New media operations: 12 sober reflections on the suspension of updates on “WeChat, Weibo and Douyin”!

In the past two days, there has been a discussion about whether the "two Weibo and one Douyin" should stop updating, which has been flooding the circle. Friends have asked me one after another:

1. 1. Are we really going to stop updating Weibo, WeChat and Douyin this year?
   2. Is it impossible to continue working in new media? Should I change my career?
   3. Should we continue to invest resources in new media?

The following is an attempt to answer these questions:

(1) At the beginning of the year, I made a prediction: "In-depth Forecast for the New Media Industry in 2019: New Buds Sprout from Old Trees, the Second Spring of the Industry". The important judgment in the article is: good content, good operations, and good platforms will lead to the return of value.

The meaning of value return is: highlighting the valuable and removing the worthless. Therefore, if a new media account stops updating and it is a spam account, it is normal in its cycle and there is no need to panic.

(2) A large proportion of public accounts have stopped updating before. According to data released by Tencent in 2017, the number of public accounts has exceeded 25 million, but the monthly active accounts are only 3.5 million, and the activity rate itself is less than 14%.

The 3.5 million active public accounts can be further divided into different categories. According to statistics in 2018:

• 250,000 WeChat public accounts with more than 100,000 followers from Visual China
• There are about 1,700 WeChat subscription accounts with more than 1 million followers from Lan Xi
• There are only 173 WeChat subscription accounts with more than 3 million followers from Lan Xi

According to the current opening rate of 3% in the industry, the normal number of readers of accounts with less than 100,000 readers is less than 3,000 all year round, which exceeds 90% of the monthly active users of public accounts. It is foreseeable that some of the bottom accounts will be eliminated due to weak growth and continuously declining opening rates.

(3) Of course, the person who ordered the suspension of updates may not be the editor, but the boss of the company. After all, bosses are reluctant to post articles with only dozens or hundreds of readers on WeChat Moments every day, as that would be embarrassing. Some bosses do new media just for the sake of doing it, without understanding the purpose behind it.

(4) Is the purpose of creating a public account just for brand promotion? Companies generally have three purposes for engaging in new media: media branding, product services, and merchandise sales.

Public accounts that serve the purpose of media branding are more affected by the decline in opening rate because their core purpose is communication. In fact, companies that focus on products and sales are entering their best era. The purpose is to produce products, but with the support of mini programs, there are still huge dividends, such as small rice cakes, sugar beans, square dances, etc. For the purpose of sales, such as Pinduoduo and Yunji Weidian in the WeChat ecosystem.

(5) The development of new media has gone through three stages:

• The 1.0 stage belongs to the editing era, and good content will naturally spread.
• Stage 2.0 is the operational era, where everyone focuses on becoming fans and building social relationships.
• In the 3.0 stage, with the emergence of mini programs and the cooperation with social groups, new media can appear as a platform business independently.

The vast majority of companies’ understanding of new media is still at the 2.0 stage, and many traditional companies are even still in the 1.0 era, believing that new media is simply something that editors do.

(6) At the same time, new media editors have reached the point where they have no choice but to transform. To put it simply: editing is editing, and operations are operations. The work will be more detailed.

New media operations have developed from the BBS era in 1999 to the present, and more and more skills are required.

by Long Gonghuohuo "Advanced Operations"

Within the WeChat ecosystem, as WeChat’s functions evolve over time, operational skills are required to cover not only breadth but also depth.

by Long Gonghuohuo "Advanced Operations"

For new media people, T-shaped growth will become the mainstream, that is, being specialized in one thing and being capable of many things.

(6) It is increasingly difficult for new media to create events. Since the Fanke incident in 2014, it is rare to see a company launch a campaign that is known to the public. Because people's interests and media distribution are too scattered nowadays.

The media has changed from a few centralized continents to small, weakly centralized islands. In the industrial age, the media is centralized, and everything will be fine as long as you focus on a few media. That’s why it used to be the case that manufacturers going to Beijing’s Media Center to purchase CCTV advertisements was like picking up money; they could hear the sound of money rustling through the screen.

At the same time, the way people gather together has also changed. People's social circles are made up of many interests or social relationships. It takes money and luck to spread information and break through circles.

Figure: Communication in circles by Long Gonghuohuo "Advanced Operations"

(7) The era of traditional public relations based on simple exposure will be a thing of the past. When I was in my previous company, I was in the public relations department, and our indicator was to look at the UV covered by the entire activity, and PV did not need to be evaluated based on sales volume.

Similar to the previous vertical version of Pechoin that flooded the screen, if there was no sales link behind it, the boss would probably break his legs. Product and sales integration is a must.

(8) Compared with the corporate standard of “two Weibo and one Douyin”, it is more accurate to say that companies build a new media matrix. For specific construction methods, please see the 8,700-word detailed explanation, an incomplete guide to building a new media matrix!

Of course, the matrix does not necessarily have to focus on WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin.

Generally, there are only two ways for enterprises to play: one is to have products and look for traffic, or to have traffic and look for products.

Generally speaking, the former is more common, and the most important thing for the product is the appropriate flow. For example, there is a company that focuses on Zhihu, and the monthly output value of two people exceeds 300,000. Kuaishou is more like "WeChat Moments" than Douyin, and many products sold on Kuaishou can be very successful.

(9) Bezos said: I am more interested in what remains constant than what changes. The same applies to new media, which requires seizing the scarce capabilities and resources that remain unchanged.

For example: In 1997, Lao Rong wrote an explosive online article titled "Dalian Jinzhou Doesn't Believe in Tears" on Sohu.com, which received tens of thousands of hits within 48 hours (at that time, there were only 620,000 Internet users nationwide). Until the "Death of the Poor Scholar" that was blocked before the festival, good stories always have a large amount of traffic, of course the latter is a fictional story.

(10) How to create better content? To be honest, 90% of people are not suitable for creating content. Good content is a craft. Although it can be reproduced in large quantities industrially, it is tasteless after all.

Then why are there so many "worthless" contents? In fact, they are always valuable to some people. After all, information gap will always exist, and the critical thinking ability of many people cannot be improved in a short period of time.

(11) So how do we absorb the nutrients we have gained? Many times, online products are a mirror image of their offline counterparts. Douyin is more like a personal TV station, so those who sell goods on Douyin can learn how TV shopping is done. There was an organization that did very well in selling courses through the community, and their process was essentially based on the offline sales process. If you attend an offline sales meeting, you can map the links that arouse emotions and the links that discuss prices to the online ones.

(12) As Dickens said, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times, it depends entirely on your judgment.

• In 2014, many people said that they should stop creating public accounts because they could not be monetized. I didn’t believe that Shidian Reading, which transformed from Weibo to WeChat, had a revenue of over 40 million in 2017.
• In 2015, many people said, why bother with public accounts, wouldn’t it be good to increase followers on your own? The Guangdiantong advertising enthusiast "Yi Tiao" didn't believe it, and bought millions of fans at a cost of less than one yuan per fan.
• In 2016, many people thought that the growth of public accounts was too slow and there were no new opportunities. They did not believe in "Youshu", which had only gained 7,000 followers in the previous six months. Later, through social network fission, it grew by nearly 10 million in half a year.
• In 2017, many people said that it was too slow for public accounts to gain followers through content, so they should just buy followers. Liu Xiao, who is obsessed with audio at "Ye Ting", couldn't believe that she now has 30 million fans.
• In 2018, many people said that they would stop doing H5 and start developing mini programs to increase their followers. There is a fortune telling company that has made hundreds of millions by relying on H5.

Last year, many people said that service accounts were overused, but we believe that they have strong functional development attributes, and template messages + customer service messages are still a powerful tool for increasing followers. We persisted in doing this for 9 months and gained 5 million followers with less than 50 cents per follower.

In the new media era, you must independently distinguish what is a signal and what is noise. See first and then keep going.

As the Red Queen said in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “To keep your place, you must run as fast as you can; to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as you are now.

Source: Dragon Fire