Operational tips: In the early stage of promotion, should we use WeChat or App?

The author of this article is Qianniu Xujin, formerly the operations director of Toutiao and editor-in-chief of Hexun Blog. In the article, he talked about the pros and cons of making apps and using WeChat in the early stages of promotion, and also shared his own thoughts and insights. There is a lot of useful information, and I strongly recommend everyone to read it.

But if you don’t have enough time, you can also look directly at the three conclusions:

1. Don’t think about making an APP without full-time staff for server and client development.

2. Don’t give up on the Web easily. The number of computer web users has not dropped that badly. At least everyone still has to use computers to work, and there is also search engine traffic. The Web should be adaptable to mobile phones to facilitate access by users on mobile devices.

3. The sooner you operate a WeChat public account, the better. You can also consider other platform media accounts, such as Toutiao, Yidian Zixun, Sohu, and NetEase, which have low startup costs. It’s like testing your idea in a simple way, and you can get direct feedback from users. The so-called operation is nothing more than magnifying the successful model, making it deeper, broader and more systematic.

When you have enough power to make an APP, you also need to consider the features of your product. I think there is limited significance in making an APP with pure information content. Users are more inclined to choose portal-type information apps when reading information, such as Toutiao and NetEase News.

If you are developing a tool-based or community-interactive product, it makes sense to develop an APP, because these two types of products have little room for maneuver in WeChat and are like dancing with shackles. If you can attract more users by making an APP, I think their loyalty will be very high and their value will be greater. In short, choose a path that suits you, keep correcting yourself, and move forward inch by inch.

After I started my own business, I discovered an interesting phenomenon: when my friends who work for large Internet companies see that I am running a WeChat account, they often ask, “Are you now focusing on pure content?” And netizens I used to know (my target audience) would also ask, “Is this the only WeChat account you have?” The implication is that if you say you are starting a business, but you spend all this time to create a WeChat account, they would look down on you.

Another group of people I came into contact with had completely opposite views. They are individual investors and entrepreneurs. When investors chat with me, they all ask, "How many followers do you have on WeChat?" When I tell them the number of followers, they are shocked and say, "You have too few followers. You need to find a way." After that, they often send me a successful WeChat account for me to look at.

Many grassroots entrepreneurs also attach great importance to WeChat, and say earnestly: "We must pay attention to the operation of WeChat account", "APP is a pitfall, so let's do WeChat first."

Problems faced by APP: It is easy to get into trouble for entrepreneurship

From my actual project experience, making an APP is definitely a very troublesome thing. When we designed the product, we focused on mobile devices, so the website (Web) was made very simple, mainly providing the background and interface. The Web development was completed very early, but we had to wait for several months for the client to be able to be debugged.

How did client-side development get into this mess? Because I was planning based on my experience in a "big company" (relatively large), but the resource input could not keep up.

The hours for the part-time jobs we find are not guaranteed, as the client developers of various companies seem to be iterating their products and working overtime non-stop. Add to that the tediousness of APP software development: adjusting the style pixel by pixel, achieving compatibility, and interacting with the server and the Web and synchronizing information, which makes it even more troublesome.

When the problem is almost solved, we also need to prepare for the promotion after going online. According to a friend who works in APP channels, the current cost of acquiring a user for a popular APP is about 2 yuan online, and the offline cost is usually more than double the online cost. There are often some fake users among these users. If the product is not very attractive to them, it will be a problem to retain them in the future.

After the product is launched and promoted, in order to improve retention, it is necessary to continuously improve the product and iterate it, which also requires a lot of investment.

Although my team and I are gradually overcoming the above problems, if you ask me now whether I should make an APP, I would be cautious. So is it okay to not make an APP and just have a WeChat account?

Four Problems of Placing Your Bet on WeChat: Hidden Risks

When I encountered the difficulties mentioned above in the development of my project APP, I felt that I could not just sit there and wait, so I increased my efforts in WeChat operations during this period.

On the one hand, I have benefited from some user dividends brought by the high level of WeChat, and lamented that I started WeChat too late; on the other hand, I have also felt the abyss in the surging ocean of WeChat - it can make you successful, but it may also drown you and make you lose yourself.

I won’t say much about the first aspect, as everyone has witnessed the tremendous power of WeChat. I will focus on the latter risk issue below (this is just my limited opinion, please correct me if I am wrong).

Risk 1: Account destruction and jail time

When running a WeChat public account, you must first have a clear understanding: this is not a territory that you have complete control over, you only have the right to use it. Your account may be temporarily or permanently banned due to being reported or considered in violation by WeChat officials.

Not long ago, a friend of mine encountered the problem of his account being blocked. This friend saw that some accounts were holding very popular New Year lottery activities, so he also planned a similar activity, which was to let users reply with numbers to draw lots and get content. He prepared for more than a month, but his account was blocked shortly after the launch.

The initial reason was that the content contained pornographic, obscene and other illegal information, and was permanently banned. This friend was anxious. He had been in charge of content review on the website for many years. How could there be pornographic or illegal information? Later, after some effort and appeal, the reason was changed to inducing sharing and he was banned for one month. This friend said that the reason might have been written wrong at the beginning, and he was really grateful for not killing him, because if the WeChat account that had been operating for several months was permanently banned, all previous efforts would be in vain.

In fact, even if it is blocked for a month, there will be considerable losses. I remember that some big accounts such as Elephant Association and Titanium Media have also been blocked. An article described the bad mood of Huang Zhangjin, the founder of Elephant Association, after the blockage: he was distracted, looking at things on the Internet, and was stunned. At the 2014 annual meeting of Titanium Media, an award was given to the author who caused them to be blocked - the Most Destructive Award of the Year. An article by that author caused the Titanium Media WeChat account to be "dead" for a month.

My friend reflected on it afterwards and discussed it with other people, but he still didn't quite understand the exact definition of inducing sharing. However, some big accounts that did similar activities before and after him were fine. He said that before carrying out the event, he had carefully read the "WeChat Public Platform Service Agreement", "WeChat Public Platform Operation Specifications", and all the announcements issued in the past. But the power of judgment lies with Tencent, which creates a lot of uncertainty.

Risk 2: Your product’s fate is tied to the platform

A few days ago, another friend who is starting a business told me that his current goal is to develop WeChat as soon as possible - he used to be based on Weibo and had tens of millions of fans. He thought it was a little late and it was difficult now. I mean, don’t you have so many fans on Weibo? He said that fans will grow old. This sentence made me think about it for a long time.

If you bet on a platform, when the platform is thriving, you can share the dividends brought by the platform's growth, but what if the platform fails?

After seeing this sentence, many people will definitely not think that WeChat will decline. In the industry, Zhang Xiaolong has been hailed as the God of Product Managers, a figure comparable to Steve Jobs, and Tencent has monopolized the Chinese instant messaging market for so many years. But I want to say that being strong is never a reason for invincibility.

In the Internet field, the changes in the landscape are accelerating. Taking a foreign example, MySpace was once very popular and was acquired by News Corporation in 2005 for the then sky-high price of US$580 million. It was later replaced by Facebook. Facebook has become an old guy in the past two years, and young users are choosing new products. So Facebook started a crazy acquisition: it acquired Instagram for $1 billion and WhatsApp for $19 billion.

A domestic example is Weibo. I remember that four years ago, Kai-Fu Lee released the book "Weibo Changes Everything". At that time, Weibo was at its peak and almost everyone was using it. Today, Weibo’s popularity has long been overshadowed by WeChat. Although the data officially released by Weibo is still achieving record highs, data can be misleading and you can be selective. Users’ time is limited. When you browse your Moments a lot, it is obvious that the time you spend browsing Weibo is getting less.

So is there a potential crisis with WeChat? I think there are:

Why does WeChat repeatedly crack down on behaviors that induce content sharing? Because the carrying capacity of the circle of friends is limited, the circle of friends is positioned as a social network among friends. From my personal experience and that of some of my friends, we check our Moments less frequently and spend less time on them than before. Why is it decreasing? Because there are more and more uninteresting information in the circle of friends.

I think this is mainly determined by WeChat product design:

1. WeChat combines communication and social attributes, which is a great creation, but it also creates problems.

WeChat has two core functions: instant messaging and interaction within the circle of friends. The combination of these two is a remarkable creation, but I have a question: How many of the people in your WeChat address book are people whose lives you truly care about, whose sights you see, and whose thoughts and feelings you love to hear?

The communication properties of WeChat allow us to add everyone we come into contact with at work (colleagues, clients) as friends. Young people nowadays change jobs very frequently. Every time they change jobs, a lot of people are added to their address book, so their circle of friends will become more and more bloated. When your circle of friends accumulates more than 1,000 people, how much information can you read one by one? The upper limit of friends in the circle of friends is 5,000. In the long run, the number of friends each person has will get closer and closer to this limit.

You could say, isn't it enough to just set it so you don't view the other person's Moments? The problem is that most users will not change the default settings. Due to face issues and some utilitarianism, it is not good to prevent others from seeing your Moments, and it is also not good to not like others' posts when someone likes their posts. Maybe if you give your boss, colleagues and clients a few more likes, it can bring you advancement in your career.

A friend of mine in the United States once told me that people in China completely mix work and life together. Yes, we often discuss work issues through WeChat late at night.

From this perspective, it makes sense that WhatsApp only has communication but no circle of friends. Path, a foreign mobile social application that was once very popular in a small circle in China, has a friend limit of 150 people, which makes sense.

Path only allows you to add 150 friends. The official reason for doing this is based on research by a professor at Oxford University, who believed that people can only maintain stable social relationships with about 150 people at most. These include 5 best friends, 15 good friends, and 50 closer relatives and friends.

2. WeChat combines content distribution with communication and social attributes, which is a great creation, but it also creates bigger problems

Another core function of WeChat - the invention of official accounts is very remarkable.

WeChat, which was successful in instant messaging, first launched the Moments, and then launched the WeChat public account platform with the slogan "No matter how small an individual is, he or she can have his or her own brand", creatively integrating media content distribution and instant messaging, solving the dilemma of traditional content producers.

In just over two years, the number of WeChat public accounts has grown from 0 to tens of millions. The ones who benefited the most are traditional media and traditional media people. Last year I went back to Dalian and visited my old employer, Peninsula Morning Post, and found that everyone attached great importance to the operation of WeChat accounts, and the operation was very effective. More media individuals have benefited from the operation of WeChat accounts. I heard from a financial media person that a friend of his operated a financial media account with an annual income of 800,000 yuan, which is far more than his income during the heyday of traditional media.

However, a big problem with WeChat public accounts has also emerged: it mainly distributes content through Moments. According to the data officially disclosed by WeChat at the end of last year:

On WeChat, 20% of users go to subscription accounts to select content, and 80% of users read the content in Moments. When WeChat users see an article they want to forward, 61% forward it to Moments, and 39% forward it to friends.

WeChat official account content verification relies on Moments distribution, and each person's friend list approaches the upper limit of 5,000 over time, making the problem more serious. In addition:

Everyone has some friends who are doing micro-business in their circle of friends;

Many people are unable to separate work from life, and forwarding company-related content in WeChat Moments often becomes a job requirement;

WeChat has the grand ambition to connect everything, and countless websites support sharing, trying desperately to get users to share links to their friends;

You can often see red envelopes shared by Didi Taxi now. If WeChat really connects everything one day, you may even see shares of refrigerators and color TVs.

If this continues, there will be more and more information in the Moments, and the Moments is becoming another Weibo.

Many people in the technology media leave their personal WeChat accounts under the articles they publish, instead of Weibo, which shows that everyone treats Moments as Weibo: in the past few months, more and more hot events have been flooding Moments, such as the death of Yao Beina and Chai Jing's heated debate on environmental protection.

If you observe carefully, you will find that the existence of public accounts and the spread of web links have penetrated the closed nature of friendships in the circle of friends. Having written this, I think I understand why WeChat is so severe in cracking down on behaviors that induce sharing.

Recently, WeChat officials have launched another strong crackdown on induced sharing. This time, in a rare move, the punishment not only targets public accounts and websites, but also individuals. On March 15, the "Guidelines for Using WeChat Moments" were issued.

Risk 3: What do you rely on to make your WeChat account successful?

According to my observation, there are four types of WeChat subscription accounts that are doing well:

The first category is traditional media people.

They are good at creating the style of individual content and the overall media. During the time when I was running a subscription account, many friends from traditional media gave me advice and suggested that I should focus my content on themes, have a clear tone, and showcase the charismatic personality of the editor-in-chief. They also sent me media accounts that I could use as reference, such as "Shi Xiang" and "Hao Bao" created by these two media people, which have exactly these characteristics.

The second category is traditional media.

Whether it is print media or television media, just keep pushing their WeChat QR code every day and you can attract a lot of fans.

The third category is self-media people or celebrities with distinctive characteristics .

For example, Pan Xingzhi, who provides emotional counseling, Zhang Defen, who provides spiritual healing, and of course the famous Luoji Siwei, who sells values, are all brands themselves.

The fourth category is the big jokes.

That is, the group of people who transferred from Sina Weibo. They understand users' preferences very well, are experienced, and are able to find or create content suitable for dissemination as quickly as possible. They also work together to grow rapidly through mutual promotion.

The four categories I mentioned are based on my own observations, and there are definitely more types that are doing well. This is just a starting point. I hope you will think about what unique features or resources you have that can help you build a public account?

A friend who used to work at Phoenix and Taobao told me that those of us who have worked in operations at larger websites and run Weibo and WeChat accounts are really no match for those media people and joke tellers. This is like comparing our own weaknesses to others' strengths.

The force surface of WeChat accounts is very narrow, and the narrower it is, the better they are at performing. Our advantage should lie in the regular army's approach, that is, building websites and platforms.

I know you will say that it is too difficult, and I also think it is not easy. So let’s look at the actual situation.

Risk 4: Have you missed the best time to operate WeChat?

After I created the WeChat account, I tried many methods, such as participating in mutual promotion and adding the WeChat account to media accounts on other platforms for promotion, but the conversion rates were relatively low. For example, an article published on other media platforms may have 200,000 readers, but bring in less than 20 fans, so the conversion rate is very low. Friends who have been doing this for a long time told me that the conversion rate was much higher a year ago than it is now.

The well-known WeChat public account Elephant Association was launched in December 2013, which is more than a year ago. Founder Huang Zhangjin also believes that he is one of the latecomers and missed the golden window period of WeChat public accounts.

Assuming that your WeChat account has just been launched, or you still have very few fans, if you want to make your WeChat account bigger, you will obviously need to put in many times more effort than the pioneers. Because the content of WeChat accounts has been greatly enriched, the Matthew effect has become increasingly obvious, users are becoming more and more picky about WeChat accounts, the opening rate of subscription accounts is also very low, and WeChat's management has become stricter.

How much effort can you put into operating a WeChat account?

in conclusion

As I was writing, the article became so long. To thank you for reading this far, here are some useful tips. My suggestions are as follows:

1. Don’t think about making an APP without full-time staff for server and client development.

2. Don’t give up on the Web easily. The number of computer web users has not dropped that badly. At least everyone still has to use computers to work, and there is also search engine traffic. The Web should be adaptable to mobile phones to facilitate access by users on mobile devices.

3. The sooner you operate a WeChat public account, the better. You can also consider other platform media accounts, such as Toutiao, Yidian Zixun, Sohu, and NetEase, which have low startup costs. It’s like testing your idea in a simple way, and you can get direct feedback from users. The so-called operation is nothing more than magnifying the successful model, making it deeper, broader and more systematic.

When you have enough power to make an APP, you also need to consider the features of your product. I think there is limited significance in making an APP with pure information content. Users are more inclined to choose portal-type information apps when reading information, such as Toutiao and NetEase News.

If you are developing a tool-based or community-interactive product, it makes sense to develop an APP, because these two types of products have little room for maneuver in WeChat and are like dancing with shackles. If you can attract more users by making an APP, I think their loyalty will be very high and their value will be greater. In short, choose a path that suits you, keep correcting yourself, and move forward inch by inch.