The gameplay and rules of WeChat ecosystem fission growth!

Looking back at the development of mobile Internet in recent years, it is not difficult to find that innovative growth has always been a topic of great concern:

• O2O was born in 2014
• The sharing economy that took off in 2015
• New retail emerged in 2016
• Short videos, MCNs, and IP influencers in 2017
• Fission marketing, growth hacking, and traffic pools that emerged in 2018
• Private domain traffic and KOC appeared in 2019

It is not difficult to find that these are all based on the growth of the WeChat ecosystem.

Having seen so many screen-sweeping cases and experienced many fission projects, we might as well summarize the gameplay and rules of WeChat ecosystem fission growth so as to better innovate and find growth methods suitable for our own products.

1. WeChat Ecosystem and Traffic Pool

1. What are the characteristics of WeChat ecosystem?

The reason why WeChat ecosystem has become an important platform for Internet companies to acquire new customers is that it has several major characteristics:

(1) Huge user scale

The number of daily active users alone is far greater than that of other social platforms. According to the latest statistics, WeChat’s daily active users have exceeded 1 billion, making it undoubtedly a national-level application.

(2) Ecological improvement

From Moments, WeChat groups, public accounts to mini-programs, all of them reflect WeChat's determination and attitude to improve the ecosystem, promote ecological development, and promote activity in an empowering way.

(3) Flexible law enforcement

Even though WeChat has introduced policies many times to maintain the ecosystem, the actual implementation level will always rely on the judgment of multiple parties to decide whether to enforce the law and to what extent to enforce the law, so as to avoid damage caused by excessive enforcement and avoid excessive leniency that affects user experience.

2. Three major traffic pools in WeChat ecosystem

(1) WeChat ID

In terms of traffic acquisition, WeChat accounts have a slow growth rate, but products with high average order value, high decision-making costs, and high trust dependence are very suitable for operating and attracting new customers through WeChat accounts, so the importance of KOC is highlighted at this time.

(2) WeChat Group

Compared with WeChat accounts, WeChat groups grow very quickly, but the maintenance and operation costs are high, and the trust level fluctuates greatly. Service-oriented products are more suitable for operation and promotion through WeChat groups. Many of the paid knowledge communities we have seen are the best examples.

(3) Official Account

Compared with WeChat accounts and WeChat groups, public accounts have a moderate growth rate, average maintenance and operation costs, weaker ability to reach users, and the current opening rate of public accounts is decreasing. Therefore, public accounts are suitable for promoting and operating products with lower decision-making costs.

After understanding the WeChat ecosystem and its traffic pool, we actually understand that different products must choose the appropriate traffic pool to operate and promote them, and cannot blindly invest and cause unnecessary waste of resources.

2. Fission growth and "one data, two points"

Fission growth is actually a method of achieving user growth by guiding users to engage in social dissemination through certain welfare baits.

Common examples around us include Pinduoduo, Luckin Coffee, and other rapidly growing companies, all of which have acquired massive users through fission growth. This shows that this is a powerful tool for user growth.

The essence of fission growth is a kind of social communication, and WeChat has its own social attributes, wide user coverage, and a complete ecosystem. It is undoubtedly the best place for fission growth. This also means that the path of WeChat ecosystem operation growth is very worthy of our exploration.

When it comes to the significance of fission growth, it can be summarized as follows:

• For advertising, fission growth can reduce costs
• It has a traffic circle effect and is easy to spread among groups with significant circle attributes.
• It has first-mover advantage and user stickiness, which is based on social attributes.
• Fission growth can bring a massive user base, which can easily form barriers

1. One data: K factor

The K factor is a data that can measure the effect of fission growth. It is also an important indicator that cannot be ignored in fission growth. It can reflect the effect of fission growth activities in attracting new customers.

In a fission growth activity, the K factor can be regarded as the ratio of the number of new users to the number of seed users, that is, K=number of new users/number of seed users.

It is not difficult to find that the larger the K value is, the better the effect of fission growth is, and the number of new users attracted far exceeds the number of seed users. Therefore, only when the K value is greater than 1, it is considered a successful fission growth activity.

2. Two points: sharing point and sedimentation point

In a fission growth activity, success depends on two key points: sharing points and sedimentation points. This is because sharing points can help spread and reach a wider range of users, and sedimentation points are an important position for user retention. Otherwise, new users will easily be lost if they do not settle.

Generally speaking, both sharing points and sedimentation points require reasonable activity paths to achieve. Most sharing points use honors and benefits as bait, while sedimentation points are based on service functions such as receiving products and receiving reminders.

Regarding the growth of WeChat ecosystem operations, once you have a good understanding of the above basic concepts, it will be easier for you to understand how to design growth strategies and how to choose traffic pools.

3. Eight steps to community fission

Community fission is a fission method that uses the operation of WeChat groups as the main carrier, and guides users to engage in social communication through the combination of human and robot. The process is as follows: Posters are posted - users scan the QR code to join the group - after joining the group, the robot guides users to forward the group poster - users take screenshots and send them back to the group - the robot reviews - guides users to follow the official account to receive benefits.

During the entire fission group process, eight major preparation steps need to be completed: personnel arrangement, fission gifts, fission posters, fission live codes, group message guide words, group control robot settings, common questions and answers for group users, and sedimentation points.

1. Personnel Arrangement

From personal experience, I recommend forming a group of 2 people, with each group operating 30-50 groups a day, following a shift system, and formulating a reasonable incentive mechanism, because execution is an important support for community fission.

2. Fission Gifts

When choosing gifts, two major principles should be followed: sense of value and closeness. If you think about it carefully, if the product itself does not meet user needs, fails to bring value to users, and is difficult to be close to actual scenarios, it will be difficult to arouse user interest and will lead to cold start failure, so the gift link cannot be ignored.

3. Fission poster

The popular posters usually have seven characteristics:

1. Sense of superiority: It can highlight the user's good taste, inspire the user to dare to show off, and facilitate the establishment of personal image.
2. Scarcity: words like limited time or limited quantity usually make users more interested.
3. Exceeding expectations: It can give users extra surprises and enhance their favorability.
4. Style characteristics: Use tones that can arouse users' emotions, and avoid using cold tones.
5. Trust: Users are usually invited to participate in a friendly tone.
6. Main title: concise and easy to understand, clear font is the first priority.
7. Content introduction: Outstanding selling points, emphasizing user interests.

4. Fission live code

The function of the fission live code is to break the limitation of 100 people on WeChat who cannot scan the code to join the group. Here, tools such as Jianqunbao can be used to improve operational efficiency.

5. Bulk message guide words

When users scan the QR code to join the group, we need to provide them with group rules, product introductions, sharing techniques and fission posters so that users can immediately understand how to participate in the event.

6. Swarm fission robot settings

When the user completes the task of forwarding the poster, the robot should automatically send the speech, combined with manual review and urging, to shorten the time the user waits for a response.

7. FAQ for group users

During the entire community fission activity, documents such as methods of listening to lectures, methods of sharing on WeChat Moments, introductions to courses and content, etc. need to be prepared in advance to facilitate answering users' questions and improving user experience.

8. Public account precipitation point method

After users sign up, we will distribute benefits in the group. To receive the benefits, users must follow our official account. This is the purpose of official account sedimentation.

4. Distribution team fission: a powerful tool for screen-sweeping

Distribution team fission is to bind a group of KOLs in vertical fields through distribution interests, and use KOLs to conduct targeted blasting and screen-sweeping activities in a team manner.

In order to achieve screen-sweeping, the distribution team fission needs to complete each of the following steps, improve the conversion rate of each step, and thus promote the final screen-sweeping.

Step 1: Determine the theme of the event, which should be planned closely around the brand’s current advantages and target audience.

Step 2: Determine the distribution rules, clarify how to allocate distribution rights, and motivate participants to participate in the distribution through ranking rewards.

Step 3: Prepare distribution posters and distribution copy, and make sure the posters and copy are concise and to the point.

Step 4: Prepare distribution cooperation documents and invite KOLs. The document format should include the event background, product introduction, distribution rules, ranking rewards, additional benefits and unified action time. As for operating KOLs, you need to pull the KOLs into a group and let them form their own team to PK on the rankings. The team group needs to invite public account personnel to join the group for supervision.

Step 5: Relationship binding, adjust the price to a low price, let the KOL bind his own users first, and then restore the original price within a specified time to better help spread.

In the entire distribution team fission activity, there are two aspects that require special attention:

There are three key points in fission activity:

• To receive the account in real time
• Secondary binding distribution function
• There should be a ranking function to encourage user participation

At the designated time, KOLs should be organized and the team should be mobilized to post posters in the circle of friends in a unified manner to create a screen-sweeping phenomenon. This is because the vertical density of the user population is large, the outbreak time points are concentrated, and the interests of users are bound together layer by layer, which will ultimately lead to a screen-sweeping phenomenon.

To summarize here, a good fission activity needs to go through the following 10 stages:

1. User research: Understand user characteristics and predict what type of product is suitable for users.
2. Competitive product analysis: Understand what you can learn from your competitors’ gameplay.
3. Gameplay design: Design gameplay that can help spread the game, and the cost of user participation should be low.
4. Copywriting + poster: enough to attract users' attention and motivate them.
5. A/B testing: It is easy to select the most appropriate solution and reduce unnecessary waste.
6. Optimization iteration: Look for areas that can be improved, such as speeding up the speed of fission into the group.
7. Online explosion: control the rhythm of screen swiping and drive KOL to forward.
8. Risk control: Prevent being induced to be blocked, and prepare a solution in case of being blocked.
9. Data analysis: Find areas for optimization with the goal of improving conversion results.
10. Activity review: Sort out the complete gameplay, make micro-innovations based on it, and pay attention to the pitfalls.

5. Summary of the gameplay of fission activities

Through observation, we have seen that some of the fission activity gameplay can be summarized into the following nine categories. Each category has its own characteristics. We can choose the appropriate gameplay according to our own product situation and the goals to be achieved.

• Mission Bao is often used to increase followers of public accounts. It has a good initial effect and controllable costs, but the quality of users it brings is average and the accuracy cannot be guaranteed well.
• The community fission has a significant effect in terms of volume, relatively low cost, and relatively accurate user quality.
• Check-in rebates have a significant initial effect, controllable costs, and good user quality, and are often used in educational products.
• For testing, it is difficult to evaluate the effect, cost or user quality. It depends on whether the content is interesting enough to attract the attention and spread of the group.
• Distribution and the volume effect depend on the highlights of the product itself and the attractiveness of the distribution ratio, so it is difficult to evaluate the volume, but the cost is controllable and the user accuracy is relatively high.
• The red envelope method has a significant effect in increasing the volume of users, but the cost is relatively high and user accuracy is difficult to guarantee.
• The group buying method has a general effect in terms of initial volume, but it is suitable for acquiring accurate customers at a low cost.
• In terms of the effect of increasing sales, cost and customer acquisition accuracy, bargaining is relatively general.
• For crowdfunding, the initial effect depends on the attractiveness of the product itself, the cost is controllable, and the customer acquisition accuracy is very high.

VI. Conclusion

All fission methods have their limits, and there is no universal method that can always guarantee product growth. Moreover, in the WeChat ecosystem, we still have to adjust the fission method in the face of policy changes. Therefore, the growth method shared today is only used as a reference basis to facilitate micro-innovation in the future and explore growth methods suitable for your own products.

Author: Xiong Buzhi

Source: Xiong Buzhi