WeChat’s new killer feature—“Nearby Businesses”

When the WeChat Nearby People app first appeared, some people used it to promote it. The common way was to give it an ambiguous and tempting name and put a revealing profile picture to attract people around to add them as friends to achieve the promotion effect. Later, some advanced methods appeared, such as using programs to automatically simulate locations, automatically greet people, etc. However, the official used various methods to restrict it, and it is now almost disappearing.

In fact, promoting on WeChat has long been the wish of businesses. Weishihuo used to help businesses with promotion, but since Weishihuo was acquired by Dianping, the promotion of WeChat businesses has gradually faded.

Now, WeChat officially allows businesses to enter nearby people to promote their products. However, this function is currently only available to certified service accounts and public accounts with card and coupon functions.

WeChat has allowed merchants to register nearby people. The function is similar to that of Dianping.com, with pictures, addresses, phone numbers, business hours, special recommendations and other related information and card functions, but it lacks the more important review content. This is another powerful function of WeChat after launching the card and WeChat wifi functions.

This time, WeChat launched a feature called "Nearby Businesses". It will be displayed at the top of the nearby people and is quite conspicuous.

Through the unique LBS precision recommendation advantage of WeChat Nearby People and the advantage of the number of users, it seems to be just a traffic entrance, but it is a complete O2O closed loop. It is conceivable that if the review system is added to the "Nearby Merchants", it is equivalent to a built-in Dianping, and it also has the card and coupon advantages and direct payment functions that Dianping does not have. Such temptation is difficult for both merchants and consumers to refuse.

It seems that WeChat has launched powerful life functions after cards and WeChat Wifi, but once there are too many merchants, the most intuitive change is that the nearby people will completely become the nearby merchants. When the user experience of nearby people becomes worse, although WeChat has a high user stickiness, as a social software that is unwilling to be lonely, if it gives up an important social function, then this merchant promotion will be a bit of a distraction.

In my opinion, it would be better to add another entrance and name it Nearby Businesses. It is equivalent to having a complete Dianping built into WeChat. Why does WeChat put businesses in the Nearby People? One important point is that it values ​​the traffic of this entrance. But once it becomes the main attraction, it will lose its habit of picking up sesame seeds. It is equivalent to an independent APP of Dianping. I believe that there will be no problem with the built-in Nearby Businesses.

summary

In general, WeChat’s inclusion of promotions for businesses shows that Tencent no longer defines WeChat as a simple social software. WeChat wants to penetrate into every corner of life and promote micro-life.