How many brands have been killed by the “suspension of updates on Weibo, WeChat and Douyin”?

Previously, "suspending Weibo, WeChat and Douyin" became a hot topic. Some people believe that social media such as "WeChat, WeChat and Douyin" should be done by professionals, and brands only need to do what they should do. However, "suspending Weibo, WeChat and Douyin" is actually a deviation from brand building, or a logical confusion in the understanding of brand value.

Around 2019, there was a call in the advertising and marketing industry to “stop updating Weibo, WeChat and Douyin”, which quickly became a hot topic through the voices of several industry KOLs.

The reason why the topic of "stop posting on Weibo, WeChat and Douyin" became popular at that time was, of course, that it hit the pain points of social media marketing of brands. But looking back now, the idea of ​​"stop posting on Weibo, WeChat and Douyin" actually caused great harm to brand building. Weibo, WeChat and Douyin did not disappear from the brand self-media position, but became more important today.

The key point of the KOL who called for “stop updating Weibo and Douyin” at that time was:

• The dividends of social media communication have gradually faded. The era of screen-sweeping like Durex Weibo and H5 interaction is gone forever. Brands do not need to waste resources on self-media;
• Most of the social media content operated by brands is "self-talking" advertising content, which belongs to the "self-entertainment" of the brand. However, no one likes to watch advertisements, and users have no reason to pay attention to them.
• Compared with professional content KOLs, brands’ own content capabilities are relatively poor. The content quality of a large number of official microblogs and official blogs is questionable and cannot arouse user interest.

In a word, based on the professional division of labor, social media such as Weibo, WeChat and Douyin should be managed by professional KOLs and MCNs to do content operations and produce content that users like, while brands should do what brands should do, such as producing good products and providing good services.

This view seems very reasonable at first glance, but it does not stand up to careful scrutiny. Today, all successful brands in the market have not only not "stopped updating Weibo, WeChat and Douyin", but are even operating emerging platforms such as Bilibili and Xiaohongshu, and using social media platforms to achieve business growth.

What's wrong with "stop updating on Weibo and Douyin"?

(“Double Weibo and Douyin” is used below to refer to the brand’s official self-media platforms on major platforms, not limited to WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin)

"Stop updating Weibo, WeChat and Douyin" is actually a deviation from brand building, or it may be a logical confusion in understanding brand value.

1. “Weibo, Weibo and Douyin” are not only about communication, but also about business growth

In fact, the logic behind “suspending updates on Weibo, WeChat and Douyin” is similar to saying that the official website is useless today and the content on the official website is self-entertaining, so we don’t need to have an official website; or it may be better to let internet celebrities, KOLs and distributors help us sell goods than to have a Tmall flagship store, so we don’t need to have our own e-commerce flagship store, because others sell goods more professionally and can help us sell better.

Obviously, these viewpoints are not worth refuting. The construction of an official website is still necessary, as it is the most convenient official way for users to recognize the brand. The construction of an e-commerce flagship store is even more necessary and has become an important source of business growth in recent years.

The brand’s self-media accounts such as “WeChat, Weibo and Douyin” are actually similar to official websites. If users want to search and understand brand information on the WeChat platform, the most authoritative and efficient channel is to check the content of the official WeChat account.

If users find that the brand has no official Weibo account or the official Weibo content has stopped updating when they actively search, it is obvious that the users’ trust in the brand will be greatly reduced, and they will lose the opportunity of extremely accurate traffic conversion in vain.

Those marketing KOLs who strongly call for "stopping updates on Weibo, WeChat and Douyin" are actually only analyzing the value of brand self-media from the perspective of "communication", rather than conducting a comprehensive analysis from the perspective of overall brand building and business operations. This is enough to show the cognitive limitations of traditional third-party KOLs.

More importantly, "Weibo, Weibo and Douyin" are the core hubs of the corresponding platform's business operations.

For example, official accounts can connect mini-programs, Moments ads, video accounts, corporate WeChat, private domain communities, etc., thereby building a full-domain operating system under the Tencent advertising ecosystem. Although the content opening rate of official accounts may have been declining in recent years, its importance to companies in the Tencent ecosystem is actually becoming increasingly prominent. For the future release of the platform's 2B capabilities, official accounts will obviously become a core hub.

The same is true for Douyin. As Douyin's e-commerce ecosystem matures, empowering brand official accounts will better provide B-side services to enterprises. In the future, the expansion of the business capabilities of a large number of enterprises will obviously be based on the official brand accounts on the platform.

Therefore, we should not think that “Weibo, Weibo and Douyin” are just new media. It actually involves the construction of the operating system of the corresponding platform, which is the core of business and growth.

2. Only by doing well in “Double Weibo and One Douyin” can we master the sovereignty of traffic

The danger of “stopping updates on Weibo, WeChat and Douyin” is that it hands over the opportunity for brands to connect directly with users, and brands built in this way are actually vulnerable.

A brand’s “traffic sovereignty” is the brand’s lifeline and needs to be firmly in the hands of the brand itself. Only in this way can it more effectively achieve certain growth and resist fluctuations in the external environment. Otherwise, once the external environment changes and competition intensifies, the brand will collapse at an alarming speed.

A large number of new consumer brands have provided us with the latest cases. We might as well use live streaming as an example for analogy.

The brand has achieved rapid sales growth with the help of top live-streaming anchors such as Li Jiaqi and Viya. This is similar to how brands can achieve screen-sweeping through the use of top KOLs in social media communications.

The problem is that although KOLs can achieve screen swiping and sales, the link between the brand and the user is very weak, because the essence is that users trust KOLs and channels, not brands.

In live streaming sales, the reason why users buy branded products is due to their trust in the live streamer, rather than a spontaneous recognition of the branded products. This is also the reason why the return rate of products sold through live streaming by internet celebrities remains high.

If users buy good products through a live-streaming anchor, they will trust the anchor’s recommendation more, rather than developing a trust link with the brand behind it. If users buy unsatisfactory products through a live-streaming anchor, they will lose points in their impression of the brand and forgive the anchor’s helplessness in making money.

From the perspective of risk and return, it is not cost-effective for brands. Therefore, this behavior of placing KOLs can only show its effect during the traffic dividend period. Once the platform traffic dividend disappears, the brand will immediately enter the "traffic prison" and barely survive.

It can be said that this simple investment behavior cannot be efficiently accumulated into brand assets, but instead serves as a wedding dress for the channel and does not have much long-term value.

Live streaming and official media operations are essentially the same thing. When the price of advertising is getting higher and higher, if a brand does not have its own private traffic base, it is doomed to be eliminated by the market. So we can now see that more and more brands no longer rely on live streaming by internet celebrities, but instead build their own brand broadcasting system.

3. The operation of “Weibo, Weibo and Douyin” is the origin of brand content IP

Today, when traffic costs are high, both platform dividends and demographic dividends have receded, and content itself has become the most effective way to attract user attention in the long-term construction of a brand.

I also believe that due to the flood of information and the fragmentation of channels, in addition to its own category positioning, brands can only stand out in the minds of users by building IP. The construction of brand IP is inseparable from the support of content operations, and the support of content operations is inseparable from the coordinated voice of "Weibo, Weibo and Douyin".

But similarly, content operation, like brand building, is a method that takes a long time to show results in the early stages but has great potential in the long run. Therefore, many companies will be misled by ideas such as "stop updating Weibo, WeChat and Douyin", which is essentially a deviation from brand long-termism.

The brand's gradual progress in the content of "Weibo, Weibo and Douyin" will become the content and interaction base for core users, and "Weibo, Weibo and Douyin" will also become a brand content asset pool, which will have a certain compound interest effect.

In fact, high-quality content can often transcend time and bring long-tail traffic. For example, our account for spreading gymnastics still has many users who follow and add me as a friend after reading the articles I published two years ago. The long-tail effect of content is more obvious in decentralized platforms such as Xiaohongshu, official accounts, and Bilibili.

Of course, the previous controversy about whether to "stop updating Weibo, WeChat and Douyin" was that a large number of brands lacked the ability to operate new media content, and the content they released was often "self-talking" and "self-entertaining" public relations articles, which users were not interested in.

But this also depends on the situation and cannot be generalized:

• The content of the brand’s public account is itself an outlet for official activities and official news, which is similar to the role of official website information release. It is actually valuable to users and provides official information services;
• The brand's official account is mainly aimed at B-side partners, such as distributors, supply chains, resource providers, etc. Their content demands are not like those of C-side consumers, which pursue communication and fun, but they just need to obtain brand information.
• The brand does lack content capabilities, which results in the inability of self-media content to attract users. If this is true, the correct approach for the company is obviously not to "stop updating Weibo, WeChat and Douyin", but to find ways to supplement its own content operation capabilities.

In summary, we believe that "Weibo, Weibo and Douyin" and "direct e-commerce stores" are the most effective ways for brands to connect directly with users online, and through these two major positions of "quality" and "effectiveness", a complete full-link marketing system combining public and private domains can be extended. The corresponding "content operation capabilities" and "e-commerce operation capabilities" are the two major capabilities that brands must focus on cultivating in the future.

In summary, “suspending updates on Weibo, Sina Weibo and Douyin” is actually equivalent to closing the Tmall flagship store, except that the sales loss caused by closing the Tmall flagship store is obvious, while the brand loss caused by “suspending updates on Weibo, Sina Weibo and Douyin” will take companies a longer time to discover and regret.

Author: Zheng Zhuoran

WeChat public account: Spread Gymnastics (ID: chuanboticao)