growth in more than two years, and its overall revenue has hardly increased. Zhang Xiaolong is also facing tremendous pressure, and it is probably difficult for him to have absolute say in product iteration.

This can be seen from the iteration direction of the video account. From the very beginning, the video account has been focusing on social distribution. This distribution method is undoubtedly an impolite disturbance to users. In the past two years, the iteration speed of the video account has been astonishing, which is obviously contrary to the "restraint" that Zhang Xiaolong has always advocated.

WeChat, which has huge traffic, is undoubtedly what everyone calls a super platform, and they also hold supreme power in the mobile Internet era.

Does holding this kind of power mean that one can do whatever one wants? I'm afraid that's not the case.

Once WeChat undergoes a major product change, or even abandons its social nature, will users be willing to buy into it? Will this give other platforms an opportunity to take advantage? Only time will tell us the answer.

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