WeChat Reading - How to use social reading apps
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From the perspective of event operation and user operation , let’s talk about how Tencent, which is strong in social networking , has entered the reading market by turning WeChat Reading into a “book club”. Preface In this article, we will talk about how Tencent, which is strong in social networking, entered the reading market by turning WeChat Reading into a "book club" from the perspective of event operation and user operation. 1. Product positioning WeChat Reading is an official reading application based on the WeChat relationship chain. While providing users with the ultimate reading experience, it also recommends suitable books to users, and allows users to view the reading status of their WeChat friends, discuss the books they are reading with their friends, etc. 1.1 slogan WeChat Reading - Reading is no longer lonely 1.2 Official main features Carefully polished reading experience - supports ERUP and TXT formats, allowing you to personalize your own reading style. Carefully polished, just to give you the ultimate experience. Discover high-quality books with friends - There is a vast ocean of books, so you might as well ask your WeChat friends to help you screen and find the next book that is suitable for you. Exchange reading ideas with friends - encounter your friends' ideas while reading, share your reading experience with friends, and create more sparks. Compete with friends in reading rankings - a serious reading game where you can not only gain knowledge from reading, but also gain a sense of accomplishment from competing with friends. 1.3 Target Users From the slogan "Let reading no longer be lonely", we can actually see that WeChat Reading focuses on social reading. As a reading product based on the WeChat relationship chain, WeChat Reading’s target users are undoubtedly WeChat users who have e-book reading needs. However, due to its emphasis on copyright, the books provided on the app are basically high-quality books published by formal publications. To sum up, its target users should be: WeChat users who have the need to read e-books and have high requirements for book quality. 1.4 Solve demand pain points Reading needs: Solving users’ most basic reading needs is undoubtedly the mission of a reading app. Note-taking needs: A good memory is not as good as a bad pen. There are always users who want to record their insights when reading a book. WeChat Reading allows users to take notes instantly anytime and anywhere. Sharing needs: Notes and ideas are publicly visible and can be commented on, meeting the user's needs to express and communicate. Recommended demand: People will more or less encounter the problem of having no books to read. Although various apps have a variety of recommended topics, it is still difficult to choose. If the book is recommended by acquaintances or even professionals in the circle of friends, it will be more likely to encourage users to read it. WeChat’s friend recommendation function solves this need very well. 2. Market conditions Trend chart of total downloads of WeChat Reading on Android (data from KuChuan) WeChat Reading launched the Android 1.0.0 version on August 27, 2015. According to the data in the above figure, as of 2016/12/16, the total number of downloads of WeChat Reading Android version was nearly 13.4 million. Compared with the total downloads of QQ Reading on Android of 495 million, there is still a considerable gap. However, after all, QQ Reading was launched as early as 2012, nearly 5 years earlier than WeChat Reading, and the number of users is not comparable. However, the huge user base of QQ Reading also happens to illustrate the vastness of the reading market. In addition, based on the WeChat relationship chain with 800 million active users, the user base of WeChat Reading still has a lot of room for growth. 3. Product Features WeChat Reading app product framework (iOS 1.5.0.438 version) Based on the above iOS version of the product framework diagram, we can divide the product functions provided by WeChat Reading into two categories: regular functions and special functions. 3.1 General functions Reading: Provide a large number of high-quality e-books for users to choose from. Book recommendations: various list recommendations, topic classifications, and recommendations from WeChat friends help users make book decisions. 3.2 Features Gift books: Users can buy e-books and give them to friends Social interaction: Exchange ideas through private messages, likes, and comments Reading time can be exchanged for book coins: Reading time can be exchanged for book coins to buy books Post notes and book reviews: You can record notes at any time during the reading process for easy review, and you can see other people's notes and book reviews for interaction. The note visualization function can promote sharing and can also be saved locally Privacy settings: You can set the books you are reading to be private if you do not want your friends to see them. 4. Operational means If apps like Taobao Reading and Douban Reading provide users with a bookshelf with a variety of books for users to choose from, then WeChat Reading creates a book club. Users can express their ideas and interact with others, and recommend books they want to read to each other. So for such a reading product, its most important means of operation, in addition to the conventional content-level book recommendations, is to pay more attention to the user's UGC activity and stimulate them to contribute more content. In this way, more ideas can be generated for users to exchange ideas, which can be seen from the framework design of the app: 1). The bookstore function is intentionally weakened, and the entrance to the bookstore is deeper, in the upper right corner of the bookshelf module, rather than being on the same level as "Discover" and "Bookshelf". 2). Among the four entrances on the first level, “Discover”, “Bookshelf”, “Ideas” and “Me”, two are designed based on friends: “Discover” and “Ideas”. If this is the case, then what efforts has WeChat Reading made in terms of user operations? Whether it is event operation or content operation , its essence is operation on users. The purpose of user operation is nothing more than to expand the user base and realize user monetization. Any business model needs to make profit one of its ultimate goals. For Internet products, having large-scale active users is a must in order to achieve profitability. To a certain extent, the larger the user scale, the lower the marginal cost of Internet companies, and it may even approach zero. If you want to expand the scale of your active users, you simply need to start from three aspects: increasing revenue + reducing costs + maintaining activity. 4.1 Open Source The so-called open source is the introduction of new users. As a social reading app, WeChat Reading’s main open source methods are old users bringing in new users and ASO . 4.1.1 Old employees mentoring new employees Functional level: Ubiquitous sharing function - whether it is various lists, book details pages, book reading pages, personal notes or reading rankings, they all support sharing functions, allowing users to share to other social media (such as WeChat, Moments, Weibo, QQ Space, etc.) for exposure and attract new users. Activity level: book donation activity. Give the books you have obtained to your WeChat friends (including friends who do not use the app) to achieve the goal of attracting new users. There is also a long-term "give one, get one" campaign: after giving away a purchased book, the donor will receive the book for free, and friends can receive up to two books through "give one, get one". One book can satisfy two people to read at the same time. This kind of behavior of old users attracting new users requires more of an understanding of human nature. After all, the behavior we display in social situations is not necessarily a person’s true need for information. To put it simply: there is often a big difference between what we want to see and what we are willing to share on social media. WeChat Reading has also made a lot of efforts to encourage users to share the product on their Moments so that more people can know about it. 1.Simple and beautiful design. This app embodies a simple beauty, whether in terms of page layout or color selection, allowing users to share their works to their friends without lowering their aesthetic taste. 2. High-quality e-books. The e-books on WeChat Reading are basically high-quality books published by regular publishers, and the copyright information is clearly stated on the book information page. Sharing to your circle of friends can demonstrate your high reading literacy and the depth of your knowledge. 3. The introduction of the book gift function undoubtedly gives users a good opportunity to show off, and at the same time it can also strengthen interaction with friends. What’s more important is the combination with the “give one, get one” campaign. In essence, users don’t suffer any loss, as they can read the gifted book at the same time. To sum up, the purpose of sharing to attract new users is more to help users establish the image they want in their circle of friends and satisfy their inner vanity and sense of recognition. 4.1.2 ASO WeChat Reading & QQ Reading & Douban Reading iOS rankings (data from KuChuan) Comparison of ASO between WeChat Reading VS Douban Reading, WeChat Reading VS QQ Reading on iOS (data from Kuchuan) It can be clearly seen from the above two pictures that WeChat Reading ranks better than QQ Reading and Douban Reading both in the overall list and in the book (free) list. Even for QQ Reading, which has 450 million downloads, WeChat Reading has a slight advantage in the app store ranking. However, in terms of ASO for keywords, WeChat Reading is far inferior to the other two products. Compared with Douban Reading’s 1,201 exclusive keywords, WeChat Reading has only 854; and QQ Reading’s ASO exclusive keywords are as high as 3,679, compared with WeChat Reading’s only 188. With the endorsement of WeChat, if further efforts can be made in ASO, I believe the number of downloads of WeChat Reading will inevitably have a qualitative leap. 4.2 Throttling & Maintaining Activity The so-called cost-cutting is to prevent the loss of users and to recall the lost users. Maintaining activity means promoting user activity and increasing the frequency of their product use. Here we talk about cost saving and maintaining activity together because in actual operations, preventing user churn often requires stimulating user activity. Because in order to prevent users from leaving at will, their loss cost must be increased. The increase in churn costs requires them to leave more imprints on the products and be active on the products. So next, I will analyze how WeChat Reading prevents user churn by taking maintaining activity as the starting point. Keeping users active means hoping that they will move forward steadily on the growth trajectory we set for them, without deviating or falling behind. This will inevitably require the use of some reward and punishment mechanisms to distinguish between core users and general users, and to organize users into circles to prevent bad money from driving out good money. For WeChat Reading, a social reading app, the main behaviors he hopes users will generate are nothing more than reading and contributing ideas. 4.2.1 Increase reading frequency 1. Effective book recommendation mechanism The original intention of users to use reading apps must be to read books that are suitable for them. In this scenario, two situations generally occur: one is that the user has a clear goal and has books he wants to read, and searches directly in the product; the other is that the user does not have a clear goal of what books he wants to read, and hopes that the app will provide suggestions for selection. For the first case, the problem can be solved as long as there is enough inventory, but for the second case, the product needs to have a reasonable operation recommendation mechanism. —1.1 Product recommendation WeChat Reading has various recommendation lists, such as this week's hot list, popular books, hot list books, as well as free list, new book list, etc. In addition, there are thematic classifications from military, history, literature, novels and other subjects to help users narrow the range of choices and promote decision-making. —1.2 Friend Recommendation Since it is a social reading app, friend recommendations are undoubtedly the most important and unique recommendation method for WeChat Reading. In the "Discover" module, a large number of pages are used to display books recommended by friends, and the setting of one recommended book per page is implemented. The page will display the recommended book cover, author, reading friends, and the number of reading users across the entire platform. By encouraging users to make reading decisions through endorsements from friends and the recognition of the book, people's herd mentality and voyeurism are fully utilized. I think everyone has the tendency to follow the crowd and to voyeurize, but not everyone likes to be peeped at. We only want to show the outside world the information we want others to obtain, but we don't want to expose ourselves nakedly to outsiders. The information we want to protect also includes what books we are reading. This reflects a very user-friendly design of WeChat Reading: private reading. When we set private reading for a book, our friends will not be able to know that we are reading this book. This also avoids the situation where some users choose to leave because they do not want to expose the books they read, and deliberately choose not to read individual books in order to avoid exposure, resulting in a decrease in the number of readers of certain books and a pile of invalid books. The private reading setting can be said to have effectively reduced the possibility of user loss to a certain extent. However, the friend book recommendations in the "Discover" module also have some shortcomings. Based on my current experience, there will be more and more pages of books recommended by friends. It is not clear what the upper limit is and whether WeChat Reading will actively remove books that exceed the limit. Users can choose to long press on specific recommended books to delete them, but this method is relatively hidden. If you are not an experienced user of Internet products, you may not know how to delete them, resulting in a long list of books recommended by friends, making the "Discover" module lengthy. 2. Competition Mechanism A reading ranking list was designed to rank the reading time of mutual friends in a week. The first place winner of the previous week will be awarded a title and promoted on a special page in the "Discover" module. Through this form, competition among friends can be stimulated and reading time can be increased. In addition, the setting that one book coin can be exchanged for every 30 minutes of usage effectively stimulates users to use the product. 3. Strengthen social attributes Allowing users to form their own social circles within the product is undoubtedly a good idea to increase user stickiness. WeChat Reading, which is based on the WeChat relationship chain, has inherent advantages in this regard that other products cannot match. —3.1 Friends’ attention 1) Friend recommendation page in the “Discover” module. The app recommends four WeChat friends with the highest scores based on the number of ideas published, reading time, number of likes, and number of books read. It also displays the number of friends using the WeChat Reading app. Click to enter the friend list and choose whether to follow them. 2) The follow-up details page of the "Me" module has a link to jump to the WeChat friends list page using WeChat Reading to choose whether to follow. —3.2 Interaction 1) Private messaging function allows users to communicate directly within the product 2) Comments, likes, mutual evaluation between comments, and forwarding and quoting of ideas all provide users with a platform for mutual communication. 4. Activities stimulate users —4.1 New users receive random red envelopes Every new user will have an opportunity to receive a red envelope of book coins, which will encourage users to purchase books, allowing them to have a deeper experience of the product, further understand the product, and educate them for their next purchase. Moreover, the interface for obtaining book coins supports sharing on WeChat Moments, satisfying users' need to show off and enhancing the exposure of the product itself. —4.2 Free for a limited time, 1.99 yuan special zone Promotional activities are used to stimulate user consumption and purchases, but both activities are long-term and have extremely deep hidden entrances. Taking the 1.99 yuan special zone as an example, users need to go through five steps, namely bookshelf - bookstore - classification - 1.99 yuan special zone - details page, to enter the final activity page, which is very cumbersome. These two characteristics make it difficult for this activity to generate explosive data growth. This may be due to the product positioning of reading products themselves. The author referred to Taobao Reading, Douban Reading and Duokan Reading and found that there are very few operational activities that pursue short-term data bursts. 4.2.2 Stimulating users to contribute ideas 1. Convenient recording Supports taking notes directly during reading, which is simple and convenient and reduces user operation costs 2. High idea exposure rate The dedicated "Ideas" module is divided into two sections: People to Follow and Selected Ideas. It helps to expose high-quality ideas and satisfy the vanity of those who output the ideas. 3. Comment and like to get recognition The comment and like function for ideas can make the content producer feel recognized and make him feel that his contribution is rewarded. Stimulate him to come up with more ideas to express himself. 4. Note bookmark view function The notes in this view are very beautiful. Contributors of ideas can share them on other social channels to establish the image they want in the eyes of others. It also supports saving to local storage. I personally think this feature is great. The above is the author’s analysis of the product operation routines of WeChat Reading. Because no matter it is event operation, content operation, or user operation, although the means of operation may be different, it is ultimately an operation on users. In the actual operation process, it is a relationship of you in me and me in you. In addition, due to the characteristics of the WeChat reading product itself, no explosive activities have been planned. Therefore, in this analysis, event operation and user operation are not listed separately, but event operation and user operation are combined for analysis.Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising The author of this article @糖愫尔 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! |
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