I don’t know how many people have noticed the slogan on the login page of WeChat Public: “Even small individuals have their own brands.
This slogan is like an empty phrase today, because the public number has long departed from the original intention that everyone can create.
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Zhang Xiaolong confessed at the 2020 WeChat Open Class pro that the subsequent development trend of public numbers was indeed a mistake of WeChat, which limited the scope of creators and suppressed the growth of short content.
The public number and the circle of friends have not been able to complete the mission, the video number can be?
A similar vision of making traffic universal and the threshold of creation lower sounds too idealistic in any business model.
As if there would not exist a pure acquaintance social software in the world, there is also not a pure creation platform for individuals.
The opening of the video number is a continuation of the original intention of short content creation, the past nearly a year of frequent revisions, seemingly chaotic, but in fact, the main idea is to “stimulate the passion of ordinary people to create”.
More than a dozen revisions, at least seven times with friends, friends circle related. From the addition of personal attention, friends recommended to the online friends watching live, near the live, WeChat video number is trying to create a “around people are playing video” atmosphere.
The official quick editing tool “second cut” is online, directly compared to the video platform editing aids such as must cut, cut screen.
The full opening of the small store is also intended to lower the threshold of live with goods, only need to improve ID information to enter the distribution channel, seamlessly connected to Jingdong, Jindo and other e-commerce platform small program, do not worry about the source of goods.
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Even smaller individuals have their own brands, and even more sunken groups can create freely.
WeChat’s goal is still so good, but the huge volume and market demand may not allow it to pursue the ideal.
With the public number “in the look” function as the beginning, the private domain traffic further to the public domain traffic, social products highlight the community attributes, the main force of the creation of video number is still the group of professional.
On the one hand, the video number is elevated to the same weight as the circle of friends, and on the other hand, the video area of the subscription number “Casual Look” is launched, so the boundary between life sharing and vertical content becomes blurred.
For a huge thing with 1 billion daily activities, any move by WeChat will affect the whole Internet.
You can say it is restrained and limited, or naive and unrealistic, but if you look at all the Internet products in China, except WeChat, no one has the real capital to talk about “everyone is a brand”.
It is helpless to admit this fact.
WeChat, public number 3
1
Unrealistic pure UGC
WeChat is perhaps even more helpless, in the journey to the starry sea, every step is going “wrong”.
In the early years, WeChat preferred voice messages and encouraged people to send pictures, but the real beneficiaries were text creators.
Later, the media upgrade, WeChat open video channel, no surprise, the real benefit or professional team.
There is no reason for the short video MCN to let go of the huge flow pool of WeChat, but the business model of the video number has yet to be explored.
From the moment of the birth of the video number, everyone’s attention is gradually focused on the cash, commercialization, which means that not much space left for UGC.
Take the popular B station, it is going to commercialization, UGC space is shrinking, more and more people subconsciously to think about how to get the audience to vote more coins.
On the surface, WeChat’s solid user base can easily satisfy its commercialization purpose, however past experience tells us that WeChat is most of the time doing the work for others.
One of the root causes lies in the fact that WeChat’s original intention was just to be a communication tool to connect individuals together.
Social products are a collection of people, while community products are a collection of content. What WeChat Video wants to do is to create community content based on social products.
Community products will definitely have social attributes, but they are not the same as social itself. Social is the tool thinking, community is the business thinking.
Reverse thinking, if B station is first commercialized, and then UGC transformation, what will be the result?
The answer is that B station will lose its strong sticky fan base.
The community is a product that needs to be cultivated in the long run to catch big fish. If you skip the cultivation process and go commercial, you will either open the way for PGC or lose your regular users.
WeChat has never wanted to put the word “business” on the title page of its own map, hoping to provide a platform for users to freely grow their own business models.
So, WeChat became the big winner.
Looking back at the evolution of the public number, we will find that its community ecology has been extremely slow to develop, and only recently did it access features such as topic tags and similar recommendations, and the comment section is not yet open to new numbers.
But if the community ecology of WeChat Public could have been completed two years earlier, it wouldn’t be facing such a confusing situation now.
The emergence of “take a look” and “take a look” ended this Buddhist development, but the video number came into the world with the mission of UGC, but head into another business ecology.
Everyone is staring at every little action of WeChat, calculating how to profit. At this time, WeChat still constantly emphasizes the opportunity to be a bit pale and powerless.
The relationship between UGC and the community is actually a question of whether the chicken produces eggs or the egg produces chicken, which makes sense, but you just can’t separate them.
In the current situation, WeChat video number does not have the strong correlation between UGC and community, it has the prototype of community, social genes, but no UGC growth environment.
In the moment of public number towards specialization and high threshold, WeChat should expect that the first to open the video gate must be the professional team, such as public number authors, micro business and shake fast KOL.
The first to come is bound to take advantage of the first-mover advantage, which has been verified by most short video APP.
2
Video number most like who
Video number choose to come out in the short video market tends to be mature, many people interpret this move is forced to pressure.
It seems that shake fast desperately grabbed the user time, should have belonged to WeChat.
The opponent is certainly not only shake fast, to the video number currently presented content and form, almost can find the shadow of all the short video APP on the market.
The comments below the video have been sliding, even let people instantly back to the era of television. The single column semi-immersive browsing opens up enough space for socializing, and the presence of #topics is hard not to remind people of Weibo.
In the past, there was a gap between it and Weibo in terms of hot search, but with the launch of “Hotspot Square”, the gap has been further reduced. If we include the content of the “Casual Look” at the entrance of the subscription number, the double column selection mode will give users the illusion of entering the B station.
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(Left: B-site, right: WeChat Casual Look)
For something truly original, “mentioned” counts as one, and any user who enters the creator’s page can see which videos have been @ the creator. This setting is good for extending the boundary of acquaintances’ circle of friends, but the significance for creators with huge followers is not so clear.
Take the celebrity V on Weibo for example, fans usually do not care how many ordinary people have @ their idols, they only care about who their idols have @.
The socially focused WeChat video numbers and Racer should not ignore the social margins, even though they cannot fully apply the operating theories of Jitterbug and Weibo celebrities.
Like and watch is a risky behavior for privacy-conscious users, and video numbers even extend this risk further: you can see all the recent updates that your friends have liked. At the same time, videos that are liked and watched by friends are not necessarily valuable to the individual.
If the passive message receiving model is not matched with highly intelligent algorithms, it can easily lead to an uninformed hodgepodge.
Embrace the algorithm? WeChat is obviously torn, it is impossible to give up social distribution, so it has to try to balance between social distribution and algorithmic recommendations. The result of this balance is that anyone is like.
Carefully hoping that the user is immersed, and carefully abandoning the full screen.
The nearby live broadcast and the long video collection on the user’s homepage are the only two panels that retain the full-screen mode, except that the former has uneven content and the latter has a circuitous channel.
Zhang Xiaolong said, every day there are 500 million people spit, 100 million people to teach him how to do the product, too many voices, all according to the user vote to do the product is impossible.
The video number may also be the birth of professional consideration, such a collection of the characteristics of the product, no reason to come from the imagination, but is completely reflective of the WeChat 7.0 version of the release of the phrase “because you see, so there is”.
This philosophical statement reveals WeChat’s ambition: Everywhere you see, there is a frontier.
Images, text, video and audio, all the ways to reach the world and connect people, all have room to exist, which is the common face of all social giants.
From this perspective, it is appropriate to say that WeChat Video is like anything, and conversely it can be considered like no one. The original should have achieved its own content ecology, especially the need to guard the boundary between public domain traffic and private domain traffic.
3
Hotspot Square
and marketing erosion
On December 3, a small change was made to the article push page of WeChat Public.
Below the title of each article, the number of reads, likes and x friends read the article.
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It’s not uncommon to show the number of reads and likes in advance, but video apps in particular pay attention to this, which somehow informs users of the hotness of the article (video) and thus adds to the headline effect.
It is important to note that x friends have seen it is different from the previous display, and now users can see this data more easily.
People in a certain set of social relationships may not care about what is happening on Weibo Square and Hot Search, but they will definitely care about whether they are lagging behind in their friends’ circle.
WeChat’s social recommendation to a large extent is precisely to see this psychology, the video number even directly social recommendations and algorithmic recommendations completely separate into “friends” and “recommendations” section.
What is confusing is that Hotspot Square integrates social and algorithmic recommendations together.
In the new “Hotspot”, users can see both official custom news and videos, as well as the content that most of their friends are following, with the video content being second only to the “News”.
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We can see that WeChat attaches great importance to the video number, hoping that it can surpass the influence of the public number, and at the same time, WeChat is increasing the video content of the public number.
All the video content from both channels is gathered in the hotspot square, which is easy to give people a sense of disorganization, but it’s a bit hasty to think that WeChat doesn’t know what it wants to do.
Back to the iteration of WeChat, we can have a very clear answer: horse racing.
Video number and public video, who can finally occupy the market, who is the purpose of WeChat. Of course, the two have been the most ideal state of symbiosis, but this ideal, there has never been a video community reached.
The head effect will be reflected in the hotspot square as more and more professional teams join, and the hotspot square, which lacks strong operational intervention, will eventually be reduced to a content distribution channel.
The video number may also develop into a marketing square due to the existence of the recommendation mechanism of friends watching.
Users who are used to protecting privacy or lacking in the habit of liking will be treated unfairly in receiving information.
The more friends WeChat users have, the more likely they are to be in the marketing square. While friends circle ads can still choose “not interested in advertising products”, video numbers and hotspots put users in a completely passive situation.
Unless you directly close the “look at” and “video number”, let WeChat return to the original tool, but then, the content square will lose its meaning of existence.
It is obvious to all that WeChat Public has already passed its peak moment, and it is very difficult to get out of the circle through WeChat Public again nowadays, and the revamped content recommendation mechanism has further increased this difficulty.
Time sorting has been replaced by preference sorting, and while small and medium-sized creators are just figuring out the shape of the market, head creators have already switched to video content and extended their second tentacles to hotspot squares.
In other words, the more the creators who take up all the resources in the public era, the more they are able to “circle” on the video number.
So where should we find the space that is really left for ordinary people and the long tail?
4
Small stores
Long-tail effect is promising in the future
WeChat wants to do e-commerce aggregation platform has a long history, the earliest is in 2014 WeChat small store.
At that time, although the WeChat small store lowered the technical threshold for ordinary people to open online stores, it did not solve the problems of logistics, sources of goods, customer service and marketing, so it achieved the third-party institutions such as Youzan and Weimeng.
Plus, the e-commerce market had not yet seen the trend of decentralization, and the model of e-commerce + was not mature, so many of the ideas of the WeChat small store became paper talk.
On July 14 this year, WeChat again opened the WeChat small store internal test invitation, facing a shake fast polished and explored e-commerce + market, resistance dropped significantly.
This time the WeChat small store not only lowered the technical threshold, but also through the aggregation of sources such as Jindo, in the true sense of the word, to achieve zero cost to sell goods.
The page design and function settings are a change from the amateurish atmosphere of the past, with channels for product information release, order and logistics management, marketing, fund settlement and customer service and after-sales, etc. All are available.
Although this system is not at all innovative and cannot catch up with proven business service systems such as Youzan in a short period of time, it is perfectly adequate as a 2C product.
In order to facilitate the distribution of copywriters, the goods also support the generation of copy, pictures and posters with a single click, basically taking over the stick of copywriting screen of micro business. To paraphrase Ali’s popular phrase, the ceiling of WeChat e-commerce may be “no hard business for micro-businesses”.
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Perhaps the best chance of realizing the concept of “everyone is a brand” in the WeChat ecology is the WeChat Small Shop.
The user home page of the video number can directly see the small store entrance, this entrance is also the channel of public and private traffic, but to go through this channel, but also need community content to attract traffic.
For users who can not produce good content to open a store, community operation is also a good method, but then everything is still back to the era of micro business, the only change is the platform.
Obviously the official aggregation platform like WeChat small store, than the micro business products all based on personal conscience to have credibility guarantee.
Mature e-commerce players may not care about WeChat small store such a small white products, preliminary browsing can be found, the huge amount of fans of the video number not all have opened WeChat small store, and later may not be stationed.
Thus, the space and time left for long-tail users is relatively large, and ordinary users have time to discover their own private domain traffic, and then these flows into consumption value, even if they do not produce video content, they can also achieve revenue.
On the contrary, the video number itself, its business model is still in the vague and unclear stage, leaving it less time.
Once professional teams find that they can’t reap tangible benefits on video numbers, they will quickly abandon this distribution channel.
The reduction of PGC content does not immediately make way for UGC. More likely, daily activity will decline as refined content disappears, as user habits need constant content to be maintained.
To stabilize quality content creators, WeChat needs to further abandon the ambitious goal of social recommendations and expand the space for active subscriptions (does that sound familiar?). Yes it is the operation mode of the public number before the revision). Otherwise, before the maturity of the community ecology, worthless friends like the recommendation has first destroyed WeChat’s unique acquaintance relationship chain.
The problem in front of the WeChat video number is not complicated, simple, the only thing it needs to do is to maintain the needs of existing user groups, rather than blindly to expand the territory.
Vision is very important, to keep the mountain is the most difficult, more questions about the cultivation, less questions about the future.
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