After Zhihu and Kuaishou, who will be the next traffic gold mine?

WeChat will become more and more "formal" and even "professional", and for people's "leisure life", content community is an important trend.

1. Phenomenon: Content communities are popular?

Recently, Zhihu and Kuaishou had a conflict.

A netizen posted a review of Kuaishou on Zhihu, but unexpectedly was "exposed" by Kuaishou employees. This incident then caused an uproar, and Kuaishou’s repeated inappropriate responses led to a bigger crisis through its crisis public relations . For a time, opposing Kuaishou has become politically correct on Zhihu.

Kuaishou and Zhihu are like two countries. And these divided communities reflect the life trajectories of many people.

• In the morning, I browse Zhihu and watch quarrels on the crowded subway;
• At noon, I check Maimai in the cafeteria and peek into workplace gossip;
• Late at night, I open my friend's impressions, browse anonymous "three views" questions and answers, and look for the opposite sex I feel attracted to;
• Listen to music, open NetEase Cloud Music , and check out the hobbies of nearby girls;
• While getting a haircut, the "young man" was showing off his latest Kuaishou video;
• When dating, my girlfriend opens Instagram and browses all kinds of "high-value" beauty products, food, travel, and records her exquisite life...

This is a microcosm of today's urban life: the bubble community. Wandering around different communities every day, releasing different sides of my personality.

The division of people and the division of personalities have given rise to the prosperity of content communities . In 2017, capital rebounded and content communities gained momentum:

• In January, Zhihu completed a US$100 million Series D financing round led by Capital Today;
• In January, the community-based Pretend Couple completed a 10 million yuan Prea round of financing;
• In March, Meipian completed a RMB 17 million Series A round of funding from Zhen Fund, taking a different approach to enter the middle-aged and elderly community sector;
• In March, Kuaishou completed a strategic investment of US$350 million led by Tencent;
• In March, the 3.0 version of the photo social networking app was launched, featuring the “World Page” based on LBS+interests, highlighting the unique content for young people.
• In April, Jianshu , a high-quality graphic and text creation platform, received media attention and aimed to create a healthier and more valuable community;
• In July, Friends Impression received a new round of financing of 100 million yuan.

There is no doubt that Zhihu and Kuaishou, as two extremes, are leading the upgrade of content communities. Next, who can replicate the success of Zhihu and Kuaishou and become a new unicorn? Will content community be a new hot spot?

2. Genre: Types of content communities

Looking at the current content community, there are four major schools:

1. Content-centric faction

With high-quality content as the core of the community, everything revolves around content. Zhihu is China's largest "deep content" community. It connects elites from various industries and in-depth content in the form of "question and answer". The professionalism and readability of the content are its core. For more than 90% of the majority of users, "scrolling Zhihu" itself is a lifestyle, even if they don't make any comments.

2. Social Center

It is dominated by UGC content created by users and emphasizes social attributes. Friends Impression is committed to creating an "exhibit hall" for everyone. The "exhibits" in the hall are composed of users' life records, others' comments, and soul-searching questions about their three views, thus completing a comprehensive record of a person, forming a person's biography and encyclopedia . These contents will become social opportunities.

3. Consumer Integration

It emphasizes the sharing of brand and consumer content and is committed to the conversion of advertising and e-commerce . in is a sharing platform centered around the refined lives of white-collar women. These beautiful girls use photos and videos to record their life information such as food, beauty, travel, etc. These sharings become a reference guide for brand consumption, thus becoming a powerful tool for popular brands to gain back traffic in e-commerce.

4. Tool extension school

Tools are introduced into the community, and community content in turn consolidates tool applications. NetEase Cloud Music is the favorite of the petty bourgeoisie and the middle class. It is not only a music software, but also a warm music community with playlists, music reviews, nearby, dynamics, and topics. You can find people of the opposite sex who like the same song... Such a home setting makes Cloud Music stand out.

Content, social networking, consumption, tools, all roads lead to Rome, so why do they all end up heading towards content communities? Would a content community with a unique tone and consumer value be the best future?

Let’s first look at the big picture and big opportunities.

3. Background: Pan-entertainment, great era

In "Big Opportunities in the Next Five Years: Become a Super Player in Selling Dopamine", the author has pointed out:

A new economic cycle has begun. With the platform (efficiency) war already decided, the main opportunities in the next few years will be in consumption and "entertainment": whoever can help users kill time better, eliminate boredom, and bring rich spiritual enjoyment and satisfaction without violating policy red lines will be able to seize the dividends of the new cycle.

Content communities are the "killer" of entertainment time and will make users become immersive and dependent.

As long as you capture the entertainment time and habits of a group of people, you can create a content community unicorn.

Young people's love for the second dimension gave birth to Bilibili ;

The need of young women to record and share brands and exquisite life gave rise to in;

The love of in-depth and long reading among highly educated people in first- and second-tier cities gave rise to Zhihu;

The boredom of the loser group in second-, third-, and fourth-tier cities and small town youth gave rise to Kuaishou;

The resonance of emotions, values ​​and hobbies, self-description and real anonymous description from friends make friends' impressions repeatedly.

The student body’s penchant for “literary love” has given rise to a flourishing community of pretend lovers ;

Even products like Meipian, which we may have never heard of, are the paradise for middle-aged and elderly photography enthusiasts.

Untapped social trends and more untapped populations will create more content community “unicorns” for us.

The author once pointed out in the article " Entrepreneurs who are still obsessed with vertical segmented businesses, it's time to wake up": The social needs of vertical communities can often be met by a WeChat or QQ group, and their content needs can be met by following public accounts and Weibo celebrities on related topics. So after a year, are you going to slap yourself in the face?

Maybe there is something about these communities that cannot be replaced?

4. Division: There is only one social network, but there can be many communities?

Most people can’t differentiate between socializing and community.

When social networking was very popular in 2014, all kinds of apps emerged under the banner of social networking, but many of them were actually communities.

They all have IM chat functions, they all have news feed dynamic information flows , they all have groups... The key is that they all have content and relationships, and it's hard to tell them apart.

How to distinguish? There are content and relationships in social networking and communities, and the key lies in “who is at the core”.

The core of social interaction is "establishing, maintaining and deepening relationships among people." For example, WeChat is mainly about maintaining and deepening relationships, while Momo Tantan revolves around discovery and establishment.

The core of the so-called community is "group participation around core relationships and content." The community has a clear center, either big Vs and kols, top content, or hot topics. It puts people in a "centralized square". The center of the square produces content, and others are responsible for consuming the content and participating in various ways around the content (watching is also participation).

Why aren’t there so many opportunities in the social field? Because the number of relationships a person maintains on a daily basis is limited. According to the Dunbar number, the core number is around 150 people. Chinese people, who are afraid of trouble, will put the more important and stable relationships in one place for "batch processing", and that is WeChat. Otherwise, if there is only one platform for each relationship, people will be exhausted from running around and unable to balance both.

But there are slightly more opportunities in the community field because the roles people want to experience are relatively diverse. You may be a white-collar worker in the workplace, a hot mom, a literature lover, a veteran movie fan, a fan of worldview issues... So when you want to experience different roles, it is much more efficient to go to the corresponding content community than to screen the corresponding content in the ocean of information in the circle of friends .

Maintaining social relationships requires time and effort, otherwise they will soon fade into passers-by. But there is no such pressure in the content community. If you want to immerse yourself in a new state and role, you just need to click on the content community. Sometimes it is enough to just watch and not say anything.

It is impossible for you to add all the friends who share the same interests and hobbies as your WeChat friends (social), but you can communicate with them in content communities on different topics.

Of course, due to the cyclical nature of trends and the limited differentiation of the population, it may be difficult for content communities to be as “big and stable” as WeChat, and the market ceiling will be lower. But it is definitely not like social networking where one person's success depends on the efforts of many others. There will be Zhihu and Kuaishou in multiple fields and for multiple groups of people. Xiaohongshu , in, Babytree , Friends Impression, and Meipian may all replicate this prosperity.

5. Outbreak: Three Ways to Cold Start a Community

If we apply the investment theory of "large market, replicable and defensible" by investment tycoon Zhu Xiaohu of Jinshajiang , the value of content community also holds true.

As mentioned earlier, "the market still exists and the dividends are still there" is the first advantage of the content community.

The second advantage is that it is relatively easy to cold-start a content community, which can lead to explosive growth.

Anyone who has worked on a BBS knows that to set up a forum, it does not need to have many people and topics from the beginning. It only needs to let users see at first glance that "there are some high-quality celebrities and content here, and they are continuously updated" when they come in. The active atmosphere created by hundreds of content producers can attract hundreds of thousands of users.

It is actually not difficult for a content community to create a “lively first impression” and achieve a cold start. In the past two years, we have accumulated valuable tactical experience.

1. Viral Marketing

Through "viral marketing ", a chain reaction of spontaneous spread is quickly triggered, thereby quickly gaining huge traffic . The representative here is friend impression. No matter the previous "describe me in three words" or the later "what do you want to say to me anonymously", they have mastered the viral transmission through their understanding of users' social psychology time and time again, and the cost of acquiring customers is negligible.

2. Tool-based diversion

Instagram started as a photography tool and has become the largest photo social (community) platform. The domestic in started with a tool to make women’s photos look more stylish, and built a paradise for beautiful women to show off their travels, beauty products, and food. Kuaishou started out as a GIF and video tool, but it has created an amazing short video community. The recent Meipian is a long-text and picture tool for WeChat Moments. Due to its unique style, it has become a new favorite among middle-aged and elderly photographers.

The significance of tool school is:

• Often starting from basic high-frequency rigid demand, it is easy to obtain stable traffic;
• The content produced by the tool can be shared on WeChat and Weibo, triggering secondary dissemination;
• The tool itself may attract dedicated content producers, thus facilitating the discovery and cultivation of potential KOLs.

3. Event Operations

Continuous activity is the driving force of a content community. Representatives include the beauty community platform in, the video group chat Pabei which has just been launched, and it has teamed up with the Miss Universe pageant to create an online "star-making factory", which resulted in a fierce "civil war".

in has over 100 million registered users, of which 75.3% are born after 1995 and 83% are female users . Their willingness and ability to consume are quite prominent. How can these resources be utilized? The platform is divided into two steps:

• The first step is to invite thousands of Miss Universes to join, using the scarce resources of top stars to drive the PGC upgrade of content;
• In the second step, the "invasion" of Miss Universe triggered the catfish effect. Various talents in in formed the "in girls" team to challenge Miss Universe and compete for the opportunity to attend the finals. Soon, the whole community became hot with the beauties competing with each other for looks.

6. Sedimentation: “Invisible moat”, different countries

Cold start is easy, but how to retain traffic? The content community has an invisible moat called “community atmosphere.”

Just imagine, if you encounter an emergency and you want to know the "latest and fastest" news, you will definitely go to Weibo. But if you want to know the "most in-depth" discussion, you usually go to Zhihu.

If you take a beautiful and stylish photo, you will post it on Instagram, but if you plan to be funny and weird in a "very tasteless" way, you will most likely go to Kuaishou.

Today you suddenly saw a friend’s comment on “Alien: Covenant” on WeChat Moments, and you wanted to see other people’s comments, but when you scrolled down, all you saw were health, investment, celebrities… so you were immediately disappointed and decided to just go to Douban .

You want to post your opinion on a product, but if you post it on your Moments, won’t it be too pretentious and your colleagues will laugh at you? So you went to Zhihu.

This is the "atmosphere", something that is hard to describe, just like when you go to Tokyo, Thailand, Tanzania... you will feel completely different atmospheres, there is always one that can deeply attract you and make you linger.

The community atmosphere of Zhihu is depth, quarrels and stories; the atmosphere of Friends Impression is inner feeling, description and world outlook, the community atmosphere of Kuaishou is funny, humorous and popular; the community atmosphere of in is youth, appearance and brand... The atmosphere has an irresistible magic for the corresponding users.

7. Stickiness: The recipe for a moat

Community atmosphere is composed of the following elements:

1. Main forms of weak relationship chains

What is presented in the content community are all kinds of "weak relationships": KOLs and their fans, groups and communities with different interests, and instant friendships formed around a hot topic...

If the core of a community is the people who produce and consume content, then the atmosphere of a community is basically determined by the form of its main relationship chain.

The users of Zhihu mainly come from highly educated people in first- and second-tier cities, which means that "long content" will not be excluded here, but may be sought after; the users of Kuaishou mainly come from third- and fourth-tier cities and rural areas, so you have to be funny but not pretentious, otherwise no one will pay attention to you; Xiaohongshu started with overseas shopping experts and celebrity buyers, which makes it different from Taobao and Tmall .

What kind of relationship chain, what kind of community.

2. User role identity

If everyone has a thousand faces, then different communities can often unleash the different faces of users.

Kuaishou is full of videos of people self-abusing by eating light bulbs, eating dead pigs, dynamic social dances, and funny dirty jokes, which obviously capture the B-side of users.

In contrast, in has a lot of fashion outfits, original hand-painted pictures, travel scenery, special food, film photography and other literary and artistic life silhouettes, which clearly correspond to the user's exquisite A-side. If the artistic and beauty-loving girl in you starts to overflow, you will naturally post photos here.

If you are lonely and want to find spiritual resonance (rather than just looking at looks like Tantan), Friend Impression is a thoughtful choice.

When you want to transform yourself into a second-dimensional middle school student, Bilibili and other websites are the last paradise lost.

And when you suddenly become "that you" who is serious about learning and striving for knowledge, Zhihu is the best place to go.

What kind of role, what kind of community.

3. Mainstream content style

There is a word called "tonality".

Different communities will gradually form their own mainstream styles: it is more appropriate to publish content of this style here, and it is easier to find content of this style here.

For example, the "Zhihu style" that has been formed on Zhihu, the funny and creative video style on Kuaishou, the high-value brand style on in, and the literary chicken soup style on Jianshu.

Just imagine, if you post something using the "Zhihu style" on WeChat Moments, Tieba or Douban, will it be popular? Most people would definitely say that it’s too long and too pretentious! Similarly, why don’t you try posting the videos on Kuaishou to Tudou or Meipai ? Therefore, the key to publishing what style of content depends on the appropriateness of the community atmosphere.

Content that is suitable for producing and consuming a certain style will obviously attract users with the corresponding tone.

Contents of different qualities bring together people of different qualities and set the atmosphere for the evolution of content style.

4. Management Mechanism

The core beneath the surface of the content atmosphere is the management mechanism of the entire platform, just like the culture of an enterprise is often determined by the system behind it.

The reason why Kuaishou can stand out from the crowd of Weishi , Meipai and Miaopai is essentially because of its powerful mechanism. The latter three have been using Weibo’s centralized mechanism from the beginning and have relied too much on celebrities and beauties, which has resulted in ordinary people having no sense of existence at all, not to mention the “ignored people” in third- and fourth-tier cities and rural areas.

The decentralization and algorithm recommendation mechanism adopted by Kuaishou has formed a mechanism that allows ordinary people to become famous. The scary thing about Kuaishou is not that it has people like MC Tianyou, but that it has a mechanism that can produce N MC Tianyous.

Similarly, Zhihu's "algorithm recommendation + social recommendation + editor recommendation" mechanism can effectively ensure the participation of latecomers. Even if you are a " newbie " on Zhihu, it is entirely possible to become a great author with tens of thousands of upvotes on one answer. In contrast, the "anonymous Q&A" in the impression of friends has the characteristics of decentralization. You don't need to be a big V. As long as you answer the questions carefully, read carefully, and swipe left and right, the system will gradually help you find the opposite sex with "similar values".

5. Activities and themes

The system is implicit. For users, what they see are the new topics and new activities that flow every day. This is almost the core component of "community life". What we experience every day in the community is “mobilizing the masses to fight against the masses” and “setting up a stage for thematic activities” time and time again.

Following hot topics on Weibo, comments and group topics on Douban, in-depth interpretations and daily quarrels on Zhihu, the entry of Miss Universe and brand events on in... It can be said that the kind of activities you choose will also determine the kind of people and content, which will objectively create the atmosphere of the community.

Relationships, content, mechanisms, activity themes... the community atmosphere is formed in this way, and it begins to sell a sense of participation and community experience.

Interestingly, although community does not equal social interaction, the social effectiveness of community platforms is often better than that of pure social tools. Why?

8. Extension: Added value of content

That’s because the content of a content community is not just content, it also has two outstanding values:

1. Social value

The effectiveness of social interaction often lies in the matching and unification of social advantages and motivations. The rich discussions around different topics in the community can fully demonstrate the advantages and needs of each user and then organically combine them.

On Zhihu, ordinary users "consume high-quality content that they are interested in and discover awesome experts", while the awesome experts can just use "long answers" to showcase their social advantages and build their own fan circle influence, so that each gets what they need and is effectively matched.

As a question-and-answer community, the questions and answers on Friend Impression are not for "seeking knowledge" but for "matching", which is to find the opposite sex with whom you resonate. The platform will connect "people with many similarities" through algorithms: your friendship needs are that you like rock and electronic music, and you like the travel routes recommended by Lonely Planet, and your friends describe you as generous and not holding grudges, and the other party meets all of these requirements and happens to like your keywords , so "Impression" becomes a social bond.

Chinese people’s social interactions often require a buffer zone, that is, scenes and topics to break the ice. If you start with a one-on-one conversation, it will often turn into an awkward conversation with no topics to talk about. Therefore, everyone needs "content" as a buffer zone. First, interact around the content, like, comment, communicate, and gradually become familiar with each other. This is another value that content communities bring to social networking.

2. Long-term value

Different from general information and social products, the content in content communities often has the characteristic of "long-term effectiveness".

The questions and answers on Zhihu can be regarded as an in-depth version of "Baidu Knows". Once a question is expanded, no matter whether it has been queried or not, as long as there are users with related questions, they can find out more through search.

The impression tags on friends' impressions and the 360-degree description of each person constitute a person's "database". Users can search for everything about a person like Google or Baidu, including what movies he likes to watch, what music he likes to listen to, what food he likes to eat, his personality, world outlook, life stories, and friends' comments. Once these contents are released, they become a person's "Dianping" and will not fade with the passage of time.

in is a reference manual for consumer brands and word of mouth. The beauties’ life records around food, beauty, travel, etc. have accumulated valuable consumption scenario content, and these contents, like "Dianping", can become a guide for user consumption and a tool for brand marketing .

The combination of sociality, instrumentality and long-term effectiveness gives content communities outstanding value. But that doesn't mean it's invulnerable.

The greatest weakness is often hidden in the greatest strength.

9. Risk: Bottleneck of Community Sedimentation

The advantage is the community atmosphere.

Although the community can use the "power of atmosphere" to effectively obtain corresponding traffic, it still cannot go down. However, the community atmosphere often prevents more people from joining, making efforts to build a community for all people difficult, so to speak, "unable to move forward."

Just imagine, if a person who is good at making jokes in the style of Weibo comes to Zhihu, he will generally not be welcomed and you will lose interest after posting for a few days. In other words, if a large number of Weibo joke tellers come in, then Zhihu's die-hard fans may leave because the atmosphere has changed and "it feels different."

Because of the atmosphere, many communities are unable to die but cannot grow big, which is a common problem.

Some people also say, what kind of community is that? Isn’t it just a BBS? Since the BBSs of the past have all declined, what makes you say that content communities have hope?

In fact, the decline of traditional BBS is due to five main reasons:

1. With the influx of users, information noise increases

Once the number of users increases, there will inevitably be “too many people and too many mouths”, and as a result, many users will not only fail to match effectively, but will also harass each other. The more users come in, the more difficult it is to control, and the harder it is to find something you like in a sea of ​​information noise.

2. Concentrated speech and loss of participation

The right to speak can easily be concentrated in the hands of a few KOLs, who become microphone tyrants, while most people can only watch silently, lacking a sense of participation.

3. KOLs stick together, making it difficult for latecomers to stand out

It's like on Zhihu, the weight of a big V's likes is far greater than that of ordinary people, and if you don't know how to "stand in line" and offend people, you may also be complained by a group of people, which makes latecomers gradually less willing to post things.

4. Evaporative cooling: bad money drives out good money

Another possibility is that the rapid influx of newcomers gradually lowered the average level of the community, causing the big Vs at the top to gradually become unwilling to talk and leave, which further aggravated the watering down of the community.

When people who are serious about producing content work hard for a long time to produce a long manuscript, but the effect is not as good as stories, gossip, chicken soup and jokes, they don’t want to write anymore.

5. PGC addiction

Although from the perspective of valuation, a universal UGC platform is often more imaginative. But in practice, many platforms claiming to be UGC are ultimately bound to become PGC. Of course, the PGCs here may not be the "writers" actively hired by the platform, but more likely the number makers on various platforms, the " wool-pulling party " that takes advantage of traffic.

In China, PGC will almost certainly suppress UGC in the long run . The first reason is that professional content producers can more easily obtain traffic and know better how to capture the user's G-spot and produce popular content on an assembly line basis. This advantage is not possessed by UGCs who "create based on inspiration and improvisation". The second reason is that professional content producers have more motivation to continue producing and often have established a "profit chain" around content traffic, which is much better than UGCs who simply rely on interests and feelings.

Even on a platform like WeChat, it is a visible trend that more and more PGC content is forwarded and shared, and the enthusiasm for original creation is relatively reduced.

Starting with PGC operations , it is often easy to complete the cold start of the community in the short term, but in the long run it may often kill the atmosphere and enthusiasm of the public to participate in UGC, and it is unlikely to form an ecosystem. However, if you start with UGC, you will inevitably fall into a sea of ​​information noise, and will eventually become PGC.

Precisely because of these five reasons, traditional communities are almost completely unable to resist the fate of "prosperity and decline". When a large number of users pour in and data reaches its highest point, various long-lurking contradictions and problems erupt one after another. In fact, the downward curve has quietly begun.

Can the new generation of content communities escape this fate?

10. Evolution: Past and Future

Looking back at history, communities have always evolved.

The first generation of community is the traditional forum BBS, whose characteristic is "moderator recommendation". The moderator has pinned it, the moderator has featured it, the moderator has initiated an event...but the moderator's ability is always limited, and it is often difficult to satisfy everyone when faced with a variety of strange demands. So once a massive influx of users and information comes in, they can no longer hold on.

The second generation of communities, such as Weibo and Instagram, are characterized by “social recommendations”. If you follow different influencers, you will see different things. However, such communities can easily be exploited by "number makers" and eventually become a paradise for zombie fans and water armies. At the same time, the right to speak is rapidly concentrated in the hands of KOLs, which also results in most users having no sense of presence and participation.

Then, the new generation of content communities that are emerging now are likely to be the "unification of algorithmic recommendation and social recommendation" (or even more inclined towards algorithms), thus creating a content community like Toutiao . For example, on Kuaishou, the platform recommends relevant short videos based on your interests. Even if you don’t have a large number of fans, you may be pushed to the corresponding user group because of the content tags, thus achieving good dissemination.

So:

1. There are thousands of different people in the feed, and each person sees the information that he is interested in, which reduces information noise;
2. What KOLs see is what he is interested in, and they notice that the possibility of hydration and evaporative cooling is reduced;
3. The right to speak is no longer concentrated only in the hands of big Vs. As long as the quality of content is high, newcomers will also have the opportunity to stand out.

It seems that the problem has been solved, but algorithm recommendation still has its limitations:

1. Any algorithm must be based on a certain amount of data, otherwise it is meaningless. In other words, this algorithm will only be accurate if you have a large number of users and have accumulated user usage for a period of time. Moreover, many contents are difficult to CTR and label.
2. Algorithmic recommendations can easily lead to the cocoon effect . When it is discovered that users are interested in a certain type of information, this type of information will be pushed to them desperately, losing the possibility of a wider range of richness, and people's vision becomes increasingly narrow and monotonous. From a practical perspective, whether it is Toutiao or Kuaishou, this approach may eventually lead to the low-level nature of the platform, that is, users will gradually see the most superficial, popular, simple and crude content, because these are the easiest to "capture human nature" in the short term.

From this perspective, how does algorithm recommendation work? How to determine the weights of algorithmic recommendations and social recommendations? There are still many problems, but that does not prevent the great era of content communities from coming.

11. Trend: The Huangpu Military Academy of Unicorns

Back to the beginning, why do we say that “content community” is likely to be the future? In this future, will there be more unicorns like Zhihu and Kuaishou?

There are a few points worth noting:

1. WeChat Moments may be about to start a “downward curve”

Have you noticed that when WeChat launched the “Friends Circle visible for three days” feature, many people enabled this feature without hesitation?

In fact, this is an important manifestation of the Snapchatization of WeChat. If the Moments in the past were like Facebook’s personal homepage, your own exhibition hall; then the Moments with this function are beginning to become more like Snapchat’s Story function, increasingly catering to young people who “pay attention to privacy, fear social pressure, and like to delete past status.” But why does Moments suddenly involve privacy and social pressure?

Because today's circle of friends is different from before. It is no longer the closest personal relationships. Everyone's WeChat is flooded with various relationships such as parents, colleagues, leaders, business partners... Even grouping friends cannot handle it.

As a result, they are less and less willing to speak in their circle of friends, and sharing other people's articles and showing off their positive and successful selves have become the safest options.

Although the circle of friends is decentralized, with the increase in the average number of friends of users, information noise, evaporative cooling, reduced participation... these problems of traditional communities have emerged.

For most people, the increase in WeChat friends is an inevitable trend, it’s just a matter of speed, sooner or later. We can infer that in the near future, the attractiveness of the WeChat Moments feed will gradually decline, and people will start to have time to pay attention to other feeds.

2. Social media and content platforms have a weak sense of participation

In addition to the Moments, the other two mainstream feed flows are “social media represented by Weibo” and “content platforms represented by Toutiao.” But their problem is the same: most people can only become silent spectators and find it difficult to feel a sense of participation and presence.

Based on 1 and 2, content communities, as feed streams with “more precise tonality” and “stronger sense of participation”, have obvious competitiveness. This is from the perspective of product experience. Another thing that cannot be ignored is social trends:

(1) The collapse of the acquaintance society and the arrival of the stranger society are already very obvious in first-tier cities and will extend to second-tier cities in the future. Looking at a longer curve, the role of "weak ties" will become increasingly obvious, and content communities are one of the main occasions for weak ties to ferment.

(2) The population is gradually divided into different circles. With the differentiation and solidification of classes, it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to find a unified mainstream. Our world will be divided into more interests and subculture circles, which brings huge opportunities to community platforms. People in the second dimension gather on Bilibili, those who share the same values ​​gather on Friends Impression, fans of long content gather on Zhihu and Jianshu, and girls who pursue a beautiful and refined life gather on in and Xiaohongshu... There are too many Chinese people, and to deal with one type of people, the number may be tens of millions or even hundreds of millions.

(3) The lack of NGO experience brings huge potential energy. Why are so many people so keen on watching and arguing on Weibo and Zhihu? In fact, it is because of their deep yearning for the "square experience" and "community belonging". In the West, where the government is small and society is big, the development of NGOs has fully met this demand. Various gatherings, sports and even parades are held in a lively and festive manner, fully releasing people's need for community belonging. In China, the development of NGOs is relatively weak, so various online communities have taken over this function and become part of the mobilization force of non-governmental organizations. In the hot events of "mobilizing the masses to fight against the masses", everyone lived a fulfilling life.

(4) In the process of user consumption upgrading, content communities have become an important data reference because of their unique duality of “content relationships” . For example, questions on Zhihu such as "How do boys buy ties" and "How do boys order custom suits" are issues that the author is particularly concerned about. For example, the travel, food, and beauty sharing by good-looking influencers on Instagram will become consumption models for young girls. The direct result is that these content communities will be easier to commercialize and can easily become the main battlefield for "soft implantation" by big brands. You should know that in addition to pursuing traffic and KPIs, mainstream brands pay more attention to the brand tone and audience characteristics of the platform itself. If your platform has an elegant style and a clear atmosphere, and your audience is the post-95s and post-00s generation, it will be much easier to explore commercialization.

WeChat will become more and more "formal" and even "professional", and for people's "leisure life", content community is an important trend. Zhihu has won over a group of long-content enthusiasts, in has attracted a large number of post-95 beautiful girl users with its stylish content, Friends Impression is heading into the field of "young people's emotional values ​​and hobbies", Babytree is moving into maternal and child content, and Jianshu is harvesting literary chicken soup enthusiasts... New giants may emerge in these communities.

If you have found an unoccupied content and crowd segment that you are good at, what are you waiting for?