Why don’t you post on WeChat Moments anymore?

It’s not that Moments is not useful anymore, it’s just that it’s a bit “old”.

01. It’s not fun anymore

Just as Renren had defects in its content operation mechanism, college students fled Renren overnight. After Zhihu's user scale increased, there were too many problems with dilution. The big Vs had already gained fame and success here and didn't want to waste time answering stupid questions, so they also fled and switched to other platforms. I'm afraid similar problems will also appear in WeChat Moments .

From initially only close friends to now including all kinds of people, everyone's circle of friends has been upgraded to a vanity fair that encompasses all aspects of society, including showing off, micro-business purchasing, motivational speeches, showing off children/affection, junk advertisements, and all kinds of rumors that are difficult to distinguish between true and false.

Yes, we can choose to block and set privacy permissions. WeChat has taken a lot of considerations on the human level. It provides a variety of functions to support you in transforming your WeChat into what you want. But when a flood of information comes, you may lose the motivation to set up technical guarantees such as grouping, visible/invisible, and blocking, just like when faced with mountains of homework, students tend to do nothing.

Looking at the address book with hundreds or thousands of friends, in fact, there are really few people who pay attention to you, and the circle of friends is filled with a lot of information that is irrelevant and worthless. The appeal of the circle of friends is indeed not as good as before.

02. The new generation is unwilling to enter

The main social venue for those born after 1995 and 2000 is QQ on mobile phones. When we randomly interview some young people, we can hear such voices:

WeChat is too rigid and not as playable as QQ. On QQ, you can personalize your appearance and see all the interactions between friends. However, there are too many elders on WeChat, so you have to be cautious when posting a status. The interface also has no personality and is not suitable for children like us.

It is obvious that only aunties and uncles in their 50s and 60s use WeChat because it is simple. Compared with WeChat, QQ is obviously more mature and has more functions. Relatively speaking, it is not easy for older people to understand and use it. So, don't always say that only people born after 2000 use QQ when you don't know anything.

Therefore, WeChat and QQ Mobile have long been separated in terms of user groups. Most QQ users in the PC era have moved to WeChat, and this group of people are now in their thirties and forties. When WeChat was born, those born after 1995 were in middle school and those born after 2000 were still in elementary school. It was inevitable that they would be out of touch with the younger group.

QQ Mobile's rich, personalized, and fun features have no corresponding functional modules on WeChat. I believe that this group will be brought into WeChat by older users as they enter society, but it is not yet known whether they will bring freshness and interaction to their circle of friends.

03. The main force began to retreat

The majority of users who grew up with WeChat have now begun to contribute their grassroots strength to socialist construction. The older ones among them are gradually becoming the backbone of society. At such a stage, pressure, marriage, showing off children, career and other content are the main themes of life. What is presented accordingly are inspirational chicken soup, loving children, micro-business/agent purchasing/business screen-filling. Once one day they feel that the circle of friends can no longer satisfy their desire to be noticed and to show off their external influence, they will delete those states with zero interaction and reduce the number of times they post to the circle of friends, until they are unwilling to share good articles in the circle of friends, but collect them instead.

Only young people talk about whether it is fun or not, while adults talk about whether it is useful or not. After we have squeezed out all the marketing value of the Moments, we find it difficult to use it to record our true life and feelings, because your social relationship chain on WeChat is too complicated, from strangers to best friends, from close relatives to distant cousins, there are tenants, landlords, customer service, Didi drivers, salesmen, agents, business partners, clients, ex-partners, lovers... Some of these roles also have multiple mixed identities, such as being both a buddy and a boss. It is too difficult to use the visible/invisible groups provided by WeChat alone.

Since the Moments cannot provide users with efficient social value, it naturally needs to face the reality of low user retention rate .

04. Aging user structure

As of the end of last year, the number of monthly active users of WeChat had reached 846 million. If we do not consider overseas markets, the growth of WeChat users in China has reached saturation. After the demographic dividend disappears, the significance of attracting new users is far less than studying content and interaction, as well as the user value in the relationship chain.

As a veritable national-level APP, it can even directly adjust the domestic population structure and apply it directly to the user structure of WeChat for reference. Although this statement is a bit exaggerated, the aging of WeChat's user base is an indisputable fact. In fact, making an APP for middle-aged and elderly people cannot be measured solely by commercial value. WeChat not only completes the most difficult link of connecting people, but also brings more resources and conveniences of the Internet to middle-aged and elderly users, allowing this group that lags behind the development of the times to have a "second spring" and be connected with mobile Internet . Therefore, from this perspective, the historical significance of WeChat surpasses that of a number of social products.

However, just as Facebook cannot stop users from switching to Snapchat , Secret, which sells messages that disappear after reading, was once very popular in China. Despite its tragic ending, young users want to have a more fun and exciting place where they can protect their privacy and show their own value. This desire and demand may be glimpsed. Therefore, those born after 1995 and 2000 who were using QQ Mobile are reluctant to switch to WeChat. This is also due to the natural barrier created by the aging user structure, which has evolved into two major camps each playing their own game.

The products produced by middle-aged and elderly users in the circle of friends are mostly in the form of links and pictures. The problem that comes with this is that the effectiveness of interaction is reduced, comments decrease, likes increase, and user emotions are weakened. The frequency of us eliminating the little red dots in the circle of friends is getting lower and lower.

05. Conclusion

As mentioned at the beginning, WeChat has not become bad, it’s just a little “old”.

1) The application itself is old. After six years of development, it has become a huge app. The user span that needs to be taken care of is too large, and the innovation of functional points is limited. The relationship chain is beginning to become complicated, and the content ecosystem is huge but does not reflect differentiation.

2) The new generation of users have low willingness to enter, and even if they enter passively, it is still difficult for them to be converted into heavy users, and there is little input of fresh blood.

3) The activity level of the original main force decreases, and as they enter middle age, the content they produce and their social purposes begin to change.

4) The influx of a large number of middle-aged and elderly people has solidified WeChat’s current functional architecture. Simplicity and ease of use have become the product’s tone, making it difficult to provide more personalized gameplay.

Only an application of WeChat's size would shoulder the social responsibility to call on everyone to play less with their phones and spend more time with their families, and to emphasize the product concept of use and forget. By the same token, it needs to face the growth difficulties unique to national-level applications, as well as the user gap that may arise if it continues to develop.

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

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