WeChat official data revealed: What kind of articles are more popular

With 468 million monthly active users, WeChat has long become one of the key social channels for media and self-media information dissemination. But do you know what articles users like to read on WeChat and how they like to read them? Today we will reveal some key data to you.

Users read an average of 5.86 articles per day on the WeChat platform

5.86 articles is an average, and the number of articles read by different users varies greatly. As can be seen from the chart, 23% of users only read 1 article per day on average, but 20% of users read 6 to 10 articles per day. The number of users who read more than 3 articles per day accounts for 51%, and the number of users who read less than 3 articles per day accounts for 49%. This means that heavy readers are willing to spend more time reading articles on it, but some users may not spend too much time reading on it.

80% of the reading volume of subscription accounts comes from Moments

This is a data sharing from Zhang Xiaolong at the WeChat Open Class in December. In his speech, he mentioned that a lot of the reading volume of subscription accounts comes from Moments, which is in line with the 2/8 distribution principle, "20% of users go to subscription accounts to select content, and then 80% of users read this content in Moments." From this point of view, accounts with large numbers of fans will not be able to increase the number of readings if they cannot produce attractive content.

Emotional, health and political and legal news are most popular among the public

What kind of WeChat public account articles are most popular among the public? These two tables show clearly that emotional, health and political and legal news are firmly in the top three in terms of readership and sharing. Especially emotional information and health content, which far exceed other types of content, users love to read and share.

By comparing the number of readers and the number of shares, it was found that although disease pathology was not among the top ten contents in terms of number of readers, it was the fourth most shared content. There are many people reading financial news, but the number of shares has disappeared from the top ten.

61% of WeChat users forwarded articles to their Moments

When WeChat users see an article they want to forward, 61% forward it to their Moments and 39% forward it to their friends. Targeted sharing can be seen as a characteristic of WeChat users sharing articles. Although forwarding to Moments can allow more friends to see it, nearly 40% of the content is still forwarded to friends.

Several characteristics can be summarized from the above data:

1. WeChat public accounts with a large number of users are also facing operational pressure. We cannot rely solely on users to find content to read from subscription accounts, but instead we need to produce more high-quality content that users are willing to share and forward.
2. User reading volume shows a polarized trend, which means the Matthew effect of article sharing. Imagine a scenario where an article is forwarded many times in Moments. For those users who read less, they may be more inclined to read this article that everyone is forwarding, thereby contributing to the exponential increase in the number of article readings.
3. It is becoming increasingly difficult to attract users to subscribe to an account. When users find that they rarely read content from subscription accounts, their motivation to subscribe will gradually weaken, because the content forwarded by friends in their circle of friends is the main source of information.

It can be seen that good content will become more and more important on the WeChat public account platform in the future. The New Yorker once published a research article that found that content that is easily shared has the following characteristics:

• The article has a positive theme, which makes readers feel excited after reading it;
• Articles that make users very angry and panic;
• Make the reader feel that he is not only smart, but also well-informed and knowledgeable;
• Practical and memorable content;
• A valuable story.

These points correspond exactly to the types of articles with the highest reading and sharing volume on WeChat. Don’t emotional information and political and legal news contain stories and easily cause people to have emotional reactions?