Soul Product Analysis

Socializing with strangers is something that many people today fear. The possibility of offline socializing with strangers is very small, while online socializing with strangers is a huge market. The author analyzes the product design requirements of stranger social networking from five aspects. Let me take a look.

1. Competitive product analysis objectives

As an old user of Soul Planet for more than 1,500 days, I have mixed feelings watching Soul's servers frequently crash in the beginning and almost become the first stock in the Metaverse.

Therefore, we wanted to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of each function by disassembling the functional framework of the two products Soul and Nan Nan, and put forward practical optimization suggestions by focusing on the core process of two strangers from matching screening->interaction breaking the ice->intimacy upgrading->intimacy layering personality setting.

2. Conclusion and Recommendations

After the entire 10,000-word analysis, Nan Nan was completely defeated, but it also gave Nan Nan many practical optimization suggestions:

1. Matching screening

• Before matching, users should have a correct view on choosing a partner
• Speed ​​Dating Framework Optimization
• Develop various speed matching games
• Do not disturb protection mechanism for female users

2. Interactive icebreaker

square:

• Square Tone Cold Start Phase Plan - Collecting High-Quality UGC through Topics and Operational Activities
• How to improve user activity in the square solution - develop more interactive gameplay (content co-creation)
• How to migrate users from the Square to private chats - add the recent interactions between consumers and creators to the Square recommendation algorithm, and give priority to recommending users who have interacted but have not established a relationship

Voice Room:

• Users don’t understand how to play — Beginner tasks
• Users are afraid that no one will participate in the room they created - in the cold start phase, the relationship chain distribution/random matching algorithm is used to tilt
• Users are afraid that someone will join in the awkward situation - game-driven social networking/topic-driven social networking

Private chat to break the ice:

• Games drive social interaction
• Anonymous voice matching + voice-driven ice-breaking + public identity to cultivate long-term relationships

Intimacy upgrade:

• Shared views on whether WeChat is the end of stranger social networking

Intimacy level character setting:

• High resolution
• Easy to operate
• Friendship independence

Of course, we also made some optimization suggestions for Soul, but please go back to the original text to read it.

3. Industry Status

With the rise of Generation Z users and the continuous changes in social media, there is no longer any chance for social networking among acquaintances, and the stranger social networking track can be roughly divided into social products for users over 25 years old, social products between 18 and 25 years old, and social products for users under 18 years old according to the age of the users.

Representative social products for people over 25 years old are Momo and Maimai.

• The characteristics of this type of user are that the threshold for making friends is high and it is difficult to match their hearts;
• They are very utilitarian in making friends, lack patience, and pay more attention to matching efficiency;
• There is a widespread and clear sexual desire.

The representative social product for people aged between 18 and 25 is Soul.

• The characteristics of this type of users are that they have a strong sense of loneliness and a need for love;
• There is relatively ample free time available;
• He is gradually forming his own personality and character.

Therefore, the main theme of social interaction for this age group is to build up one's own attractive profile by posting life fragments in a friendly square, so as to attract each other and seek quality social interaction.

Compared with users over 25 years old, users aged 18 to 25 have a lower threshold for making friends because they have more free time and therefore do not care about matching efficiency. They are more inclined to relieve loneliness and seek spiritual resonance without utilitarianism. Their sexual needs are not as strong as their love needs. They value spiritual connection rather than sex.

Representative social products for those under 18 years old are Yican and Uki.

• The characteristics of this type of user are the same strong sense of loneliness, stronger curiosity, being driven by curiosity to have a lot of contact with peers, being ignorant and curious about love, and having less sexual desire or even resistance;
• Lacking subjective and passionate life fragments to build a persona, it is difficult for them to form deep friendships, and they tend to engage in fast-food speed dating and chatting to quickly relieve their loneliness.
• I am keen on moving and modifying materials to express my personality and seek interaction. This group of users pay more attention to the liveliness and entertainment within the product, prefer group chats, and are more law-abiding.

This track can be roughly divided into video social products, graphic and text social products, and voice social products according to different social media:

Video social products are divided into 1V live social products and 1V1 video social products. I personally think that live social products are a relatively deformed social product.

1V1 video social products are roughly divided into real-time matching types (LivU, Azar, etc.) and asynchronous matching types (Tinder, Bumble, etc.).

Personally, I think the essence of 1V1 video social products is still social networking based on appearance. 1V1 video social networking itself is a false demand. If we have to talk about the advantages of such products, "real-time feedback" may be the only advantage of such products. Personally, I think "real-time matching" is more suitable to be assembled in the product as a plug-in.

Representative products of graphic and text social products include the early Douban, which connects users with content based on the concept of groups. Its advantage is that it relies on the equality of groups.

All content is decentralized and arranged according to the release time. It is public and the content in the group can be seen by all users, which improves the efficiency of information acquisition and aggregation, and brings together users with the same interests and hobbies.

Connections between users bring their own topics, reducing social pressure and sense of participation. Because there is no algorithm involved, content posted by new or old users will have the same probability of exposure and interaction, thereby increasing user activity.

The disadvantage of picture and text social networking is that with the changes in social media and user habits, there are now very few social products that are purely picture and text, and there is also a common problem with group-like formats: users' interests are always strange, different users gather in different circles, and circles are like isolated islands. Information often cannot be effectively aggregated, causing users to lose interest in browsing and resulting in user loss.

Representative works of voice social products include the real-name semi-acquaintance social product Clubhouse and the domestic stranger social products Love Story and TT Voice.

Putting aside Clubhouse's excellent marketing methods (celebrity effect + invitation system), and simply looking at its room feeds that rely on second-degree relationship distribution and topic-based user connection methods, as well as the idea of ​​centralization outside the room and decentralization inside the room, it can indeed greatly improve users' social efficiency in the short term.

But if we extend the timeline, since users are negligent in managing their online relationship chains, each user's relationship chain list will increase infinitely over time. The resulting phenomenon is that the user's room feed becomes more and more cluttered, and the room theme is likely to not match the user's interests. A difficult problem that Clubhouse must face is that the real offline social environment allows users to naturally show different personalities to different circles of contacts.

However, the online virtual environment displays the full user portrait to all users, and users have a natural need for intimacy stratification online.

The stranger social track can also be distinguished by the strength of the relationship chain based on the type of relationship chain established:

Types of relationship chains and representative products: utilitarianism (Maimai), sexual attraction (Momo), hobbies (Douban groups), resonance and loneliness (Soul). The strength of the relationship chains established also ranges from strong to weak.

4. Market Analysis

Since the competitive product analysis this time is suitable for domestic voice social apps that are suitable for people under 20 years old who rely on their interests and hobbies to achieve spiritual resonance or relieve loneliness, the following market analysis will focus more on analyzing "Internet generation" users.

1. Policy environment

Emerging mobile social products are often accompanied by certain risks. In the past year, there have been frequent regulatory incidents in China's mobile social sector. Leading social community applications such as TanTan, Soul, and Jike have all been summoned, removed from the shelves, and had their services shut down.

With the huge attention paid to the issue of anti-addiction for minors and the advocacy of youth mode and the superposition of the Internet Clean-up Campaign, the domestic mobile social industry faces more stringent industry supervision.

Against the backdrop of normalized regulation, the industry ecosystem is being reshaped, and mobile social platforms will strengthen industry self-discipline, improve product core and implement regulatory requirements.

2. Economic environment

The size of netizens born in the internet age exceeds 300 million, accounting for nearly 30% of all netizens, and the trend is increasing year by year. Those born after 1995 have grown up with the Internet and are digital natives, enjoying the dividends of growth.

Corresponding to the current monetization strategies of stranger social platforms: both advertising monetization and value-added service monetization require huge traffic scale. User scale and stickiness also determine the revenue ceiling of social products. Therefore, for social products, acquiring and retaining users becomes the core goal.

3. Social environment

Due to the special age of Internet-born users, they have relatively ample free time. Nearly 90% of users like to make friends through online social tools. They are senior "social addicts" and spend more than 2 hours on social applications every day.

The calls from the new generation of young people to "escape from WeChat" continue to grow, and more and more young people are eager to find a data platform where they can confide anonymously.

4. Technical environment

The concept of "metaverse" that emerged at the beginning of this year and the rise of virtual world IPs such as "Sword Art Online" now seem to have become the expectations of the entire stranger social track for the future.

With the continuous maturity of technologies such as AI, blockchain, Internet of Things, 5G, AR, and VR, the user experience of social products continues to improve, unlocking more creative ways to play, and getting closer to the concept of the metaverse.

5. Competitive Product Analysis

1. Analysis of basic information of competing products

(1) Product Overview

(2) Product user demand analysis

From the age distribution of their users, combined with the above analysis of stranger social products classified by age, it can be seen that Soul and Nannan are not in the same category of stranger social products, and the age circle of Soul (born after 1995) is larger than that of Nannan (born after 2000).

What drives users to use Soul to socialize with strangers is a strong sense of loneliness and a desire for love. The ample free time determines that users choose a less efficient matching method, which is to accumulate portraits by sharing fragments of life and interests and hobbies, and then identify whether there are common topics through portraits to match them.

What drives users to use Nannan to socialize with strangers is more about making some customized solutions based on Soul user portraits.

Most of Nan Nan's target users are in high school or below. The heavy academic workload forces this group of people to live a life of going back and forth between school dormitory and home every day. As a result, this group of users do not have enough attractive life fragments and hobbies to support them in meeting people who can resonate with them spiritually. Therefore, this group of users prefer group chats and look for their partners in chats.

Based on the regional and educational distribution of the two, it can be seen that the biggest challenge facing Soul and Nannan is the weak profitability brought by sufficiently young users. The highly overlapping user portraits of Soul and Nannan are concentrated in high school and below. The characteristics of this part of users are that they have no ability to live independently and face two huge mountains of family supervision and academic pressure. How to discover more revenue methods and break the circle are difficult problems that the two companies need to think about in the long term.

(3) Analysis of product revenue model

In terms of exploring revenue models, Soul is at the forefront of the industry, and Nannan can use Soul's exploration of revenue models to promote itself.

In fact, the biggest challenge companies face when exploring revenue models is how to balance user value and corporate value.

Soul seems to have its own solution for advertising monetization: Soul's current advertising models are splash screen ads and native ads. In terms of advertising placement, Soul focuses on letting users recognize more new brands. Differentiated brand advertising and creative advertising are Soul's main placement strategies.

Soul has established its own e-commerce optimization team and cooperated with the upstream product supply side to lay out the possibility of B2C and 2C monetization in the social e-commerce scenario.

Since Wang Feng joined Soul, more celebrities and famous companies have joined Soul, and have also laid the groundwork for media communication, making the later broader monetization methods full of imagination.

2. Analysis of core business of competitors

The imagination space of the stranger social market has always been huge, and my own vision is that online stranger social networking must be a mapping of offline social scenarios in the early stage, and the imagination space in the later stage is that users can complete all social-related behaviors and services that can be completed in real life in a stranger social App.

This concept actually coincides with the concept of "metaverse". Is the ultimate goal of social interaction the metaverse?

It is too early to talk about the metaverse now, so in the competitive analysis of the social line, I will analyze more based on the key process nodes of human offline social interaction.

The essence of social interaction is connection. If the word connection is still relatively abstract and not specific enough, then we will break down connection into: self-presentation and interaction. Self-presentation is to establish a personal image and then find similar people. The meaning of interaction is that with the update of the socialization of life, various divisions of labor have emerged. Human beings are no longer self-sufficient as before. If they want to survive, they must exchange materials with others.

Upgrading intimacy is an inevitable habitual behavior of human social interaction. Due to the influence of human profit-seeking nature, people are likely to negotiate with multiple people at the same time when socializing with strangers. As the negotiations deepen, people will naturally screen out users who do not meet their expectations, and then enter the next level of intimacy with users who are more compatible.

The intimacy-layered personality is also a very common online mapping of offline social scenarios. In real life, a married and pregnant woman will share some new job opportunities with her colleagues, but is unlikely to share family trivia or the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law with her colleagues.

Whether it is WeChat tags or the existing problems with the CH room recommendation feed mentioned above, this pain point has been confirmed in online social products.

After explaining the meaning of each node in the process, we will now divide Soul and Nannan into different functions, bring them into each process, and analyze their respective advantages and disadvantages.

(1) Matching screening

Soul's matching filter:

Soul introduced an evaluation mechanism before the matching process. I think the introduction of the evaluation mechanism by Soul is a very important factor in solving the relationship chain conclusion, so here I would like to try to analyze the significance of introducing the evaluation mechanism:

How were stranger social products matched before there was an evaluation mechanism?

Taking Momo as an example, due to the users' profit-seeking nature, matching users may develop a favorable impression of the matched users due to factors such as the matched users' appearance, distance, and dynamics, and then send messages to the matched users (one-way matching).

However, in this case, the match only meets the needs of the matching users, but there is no corresponding product mechanism to determine whether it constitutes a disturbance to the matched party.

Of course, Tinder later noticed this problem and adopted a two-way matching mechanism to protect the user experience of the matched party. However, later data also showed that the two-way matching mechanism is not friendly to users with ordinary looks.

Therefore, Soul has adopted a relatively soft guidance mechanism - personality assessment to allow users to have a comprehensive understanding of what kind of person they are and what kind of person is suitable for them by completing assessment questions before the matching stage. It guides users to correct their views on mate selection at the source and improves the smoothness of the subsequent establishment of the entire relationship chain.

How to match two more similar people together? The essence is to accumulate user portraits.

• Soul has been able to obtain the user's inner portrait of the three views through the first step of personality assessment. At this point, Soul has been able to complete the matching based on the three views;
• Later, Soul opened the "Gravity Signature" function, allowing users to independently improve their user portraits, that is, add a gravity signature to tell Soul what type of user you want to match more;
• Later, in the process of generalizing the circle, Soul abandoned its original product positioning of "weakening appearance and LBS" and added LBS latitude to the matching, but the overall approach was relatively restrained, only accurate to the city, and the matching priority was the current city.

For cities that have been visited before, the precise distance matching strategy is delegated to the Love Bell.

Soul has many matching mechanisms, which I think are designed to meet the needs of different types of users.

Soul matching is more suitable for user groups who have a certain chat threshold and are able to build a unique profile through their own experiences, and who are attracted to each other through the profile to achieve spiritual resonance.

Voice matching and facekini matching can allow younger users who do not have their own unique life experiences and are unable to build an interesting and attractive profile to match voice/interests and other aspects through the anonymity after matching.

The Love Bell is for those users who have stronger needs for love and offline dating. It has a stronger hormonal nature, which I think is the result of the generalization of the Soul circle.

Group chat parties and Werewolf are the main bases for users under the age of 18 mentioned above. As mentioned above, these users value the liveliness and entertainment of the product, prefer group chats, and are more law-abiding.

Let’s talk about group chat parties separately here. At this stage, the product architecture of Soul group chat parties is still in a relatively universal stage through room types and different room types share the same microphone style. It can be seen that it is still in a relatively universal stage, and has not yet evolved into special gameplay such as blind dating/kick guarantee in other voice room products.

At this stage, two-way matching between users is more based on the interest tags set by the users themselves and the topics of the voice room, so the audience of the voice room is all-encompassing.

Let’s briefly talk about Soul’s “Campus Bar” feature which is still in the beta stage.

Let's first analyze the overall market. Major domestic companies have tried to pilot campus social networking but all ended up failing. Since the brief glory of Renren in ancient times, there has been no phenomenal product in the campus social networking track. Campus social networking may be one of the few vertical tracks in the entire C-end market that has not yet been divided.

Analyzing from the perspective of user needs, especially on university campuses, this age group is the most active in relationship formation, and the social needs between semi-acquaintances and strangers on campus are not fully met.

From the perspective of operation, we can use interest groups within geographic fences to drive social interaction. With the endorsement of classmates, it is easier to develop offline and bring about an upgrade in intimacy.

Cold start solution analysis: Taking the campus as the starting point, accumulate campus users by developing small programs with campus tool attributes (the last mile on campus, campus activity announcements, etc.);

After reaching a certain user scale, we began to build interest communities, allowing users to more conveniently meet classmates and expand their social circles.

Product Difficulty:

• The classmate relationship chain already exists in instant messaging (WeChat). What reasons make users willing to migrate? Previous plans have always been to cold start based on acquaintances on campus. If the scenario is transformed into stranger social interaction, will users be more reluctant to migrate their relationship chains?
• What kind of differentiated content makes users more willing to post on stranger platforms rather than acquaintance social platforms? I think geo-fencing + stranger social platform will greatly increase the threshold for users to post.

Campus Bar Summary: Social networking among acquaintances is a saturated market. Soul creates value for enterprises based on stranger social networking + campus social networking. On the other hand, content activity needs to be driven by social networking among acquaintances. The two points are mutually exclusive and contradictory, and I unilaterally look down on Soul's campus social networking.

Soul matching screening summary: Soul's overall matching mechanism is becoming more and more bloated, with 7 existing matching methods. In terms of functional design, I prefer what Zhang Xiaolong said about creating more of an environment (type) for users. Users are reactors to the environment, and how users operate in it is their own business. Soul's current matching mechanism is more like creating instances for users, and adding a matching mechanism when a user demand is discovered. If this continues, the product architecture will only become more and more bloated.

Soul matching, voice matching, and video matching can be combined into a matching method. Through later iterations of the Werewolf Killing rules, they can be merged into the group chat party and used as a room type.

Since Soul's three-observation scoring system consists of three stages, it is possible that users only complete the most basic evaluation or fill it out randomly. However, the evaluation weight in the matching mechanism algorithm is very high, so the matching degree will be unreliable, resulting in low matching efficiency. My solution is that if the user's connection type is "matching", there will be a "not interested" option in "more", and the algorithm accuracy can be continuously optimized through user feedback.

Alternatively, you can work on searching for similar interests between users, and use keyword searches and other methods to filter out moments with high similarity between users and match them with content.

Topic guidance for the first minute of voice matching and video matching. Soul’s three core modules: Plaza, Matching, and Profile. The equal square atmosphere allows users to establish their own personalities and accumulate profiles by sharing fragments of their lives and interests. Then, two highly matched users who both want to chat are matched together. Users can then go to the profile to verify the match and find topics.

However, voice matching and video matching directly cut off the last step of the user's Profile exploration process. The topic gap can easily lead to awkwardness, so you can consider guiding topics in some refined scenarios and developing some immersive attention-diverting experiences (similar to Tik Tok's "Watch Together", you can see the recommendations in the square here).

Murmur's matching filter:

There are still many problems with the functional framework of Nan Nan's matching interface: emotional companionship, warm radio, and expanding circle chat are room matching, and only the final soul matching and the recommended user matching in the upper and middle part of the interface belong to user matching.

The home page is the room feed stream. My suggestion is to put the room matching Tab in the room feed stream, so that there will be no ambiguity in user perception.

The soul matching at the bottom and the recommended user matching function at the top highly overlap. In the information transmission channel, both belong to text chat object matching. The difference is that soul matching matches a single user according to the matching algorithm, while recommended users recommend 6 people according to popularity.

My suggestion is to integrate the soul matching and user matching recommendation algorithms, and create some new matching methods for other information transmission media.

Nan Nan is not as good as Soul, Wanba and other products in terms of do not disturb protection for female users. In the absence of pre-matching evaluation, Nan Nan needs some protection strategies to prevent the loss of female users.

Soul sets a certain threshold based on the popularity of female users. If a user wants to have a private chat with the user, the user must first send a gift, thus achieving the goal of protecting female users from being disturbed.

Wanba does not combine any commercial means. If a user is greeted by too many users on the same day, greeting the user again in the following period of time will not be successful.

(2) Icebreaking

Soul interactive scene - Square:

The Plaza is one of the three core scenes of Soul (Plaza, Speed ​​Matching, Profile), and the Plaza serves Soul’s most core section, Profile. The initial positioning of the square was a timeline sequence of "decentralization and equal resonance", but it overlapped with the latest Tab function. Later, there was also a generalization of circles, which caused the quality of the square content to drop to the freezing point, so it developed to the later "calculation of recommendation value distribution based on dynamic interactive feedback and publisher's historical feedback".

The current Plaza content recommendation strategy has added the recent behavioral interaction dimension between content publishers and consumers on the basis of the previous one, giving priority to recommending the dynamics of creators with whom consumers have had a brief encounter, which can increase the dynamic interaction rate and even the private chat rate.

Soul has also spared no effort in creating interactive gameplay for users in the square. In addition to the common interest topics and voice/short video dynamics that appear as content aggregation, there is also unique audio co-creation, which allows content creators or consumers with a higher interaction threshold to find users with equal or even compatible abilities through co-created content, and thus establish a relationship chain.

It is also possible to enrich Soul's featured FM content through audio co-creation and voice dynamics, allowing users to increase their sense of immersion when browsing the square.

The positioning of the discovery module in Soul Square is, first of all, to cooperate with its SSR plan, build the platform's own KOC, and prepare for subsequent monetization (grass-planting community, e-commerce sales).

Secondly, the discovery module contains a channel framework, which is different from the interest topics in the square in that interest topics aggregate content, while channels aggregate people.

Different channels bring together users with different interests, drive social interaction with interests, and provide high-precision traffic distribution for high-quality SSR creators in each channel.

Soul's square atmosphere and content quality are recognized as one of the best in the industry. Since the behavior of daily recording is more female-oriented, what exactly drives male users to spontaneously generate high-quality content?

This is because of Soul's product mechanism: after playing Soul for a long time, users will slowly realize one thing, that managing their own profile to make it charming and attractive is beneficial for hooking up with the opposite sex, including increasing the success rate of active hookups and the probability of being hooked up by the opposite sex.

From a utilitarian perspective, managing a profile will bring more attention, traffic, and opportunities to communicate with the opposite sex.

Murmuring interactive scene - Square:

Since Nan Nan’s core user group is mainly concentrated in high school and below, this part of users lacks the ability to manage a profile. The core of managing a profile is to record life, and the living habits of this user group have too many commonalities and lack characteristics. Therefore, the solution provided by Soul is: dynamics are generated by high-quality content creators or users who have the ability to manage profiles, and topics are provided to the high school and below group, and this group can interact in the interactive area.

In addition, since Nan Nan's product positioning is more inclined to guide users to voice rooms, the overall penetration rate of the square is insufficient, which in turn leads to a more scarce generated content. On this basis, topics were created in advance to aggregate content. Since the overall content scale and tone of the square have not yet been built up, the content under each topic is seriously insufficient, which will give users the impression that no one is playing.

In general, Nan Nan's square is positioned more like a channel to attract traffic to the room for the room owner, while for other users, the square content style is single, and the tone and quality have not been established, and the interactive gameplay within the square only supports the most basic pictures and texts.

How to increase the penetration rate of the square and the scale of content generation and consumption, and build a UGC ecosystem? I think Nan Nan needs to correct the position of the square in the overall product framework and develop more interactive gameplay to increase the activity of the square. In the early stage, you can collect high-quality content through square topics and activities, and gradually improve the tone of the content.

Regarding the issue of how to get users to move from the square to private chat, my suggestion is to refer to Soul’s algorithm mechanism and introduce the recent behavioral interaction dimension between content publishers and consumers.

Soul interactive scene - group chat party:

First, let’s talk about the purpose of creating a voice room in a stranger social product, or what value can the voice room bring to users of stranger social products? I think the value of voice rooms is that when users have no one to chat with but still want to socialize, the platform provides them with a means to kill time.

The common voice rooms on the market can be disassembled through operation methods (anchor-driven, host-driven, user-driven) + gameplay (KTV, blind date) + revenue methods (rewards, time payment), while Soul’s voice rooms are pure UGC, tending to be user-driven chat rooms.

So why do some users want to kill time on Soul? Because the driving force behind users opening stranger social products is the desire to socialize and interact with others in real time.

So why do users follow the Voice Room Kill Time rule? Because voice rooms provide low-threshold and low-cost matching, users can chat and play quickly.

It can be seen from Soul's room feed that Soul's rooms are highly dependent on topic distribution. Users choose whether to enter the room based on their interest in the room topic. In order to create an equal and free chat atmosphere, Soul's design in the room does not distinguish between microphones above and below. The avatars of all users in the room will be displayed on the right, leaving a large space on the right for the text chat area. Soul's voice room is more like a group that supports real-time voice.

Of course, as a stranger social product, Soul’s main task is still profiling and matching.

The reason why users choose voice rooms (low threshold) is also an important factor that restricts the impact of voice rooms on the relationship chain: low threshold means low matching rate. It is difficult to establish two-way attraction between people just by someone talking, so there is no long-term value. People will only play when they cannot match users. The value brought to users is also very low, so low that users will not pay attention to it. Therefore, voice rooms can only serve as a supplement to the main tasks of social products.

Murmuring interactive scene - Voice room:

The voice room function is the core function of the Nan Nan product architecture. The overall model is PUGC, but UGC is scarce. The gameplay in the voice room covers most of the gameplay in the voice live broadcast market (CP, blind date, kicking guarantee, radio, etc.). The overall positioning of the voice room is to generate high-quality content by signing high-quality PGC guilds to attract user retention and payment.

However, based on the product's voice social positioning, the content of the UGC module of the voice room is extremely scarce. I roughly analyzed the reasons as follows: there is no mechanism to drive users to create rooms, users are worried that no one will participate after creating a room or that if someone participates, they will be afraid of embarrassment, and users do not know that they can create rooms.

For users who don’t know that they can create rooms, my solution is to build a new user guidance task system for new users. By allowing users to complete tasks and get rewards, they can become familiar with the entire product. A daily task system can also be built for long-term retention and activity.

For the situation where there is no mechanism to drive users to create rooms, novice tasks can solve part of the problem, but the core problem lies with the users themselves: in what scenarios do users have the need to open a room to chat?

When users have a strong desire to share, when users have a question that needs a professional to answer, when users cannot find a match but urgently need company (sleeping with microphone, playing games), when others want you to open a room...

For users who are worried about others participating and feeling awkward, I have two solutions: the first is to develop some game-driven gameplay with simple rules and strong immersion (you draw and I guess, who is the undercover); the second is to classify the voice rooms by channels, and then provide some topics for segmented scenarios for each channel, based on topic guidance.

For users who are worried that no one will participate after creating a room, my solution is to give priority to matching new rooms with room styles that match the user in the room matching algorithm, and to distribute new rooms through relationship chains when they are cold started.

Soul ice breaking methods:

Soul entrusted the most difficult task - breaking the ice - to Profile. Combined with the three core modules of Soul mentioned above: users establish their own personalities in the square, accumulate attractive profiles, and match two people who want to chat together through speed matching. Both parties then verify the compatibility and find topics by observing each other's profiles.

The more moments users generate, the clearer the user portrait will be, and the easier it will be to find users that match you.

Obviously, Soul is not satisfied with relying solely on the long-term relationship chain brought by Profile, and has developed more ways to break the ice in the private chat panel: the assistant intelligently recommends chat topics, shakes the dice, and both parties need to complete specific tasks based on the sum of the points on the dice, two-way interactive gameplay of helping TA to pinch their face, and e-commerce gift giving that is more inclined towards real benefits.

Of course, even if Soul has developed many methods in the ice-breaking session, they still seem insignificant.

Breaking the ice is an eternal problem for stranger social products. I don’t have any good optimization plan for it yet, but based on my limited work experience, I can give you an idea. Our users are still very smart in some aspects, such as developing gameplay in an open environment.

We don’t actually need to make a lot of rules to constrain users. We only need to provide ways to play (props), such as coins with two sides, dice, and handwritten cards. Users can develop more than a dozen ways to play based on these props without us making rules.

Whispering ice-breaking means:

Nan Nan currently does not have any more effective means of breaking the ice. Without preliminary evaluation, it is unknown where the matching degree will come from. Also, due to the characteristics of Nan Nan's user group, they are not able to build an attractive Profile, so it is impossible to find topics for the Profile.

My suggestions go in two directions:

First, we can learn from Soul to develop some small games with simple rules and strong immersion to drive social interaction through games;

Secondly, because of the targeted user group, we can consider directly adopting the anonymous matching method (Soul's anonymous voice matching), and guide users through official strong topics to break the ice through other aspects besides Profile. Finally, users can choose whether to disclose their identity and cultivate long-term relationships.

3. Intimacy upgrade

Soul/Murmur Intimacy Upgrade:

Soul makes fewer attempts during the intimacy upgrade stage and still relies on accumulating Soulmate letters through long-term private chat interactions, and ultimately establishes a Soulmate relationship and opens a Soulmate space.

Nan Nan also only relies on a mysterious CP value to record the degree of intimacy, but the official has not made it clear what privileges will be unlocked as the intimacy increases. There may be two reasons for this: the official has not figured it out yet/creating a sense of mystery for users.

However, showing the functionality to users without making the rules clear may have a counterproductive effect.

What I actually want to talk to you about here is whether the final destination of stranger social networking is WeChat? I don't think so.

Because there is a very mysterious word called context: the context of social interaction among acquaintances and the context of social interaction among strangers are completely different. Social interaction among acquaintances is more driven by relationships and purposes (work, love, goodwill), while social interaction among strangers is open-ended chatting with strangers.

If users with whom you are strangers are deliberately brought to WeChat, the context will collapse, because users are not used to chatting on WeChat with users whose relationships are unclear and whose purposes are unclear. So WeChat did not eat Momo Tantan, nor did it eat Soul.

4. Intimacy layered personality

Online relationships are mappings of offline relationships, so users naturally have the need to show different personalities when facing people of different intimacy.

The dilemma of CH mentioned above: "One of the difficulties that Clubhouse must face is that the offline real social environment allows users to naturally display different personalities to different networks, but the online virtual environment displays the full portrait of the user to the full range of users. The users have natural intimacy layered needs online" and the WeChat tag function can be used as evidence.

Building different personalities can also be divided into multi-faceted personalities at the IM level or multi-faceted personalities at the dynamic level.

The most representative example of building multi-faceted characters at the IM level is WeChat group chat. Your character in the colleague group must be different from your character in the friend group.

The characteristics required to build a dynamic multi-faceted character are: high separation, easy operation, and independent friend relationships. WeChat is implemented through tags, one can is implemented through albums, and one can is implemented with the highest degree, but it still does not respond enough because it is too deliberate.

One issue that needs to be considered based on dynamic intimacy stratification is that intimacy is dynamically lifted and lowered, and how to achieve automated lifting and lowering of intimacy is also a difficult problem...

Author: Ye Lai

Source: Ye Lai