Social media is not dead, the high-end game has just begun

Some things, when everyone is pessimistic, actually mean opportunities.

1. Toutiao’s sneak attack

Some things, when everyone is pessimistic, actually mean opportunities.

There are two recent rumors about Toutiao: one is that at the end of last year, Toutiao quietly completed an astonishing amount of Series D financing ; the other is the long-standing rumor that Toutiao is going to do social networking . In fact, Toutiao already had quasi-social products such as Douyin and Huoshan, and also acquired the social upstart Flipagram across the ocean. But this time it was still too low-key, quietly replacing the third item in the bottom bar with "WeToutiao".

When I opened it, I saw that it was a sign of a fight with Weibo!

From Alipay to Toutiao, why, when the venture capital circle is pessimistic about social networking, the giants of all sizes who have already enjoyed the traffic dividend are obsessed with social networking?

Weitoutiao looks very similar to Weibo at first glance, but upon closer inspection, the product logic is completely different:

1. Without a forwarding mechanism, a chain reaction cannot be formed;
2. The discovery of relationships is very "restrained". Except for the celebrity accounts recommended by the official, it is difficult for others to disturb each other unless they are private friends with you. Zombie accounts and water army accounts are not easy to survive.
3. The main body is still the community content pugc, and users cannot chat privately with each other.
4. The core is people, and it does not have the "hotspot focus" function of Weibo.
5. The number of readers and fans are all public, showing off one's wealth at all times.

In short, Weitao is still a "weak relationship and light interaction" social network under the logic of attention. This is a relatively early product, but the functions will be iterated. I have two important ideas for the future:

1. Is it possible for Toutiao to make social dynamic recommendations to users based on big data based on user interest data collected in the homepage information flow ? This will form a social version of Toutiao, a circle of friends with recommendations based on interests.
2. Can a unique sense of participation, belonging and relationship chain be formed?

The logic here is very simple. As the most popular content aggregation platform at the moment, Toutiao is being "encircled and attacked" by BAT and a bunch of small giants. If it only has "content acquisition efficiency" as its moat, it is obviously not enough. All content producers have the bad habit of submitting the same manuscript to multiple platforms, so it is difficult for you to have exclusive content. The efficiency of content recommendations on other platforms can also be continuously optimized through algorithms. In the long run, Toutiao’s advantage may not be absolute.

Therefore, deep control of user data, relationship chains around KOLs, and social participation around content have the potential to create new barriers. Just imagine that maybe one day, Toutiao can recommend people of the opposite sex that you are interested in at any time, and what they post are all topics that you are interested in. What else do you need Momo for?

Since 2016, content communities and mobile games, which were once viewed as unpopular, have begun to revive. Investment in the pan-entertainment sector has increased significantly in the first quarter of this year. Many people have even begun to say that the dividends of the C-end market are returning. After all, the core of 2c is product innovation, and every leapfrog innovation can bring a new wave of demographic dividends.

It seems that people have become accustomed to obtaining content through search and editor recommendations, but since 2016, feed stream content products based on big data have brought a new wave of popularity. Many times, the lack of a demographic dividend is not due to a bad timing, but because existing products are too similar and boring.
What about socializing?

2. What’s wrong with social interaction?

Since the capital winter in 2015, social entrepreneurship has become a hard-hit area. A large number of social projects in rounds AB have fallen into growth bottlenecks, activity and retention have begun to decline, and profitability is nowhere in sight.

"The overall situation of social products has been determined, the relationship chain effect of WeChat and QQ is unstoppable, and the time window for app entrepreneurship has closed!" Various bearish voices continued to be heard, and the situation seemed to be getting worse day by day. Many people immediately turned to content and live streaming as soon as they saw that the signs were not right.

However, now that Snapchat has gone public, many people's attention has returned to social networking.

From the game social networking of Werewolf to the return of music.ly to the mainland, from the mysterious animated picture of Flash to the star chart matching of Constellation City, from the interest of Pansidian Cave to the imitation of house party group video social networking, from Momo's short video to Kuaishou's amazing revenue data...for a time, the social field seemed to be on the verge of movement again.

But this time, social networking is very different, with more innovation, closer to content and closer to money.

Social isn’t dead, it’s just evolving.

The easy era of social entrepreneurship has ended, and 1.0 is moving towards 2.0. In the second half of social networking, those social entrepreneurs who lack the ability to deeply innovate and focus on users, cannot thoroughly explore user psychology, and only rely on "simple and crude methods, imitation and plagiarism, integrated financing, and blindly focusing on execution and operation " are facing a dead end.
People finally understand that social networking is not O2O or shared bicycles , and all you need to do is act quickly and raise more funds. The way of playing has quietly changed. What matters now is depth and quality, vision and details, and a deep understanding of human nature.

Social networking requires more product and strategic strength, and slow and careful work produces fine results.

Looking back at the first half, the core logic of 1.0 is "simplicity". They pursue the quantity of social interaction more. Whether looking around on Momo's information flow and seeing beauties nearby, or flipping through the cards on Tantan and chatting as soon as they see someone they like, they emphasize this feeling: there are many good-looking people of the opposite sex here, countless opportunities, and you can chat anytime you want.
Is this a real experience, or does it just look good? Everyone already has an idea in their mind.

When social entrepreneurship entered the 2.0 era, the core demand shifted from "simplicity" to "quality". Compared with the number of social interactions per unit time, the new generation of products pay more attention to the quality of social communication. For them, what is important is not how many people they flirt with, but whether they can quickly find someone with "similar values, interests and feelings", and whether they can really "chat" smoothly. The "effectiveness" of social interaction is unprecedentedly prominent.

The pursuit of social quality and accurate matching is becoming a new trend. "Plato" and "soul" try to label and match through questionnaires on views on love, the social app "Rugu" uses the K-TES test of social psychology to accurately match, and "Friend Impression" uses "label impression" and emotional questions and answers to build user profiles for matching, and mylove love agency gives 170 questions to people who want to have a serious relationship. You take your time to answer them, and the more you answer, the more accurate the answer will be.
Social is upgrading.

3. Pain Points of 1.0

Looking back at social entrepreneurship in the 1.0 era, social entrepreneurs have successively offered five routes:

1. Hormonal route: easy to trigger in the short term, and the atmosphere is difficult to control

When talking about social networking, we have to talk about hooking up . "Let's have sex?" once became a high-frequency word when people talked about social products. From Momo, Tantan to Meiliyue and gay social products, a layer of ambiguous pink has already covered the area. In fact, the magic of hooking up with the opposite sex also runs through the other five routes of breakthrough. It can even be said that all social interactions that deviate from the "hooliganism" of men and women are essentially "hooliganism" against common sense of human nature.

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Discover and "connect" with good-looking people of the opposite sex. This product is simple and direct, "available by default", and only focuses on appearance and money. The measure of its success depends on whether it can be made, whether it is easy to make the appointment, and how the appointment goes. Of course, they also bring various psychological satisfactions in hooking up with the opposite sex, curiosity, excitement and vanity - being "right-swiped" and chatted up by many people, "proving one's appearance"; seeing so many good-looking opposite sexes lined up in a row in one breath, this visual addiction is comparable to visiting a brothel in ancient times.

Pain Points

1. Almost all hormone products face "experience collapse". Once the reputation of the one-night stand tool becomes known, it is quickly stigmatized, and the user ecosystem falls into collapse due to the massive invasion of losers and low-class women. It can be said that their success is due to one-night stands, and their failure is also due to one-night stands.
2. High-quality female users are always the core, but when a product is stigmatized, any decent girl will choose to flee, not to mention the influx of a large number of losers who ask "Let's meet", making them want to avoid it as much as possible.
3. As for the men, they originally came here for its reputation as a "hookup tool", but no one responded after 30 attempts. Even if someone responded, after chatting for a while they often discovered that they were either WeChat business agents, wine-drinking scammers, or not women at all, or even not human at all (robots). What's more, in real life they are not good at starting topics and chatting in front of the opposite sex. Now they suddenly have to have a one-on-one instant chat with the opposite sex, and they can only "flirt incompetently".

2. Interest-based social interaction: difficult to do, but more sustainable

If you can’t just go for your body, what about going for your heart? Focusing on interests, status, keywords and common points, we have an interest-based social networking event of "poetry and distant places", which seems to be able to better capture the "serious and honest ordinary people". The current interest-based social networking is either a general interest platform that brings together various interests, such as Tieba and Douban , or a vertical product that focuses on a certain interest, such as a fitness social product like Keep , where fitness enthusiasts take courses, check in at regular intervals, and compete with each other.

Two days before Valentine's Day , iDaily launched its own dating app MyLove, with "fill-in-the-blank questions and answers - precise matching" as the main logic of the game. In January of this year, the MONO team launched Constellation City, which attempted to apply "constellation psychology" to the field of stranger dating. At the end of last year, Friends Impression launched "Interest Question and Answer Dating" to establish a high-quality and in-depth description of each person, which can be used for long-term mutual understanding and in-depth matching.

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Discover and "enjoy" interesting people and content based on your interests. Using interests as a "pretext" and content as a medium to engage in various types of hookups between men and women, if hormonal social networking is like looking for prey in a nightclub, then interest-based social networking is like the talented men and beautiful women in ancient times reciting poems and composing essays. At the same time, it is easier to obtain psychological satisfaction such as vanity, a sense of belonging, and the desire to express oneself among people who have "commonalities and resonances".

Pain Points

1. Slow to warm up! The explosive growth rate of interest-based products is often limited. Douban in the past and Zhihu today are both slow communities that require "strong operations", unlike hormones that explode at once. The reason for this is probably because highbrow culture is always a minority, the threshold for interest is a bit high and the traffic is dispersed, while the relationship between men and women is "universally applicable".
2. Vertical products are easily substitutable. The reading of vertical interest content is too easily satisfied by public accounts , Weibo, Toutiao and Yidian Zixun , and the community atmosphere of vertical interests can often be easily achieved through Zhihu, Tieba, QQ groups and WeChat groups .

3. New media: the path from tools to social media is blocked

Social media will periodically produce hit products. From text, pictures, sounds, short videos, to the recently popular live broadcast, for example, Instagram has brought about the era of picture social networking, and musical.ly focuses on "music social networking". In China, Kuaishou has created a glorious short video industry in third- and fourth-tier cities and among the grassroots population, while Meipian, a graphic and text editing tool, has won the favor of the older generation of photography enthusiasts because it conforms to the "aesthetics of the previous generation." ? ?

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Tools come first, and social interaction is included. Through them, users can create high-quality graphic, text, audio and video works at low cost, share them to their own Moments, Space and Weibo, and enjoy the social currency attached to the works - attracting attention, becoming a topic of conversation, and showing off. "Pretending to be cool is useful" has led to a large influx of users, and the creators of the platform hope that the influx of users will stay here to socialize. Are they overthinking it?

Pain Points

1. Tools are tools. The glory of Instagram has never been replicated. The convenience of creation does not mean the convenience of socializing. Users will never build social relationships here for the sake of "convenience of creation". What they prefer is to create content here and quickly share it on their own social networks (WeChat, Weibo, QQ space).
2. Behind the inability to socialize is the weakness of UGC. One of the important reasons why Instagram is so popular is the aesthetic atmosphere abroad: a large number of awesome creators, generally exquisite UGC content, and matching user aesthetics, which gives it a community foundation and social value; even on live streaming platforms , foreign countries mostly display creative and life content, rather than a screen full of internet celebrities . But what about its imitators in China? All selfies showing off, generally poor aesthetic taste, and funny "give up" stickers... Such UGCs are not worth communicating with. Their only success is on Kuaishou. You feel low enough but everyone can play with you.

4. Generational differences: The QQ challenge is almost unsolvable

Snapchat has become popular and has become a social platform for young people in the United States. China's WeChat is really too old, which has given new hope to social entrepreneurs. Chinese investors have begun to hype the "post-90s concept", claiming that only those born in the 1990s can understand those born in the 1990s, and that those born in the 1990s will definitely create a completely different social network. For example, youth platforms such as Pretend to Be a Couple (Classmates Next Door), Zuiyou , and Paipai have created a completely different landscape.

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Young people should have their own social networks where they can unleash themselves, express their nature, and do whatever they want.

Pain Points

1. In the comments on why Snapchat cannot be launched in China, the author has pointed out that WeChat is too old and young people need a fresh social network. This is by no means a "false demand" created by YY, but it is a pity that Tencent does not only have WeChat. In China, there is an older QQ with a comparable user base. Relying on its long-standing relationship chain, it has dominated the hearts of a large number of young people. This mountain has become a nightmare for all social products produced by the post-90s generation, locking up the new hope in its cradle.
2. Characteristics such as “ burn after reading , low social pressure, and the ability to be true to oneself” have far less impact on Chinese young people than imagined. Are they really more bold and open?

5. The B-side of anonymity: How to care if everything is anonymous

Do you feel that socializing is too tiring, always having to wear a mask, be serious, and pay attention to your public image? It doesn’t matter. China’s Wu Mi people have set off a whirlwind of B-side social networking. On platforms like Soul and Plato, the founders hope that users can have a resonance of souls with each other. Plato has abandoned the face-based social networking, and the user's profile picture is blurred from the beginning. It takes a period of communication before one can see their true appearance; Pansy Cave is a platform that focuses on fun, sex and love. People's chats are like late-night bedside talks, with all kinds of private topics flying around.

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Everyone has a B-side that needs to be released and cannot be known to outsiders. Everyone hopes to feel safe and bold to talk about topics that they dare not talk about in normal times in a certain specific occasion; everyone also likes to complain about gossip and pry into privacy. This is a fatal temptation.

Pain Points

1. Secret and his imitators can easily become a garbage dump for negative emotions, or a hotbed for peeking into dark gossip and destroying privacy, where all kinds of irresponsible and outrageous remarks run rampant. For most ordinary users, they may feel a temporary sense of pleasure from the B side, but after the climax and returning to "normal", they will inevitably feel dizzy, nauseous and uncomfortable when seeing everything here.
2. Since it is an anonymous platform, it is only for satisfying the desire to vent and pry into other people's privacy. Users are not willing to deposit identity information and relationship chains, so it is difficult to form a sense of belonging. The "come when you want, leave when you're done" approach is bound to die out quickly.

4. The crux behind the pain points

Whether you want to hook up with the opposite sex, look for business opportunities, or just vent, social platforms have a common logic: people want to find "interesting" people, read interesting content, and make "effective" interactive connections.

"Discovering and connecting" are the basic actions of stranger social interaction. Therefore, when we judge whether a social product is successful, we must first look at its "efficient matching" and "effective communication". Only when this most basic first step is closed can we talk about the subsequent continued use and profit conversion . However, many products in the 1.0 era cannot even meet this most basic first-step experience, and fall into the five deadly sins:

1. Matching efficiency is too low

Users want to find people and content that they are truly "interested" in among the vast crowd of people, no matter whether this interest is highbrow or big breasts and long legs. However, the reality is that "Aime" often collides with "Yueme", and it is even more difficult to find like-minded and interesting people. On the one-on-one random video platform, the girls wanted to see handsome guys, but they ran away because the loser on the other side "pulled out his gun too quickly".

In order to improve matching efficiency, users must first be willing to deposit their real information and interest preferences on your platform, so that there is a basis for matching. However, Chinese people are naturally lacking in a sense of security and trust, making it extremely difficult for them to honestly collect real information on unfamiliar social platforms.

This is the core issue of the 1.0 era and the main breakthrough path for 2.0. The sneak attacks by Toutiao and others are particularly valuable here.

2. Difficulty in interactive experience

?You finally found the person and content you are interested in. What’s next? Will he/she pay attention to you? After searching for a long time, I finally found a match. So what next? And then there is nothing else…How many people have finally overcome the difficulty of matching, but failed at the hurdle of “not being able to start or continue the chat”, and the quality of the interaction cannot be guaranteed.

Chinese people tend to communicate in an implicit and obscure way, and their flirting skills are very poor, so they often don't know what to say in the middle of a conversation. Therefore, a social product should not only match people together, but also provide "ice-breaking" scenarios and topics.

However, the reality is that after using so many apps, I still can’t find someone to talk to, and I’ve matched so many times, but I still can’t chat with one person. We often say "let go of your ineffective social interactions", but these platforms have become the hardest hit areas for ineffective social interactions.

3. Lack of sustained in-depth motivation

Only sticky traffic is valuable, and social platforms all value user activity and retention. However, the terrifying Tencent duo (WeChat and QQ) have formed a "large-scale network advantage" and have become a "black hole" for all unfamiliar social products. You can find new relationships through unfamiliar social apps, but once you want to establish a "stable connection", you will immediately add each other's WeChat accounts and turn to the arms of the penguin.

4. Death from information noise

In the article "Born from Social Dividends, Died from Information Noise", the author has pointed out that "rises from hookups, develops from showing off, and is destroyed by micro-business" is a cyclical law that almost every social platform cannot escape. When a platform exploded, the core KOLs and high-quality female users began to flee as they were harassed by spam messages from internet trolls, joke tellers, micro-businessmen, and straight male cancer users. Then the KOL’s fans also began to flee, which is the evaporative cooling effect.

5. Mental fatigue has set in

There are too many apps, and people are too lazy to download them. A strong sense of fatigue is coming over us. Starting with Momo, many social products have come out one after another, all telling the same story: "Use me and you will be happy." The result is that expectations are dashed time and time again, and the users' innocent desire to date has been hurt so much that they have gradually become numb and no longer believe it. Social products that can be used for hooking up have become like the emperor’s new clothes. In the past, it was “the wolf is coming”, but now it’s “the hookup is coming”. Saying these things again can no longer arouse their interest: “I don’t care, can you try something new?”

5. The logic of social upgrading

Social quality + intelligent recommendation + content community + cost advantage + rapid profit, this is the core logic of social upgrading.

Let’s go back to square one using first principles, as Musk did. For a user, he does not need to understand your model technology and innovation. His logic is very simple. He only has that little time at night. What do I get from using your time? What is the return on investment? If all the flirting is in vain, I might as well go live stream, read, or play King of Glory .

Of course, for the new middle class, "food, sex and nature" are still the strongest social motivations, but now they need more quality ways to satisfy them. Simple and thin matching can no longer meet the "hookup" needs of most Chinese people. Hundreds of millions of lonely urban white-collar workers still cannot get effective satisfaction from social interactions with the opposite sex, and they yearn for quality social interactions. This is a huge gold mine that has been overlooked.
Here are the strategic high points for the second half:

1. Build Alipay into a social network for Chinese people

In China's stranger social market, there is a lack of products that can grasp the psychology of Chinese users (especially female users), and everyone is simply imitating the American model. If "Alipay" solved the problem of lack of trust in e-commerce and triggered the explosion of e-commerce , then China's opportunities for stranger social networking are still huge. What it lacks is an "Alipay" to resolve trust and embarrassment.

2. Differentiated innovation

To compete with WeChat, the key is not to be better than WeChat, but to be “different” from WeChat. The best competitive advantage is differentiation:

1. Differentiated functions: For example, Pansy Cave integrates the industrial chain to create intelligent erotic hardware, allowing long-distance lovers to achieve the combination of "spirit and flesh" in a virtual scene. The hit app "Friends Impression" solved the problem of acquaintance evaluation that WeChat failed to solve. By combining simple graphic and text templates on Meipian, you can create a page similar to a WeChat public account .
2. Differentiated scenarios: When you want to know hot topics and celebrity news, you must go to Weibo first. If you want to know an in-depth analysis of this issue, you must go to Zhihu. If you want to know what a book or movie is like, be sure to go to Douban.
3. Differentiated relationship chains: for example, the community relationship chain based on interests and big Vs on Zhihu, the relationship chain based on workplace identity on Maimai, and the relationship chain of game unions on YY.
4. Differentiated content tone and community atmosphere: Her community focuses on the atmosphere of social interaction among female besties, Friend Impression focuses on topics of personality, psychology and world outlook, while Kuaishou allows users to become popular, become an internet celebrity, do business and win the qualification of an anchor in a real and funny atmosphere. Xiaohongshu has attracted a large number of readers and writers who are interested in overseas shopping guides to form a community. Pansy Cave makes love more sunny, healthy and interesting by live streaming entertainment elements.

3. Quick Profit

As the author said in "In the era of high-end economy, how to seize the general trend of consumption upgrading? 》 pointed out in the article "The historic marriage of consumption upgrading, social interaction and content is a trend. In this context, social channels should become the circulation channels for consumer content and the channels for reaching consumer users. Only in this way can they have the greatest commercial value.

Consumption upgrades have given birth to platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Yhouse. The rapid development of culture and entertainment and the younger mainstream consumer groups have brought about the explosion of two-dimensional and internet celebrity platforms. The popularity of live streaming has brought "cash flow" to many social platforms. From Fenda to Zhihu Live, knowledge trading has become a new profit point, followed by quickly profitable social games such as Werewolf.

Social platforms are not ashamed to talk about money, make money cleverly, and have stable cash from the beginning. This must be the trend of the future.

4. Cost efficiency is the key

All in all, the core standard for testing a new model is not how novel the story is, how rigorous the logic is, or how beautiful the design is, but whether you can acquire and maintain traffic at low cost. In short, it is the cost of acquiring, retaining, and active users. If the cost of obtaining beautiful data is too high, it costs 500 million to acquire 10 million users, and this story still won't work.

The core behind traffic costs is the efficiency of content and relationship acquisition, and what users can get by using your platform for 5 minutes. If there is no significant improvement in efficiency, why would users use it? Therefore, the key to gaining cost advantages and traffic dividends is not copying or imitating or deliberately creating gimmicks, but product innovation that understands human nature.

6. The benchmark may be wrong

The common saying now is that WeChat is the Facebook of China, and QQ is the Snapchat of China, and other social networks have almost no chance. For a long time, this statement has been almost common sense, but if you think about it carefully, it is not right. Although Facebook and WeChat are both human networks, their natures are completely different.

Facebook is an open network that emphasizes rich personal information construction and broad social possibilities. You can search for a girl from the next class, or someone from somewhere else, see all kinds of information about her or her, and leave messages.

But WeChat is actually a more closed network of acquaintances that emphasizes communication. If you don’t have someone’s WeChat or QQ account, it’s almost impossible to find them. WeChat does not have as many personal homepages as Facebook, and the circle of friends is a mess.

Have you noticed that WeChat is actually more like Snapchat, and it is essentially the same as QQ. As for the Chinese version of Facebook, it seems that there is still a chance - a more open public social platform, richer personal information construction, and more intelligent information recommendations, but how much demand there is is another matter.

As the self-media "Daomingsi" pointed out, large companies often start in a low tide period rather than a bonus period because they will pay more attention to product value and business model . We are indeed at a low point in terms of social interaction.

This is a difficult era, but fortunately difficult does not mean impossible. The high-end game has just begun, so let us have high hopes.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @张俊 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map