Anonymous social networking is no longer popular, but Secret China’s WeChat account is popular

I don’t know how things are going on there, but these past two days my circle of friends has been flooded with “Our 2014, come and recall our shared experiences.” Many friends are spontaneously sharing this link and looking forward to their friends’ “comments” on themselves.

If you pay attention, you will find that this is actually a product developed by Secret China based on WeChat official accounts. Users only need to share this link to their friends circle, and friends can comment on their friends anonymously or with real names after clicking on it. Whether it is recalling an experience between each other or jokingly "blackening" their friends, it seems that many people in the circle of friends are enjoying it.

However, compared with the popular "Our 2014", everyone may have felt that independent anonymous social applications are in a bad situation. Whether it is Secret's performance in the United States or similar products of many imitators in China, the user attention and activity are much lower than before. Secret's Chinese apps are naturally not immune to the impact of this "rule".

Duan Xia, CEO of Secret China, told PingWest that since Secret China's team resources are relatively limited, they are now focusing a large part of their energy on the Secret public account in WeChat. Before "Our 2014", Secret China also launched similar WeChat products such as "Friends Impression Wall" and "Confession Portal" based on WeChat, and even put anonymous group chat functions in WeChat.

After reading this, you may find it strange that when everyone is crazily developing apps, why would a company that already has its own apps put so many new products on its WeChat public account?

In Duan Xia's opinion, the app is "too heavy" and users lack the motivation to open the Secret app every day. Secret China has tried many ways to promote its app before, but later found that although it can attract users, it is difficult to retain them. So they changed their thinking and tried another way to make anonymous social products.

In "Friends Impression Wall" and "Our 2014", users can choose to tag their friends anonymously or with real names. Although there may be comments such as "watching Qvod", "health care", and "going to Dongguan", since the friends circle is basically full of acquaintances and friends, everyone treats these more as jokes between friends rather than personal attacks based on anonymous social networks. In Duan Xia's view, this is also consistent with the previous thinking of Mimi. They never want anonymous social networking to become a tool for people to attack each other.

In fact, PingWest previously discussed the challenges faced by independent anonymous social products in "How do social products that become popular instantly solve the growth problem?" Now Secret China has begun to use another approach to make anonymous products. Duan Xia told PingWest that during the Spring Festival, Secret's WeChat public account will have other interesting things to come out, allowing friends to have new ways to interact.