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Q: What are the advantages of Baidu Smart Mini Program compared to WeChat Mini Program?
A:
Baidu's light applications take a "top-down" approach, using more traditional front-end frameworks to develop concepts and technologies, adding new features to traditional H5 pages, similar to Google's PWA feature web pages. Today's Baidu Mini Programs and WeChat Mini Programs both adopt a "bottom-up" strategy. Except for the basic technology that is implemented using the front-end, the rest, including interfaces, concepts, and environments, are derived from native applications. Baidu was not good at making light applications in its early days, which can be described as being born at the wrong time. After all, the APP wave in 2013 had not yet faded, and Baidu's mobile applications could not replicate its absolute advantage in the PC era.
Now that Baidu has officially announced that the Smart Mini Program will be fully open source in December, are you ready to get in early and grab a piece of the action?
But before taking action, perhaps you should think about which mini program to use, WeChat or Baidu? Which one can maximize its commercial value and product value.
Comparing the ecosystems of Baidu and WeChat, let’s look at the business potential of the two in six aspects:
1. One is social-oriented, the other is content-oriented:
As a social software, WeChat obviously has social advantages that Baidu cannot replace. With 889 million monthly active users, the huge traffic provides a perfect sharing environment for the WeChat ecosystem. This environment is still closed, which means a certain degree of stability. As for Baidu, it is a content company. Due to its good search engine, Baidu has an advantage in information flow. However, considering that WeChat is the "leader" in the social world, it is not an exaggeration to say that it is in a monopoly position. However, Baidu's content is not firmly ranked first. After all, there are still competitive forces such as 360 Search and Google Search.
In comparison, Baidu Mini Programs are not as good as WeChat in terms of sharing and fission, and sharing is the main means of attracting traffic to Mini Programs. In the first round, WeChat is slightly better;
2. Installed capacity:
This goes without saying. The installation volume of WeChat APP, the giant in the social world, must be higher than that of Baidu APP. But don't forget that Baidu Smart Mini-Programs can run on multiple APPs, which is openness. This shows one thing - Smart Mini-Programs can run on external browsers, which means that users can find the developer's Baidu Smart Mini-Programs as long as they search with the browser regardless of whether they use Baidu Browser or not. However, at present, there is no news about other browsers for the APP that Baidu has announced cooperation with, and further coordination is needed to achieve it.
In this round, WeChat and Baidu have equal advantages;
3. Different search attributes:
WeChat and Baidu both have search functions, WeChat's "Search" and "Baidu", but the difference is that WeChat users use Search to focus on functionality and service, such as clothing, mobile phones, e-sports and other specific needs, while Baidu's users' search habits are content-based. The different results brought about by these two attributes are that WeChat's business ecosystem is well built, while Baidu obviously does not have a complete business ecosystem. For the e-commerce industry, Baidu's entry is more like a third party that came late between Alibaba and Tencent. It depends on whether it can change its appearance and catch up!
In this round, WeChat obviously won;
4. Payment issues:
Just by looking at the subtitle, you can roughly understand something. Mobile payment is still in a situation of "two horses competing against each other". Even if WeChat Pay does not have a large market share as Alipay, it is stronger than Baidu, needless to say. WeChat Pay brings more traffic to WeChat Mini Programs, and many companies cannot avoid this interface. Payment is a flaw for Baidu, and it is not conducive to the radiation of Baidu Smart Mini Program payment entrance to users. Therefore, when Baidu Smart Mini Program is open source, it may give priority to payment cooperation with Alipay. If it uses its own payment system, I am afraid that users will need a long time to accept it. However, it does not rule out that Baidu will use some incentives and policy tilt methods to open up its own payment market.
In the fourth round, WeChat is still in the upper hand;
5. Most people may not know where the "home" of Baidu's smart mini-programs is:
From the perspective of the entrance, WeChat mini-programs are displayed by pulling down. Users who like to pull down to refresh will easily get used to the existence of this entrance. However, Baidu's mini-programs are actually in the Baidu mobile APP, and the traffic entrance is in the list of personal accounts. From the user's habit, Baidu APP is an information flow and information type. Most people regard it as a tool and do not use personal accounts frequently. Therefore, the difference in the entrance may lead to unoptimistic traffic in this regard for Baidu mini-programs.
I hope Baidu will give more consideration to the issue of entrance settings in the future, but it is also possible that Baidu will use certain methods to "stimulate" users to change their habits.
In the fifth round, the entrance once again widened the traffic gap between WeChat and Baidu;
6. Commercial layout:
Tencent has been exploring the e-commerce industry for so long and has achieved a considerable position. In terms of reputation building and business layout, it is ahead of Baidu. Tencent has the strength to further build the WeChat business system. In terms of commercial monetization, it has the support of Tencent advertising, content and JD e-commerce, and its business layout is fast. On the other hand, Baidu Smart Mini Program, apart from the advertising support from Baidu Alliance, is relatively weak in the fields of e-commerce and IoT, and it is difficult to complete the architecture of the business ecosystem in a short period of time!
All in all, Baidu cannot currently compare with WeChat in terms of business layout.
But we can't think that Baidu has no advantages in e-commerce and there is no feasible way. WeChat is doing social e-commerce, so why can't Baidu do content e-commerce? Let's not talk about Alibaba first. WeChat's social e-commerce is indeed strong, and the advantage of search engines gives Baidu great potential in content e-commerce.
To summarize the above points, we can see that when facing Baidu Smart Mini Programs today, we still have to stabilize and give priority to the commercial value of WeChat Mini Programs. However, since Baidu dares to make strategic arrangements for Mini Programs, we should believe that when seeing these difficulties, Baidu has the determination and countermeasures to break through. While grasping WeChat Mini Programs, merchants can also try to be the first to "eat crabs", which is of great significance for contacting more applications of AI intelligence in the future.
Now it depends on whether Baidu can come out of its experience five years ago, rise to the challenge, and come from behind to win! All spectators are looking forward to what will happen when Baidu Mini Programs are open sourced in December. If Baidu really does it, Jack Ma will surely have a headache!
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