Practical sharing: 90 upgrades of mini programs, 3 things for operators to think about

From the opening of the mini program internal beta in November 2016 to August 2018, Zhuge Jun sorted out the mini program update information released through the official account of the " WeChat Public Platform " and summarized 90 capability upgrades related to mini program development, product design, and operation methods. Every capability upgrade of the mini program will bring some new ideas and methods to the operators. Through the sorting of upgrade information, we have a new understanding of the mini program's capabilities and operation methods.

1. Operation and promotion methods brought by the upgrade of mini program application capabilities

In the process of collating mini program upgrade information, the mini program and user-related updates are summarized as " application capability upgrades ", and the application capability upgrades are divided into three aspects: mini program entry, user management, and forwarding fission . Among the 90 updates of the mini program, 26 were updates on application capabilities and 21 were updates related to the mini program entrance. It can be seen that after the mini program was launched, WeChat actively deployed the mini program and brought more traffic to operators through entrance updates.

After the official launch of Mini Programs in January 2017, the only entrances open to Mini Programs were Mini Program list page search, offline QR code scanning, and LBS (Nearby Mini Programs). Judging from the entrances, it can be inferred that WeChat Mini Programs are more inclined towards offline businesses. But in 2017, the official Mini Program opened a large number of Mini Program entrances. In summary, the traffic to the Mini Program was mainly brought through official accounts, WeChat homepage, WeChat search, and social sharing, which has also become the main source of Mini Program traffic.

For the mini-program capabilities officially provided by WeChat, operators can use three strategies to promote and attract traffic:

(1) Use social connections to share and spread information

WeChat Mini Programs support overall sharing and single-page sharing, and in subsequent updates, developers will be allowed to embed forwarding buttons in Mini Programs, open social relationship chains in Mini Program games , and implement functions such as friend PK, rankings, and friend support. By utilizing the Mini Program’s own social capabilities, relationships between products and friends can be established, such as bargaining, voting, and welfare sharing, which can drive social sharing and dissemination.

(2) Establish a content self-media matrix of official accounts + mini programs

At the entrance to the official account, the official mini program has spared no effort to utilize the official account resources, and has successively opened up a number of ways to attract traffic, such as opening the mini program from the official account menu, inserting pictures and text messages into the mini program template, jumping to the mini program with text and images in pictures and texts, and opening the mini program with official account template messages, and supports opening official account pictures and texts in the mini program.

Official accounts and mini programs can attract each other to establish a self-media matrix. The push capabilities of official accounts can bring exposure to mini programs, and mini programs can provide e-commerce , knowledge payment , UGC community and other capabilities to enrich the functionality of official accounts.

(3) B2C social relationship traffic mini program

Judging from the capability updates of mini programs, the application scenarios of mini programs have gone through offline stores, online e-commerce, tools , games and other links. Both mini programs and official accounts have customer service functions, and the customer service function also opens up the ability to drive traffic to mini programs.

For example, sending mini program cards during customer service, merchants can reply to user messages within 48 hours, and users can be redirected to the mini program through public account template messages. These are all ways for merchants to actively reach users and promote mini programs.

2. Mini Program data analysis upgrade guides refined operations

In the compilation of capability updates, Zhuge Jun classified the updates related to data analysis separately and summarized them into data analysis upgrades. Among the 90 upgrades of the mini program, data analysis was upgraded 13 times , including the mini program data platform upgrade, promotion monitoring data, user analysis data , and event analysis data.

1. Data analysis capabilities provided by mini programs

The mini program backend provides operators with basic data analysis functions, which can directly view the mini program's new visits, total number of users, access trends and other related information. In addition to the data analysis provided by the platform, a data analysis interface is also open, which can analyze access trends, access distribution, retention analysis, and page access data through a third-party platform, and supports customized analysis data reporting and customized business monitoring.

2. Refined operational capabilities provided by mini programs

In terms of precise operations, mini programs also have the ability to be updated and upgraded. For example, the mini program information shared by users can be customized with pictures, so that shared customer acquisition can perform differentiated operations for different users.

3. Refined operation ideas of mini programs

The mini program supports the generation of QR codes with parameters, can monitor the opening status of different pages, supports the generation of any number of QR codes with parameters, can monitor the user sources of different channels , supports identifying the same user from different sources, and records user behavior , supports monitoring the progress of users browsing pages and other refined data.

These data are often ignored by operators due to the lack of key data analysis tools, but if used properly, they can achieve truly refined operations. For example, through Zhuge.io's mini-program analysis platform, it is possible to compare the usage behaviors of users from different source channels , including data such as activity, purchasing power, and contribution, compare the quality of channel users, and optimize channel delivery.

3. Mini Programs’ technical capabilities are upgraded with a focus on interactive gameplay

Among the capability upgrades of mini programs, technical capability upgrades accounted for 51 items . Judging from the technical upgrade contents, the official mini program is working hard to lower the development threshold of mini programs and tell us a lot about the planning direction of mini program products.

1. Mini Programs support audio and video functions

The mini program has gradually updated related capabilities such as audio, video, and photography, and supports real-time audio, real-time translation, video recording, image beautification and other functions.

2. Mini Programs support user-friendly interactive gameplay

Through user authorization, mini program developers can obtain a series of information such as the user's WeChat avatar, ID, nickname, etc., and can obtain phone number, email and other information with one click.

In addition to regular information, you can also get the number of steps. Now there are many mini-programs developed based on the number of steps. For example, the e-commerce model of step exchange has achieved very good results and ranks at the top of the TOP100 mini-program rankings.

3. Strive to lower the threshold for developing mini programs

The official mini program provides low-threshold implementation methods such as one-click generation of store mini programs and mini program standard templates, and opens a large number of interfaces for third-party development platforms. The plug-in function updated in 2018 further reduces duplicate development.

4. Mini Programs improve traffic value and monetization capabilities

In the 2017 update, Mini Programs supported embedding in apps and sharing to the WeChat social relationship chain. In the 2018 update, Mini Program pages shared to WeChat via apps can directly open the apps, which reflects the traffic value of Mini Programs.

In terms of traffic monetization, mini-program games support incentivized video components, which means that players can get game props as rewards by watching videos, providing advertising monetization capabilities for game mini-program developers. The mini program advertising component was updated in July 2018. The mini program can open traffic masters, and the traffic master share ratio can be increased in August.

Summary: By sorting out the 90 updates of WeChat Mini Programs since their launch, we found that the current WeChat Mini Programs are closely attached to WeChat's social relationship chain and WeChat official accounts . The official Mini Programs have opened up a large number of entrances and their own technical capabilities, but for operators, they still lack the ability to actively reach and wake up Mini Program users, targeting the pain points of attracting new users , activity, conversion , payment, sharing, etc. in the operation of Mini Programs.