WeChat’s turnaround is harder than an elephant

Zhang Xiaolong, the "Father of WeChat", once again took the stage at WeChat Night. This time, he was 23 minutes late than originally scheduled. In the nearly two-hour speech that followed, he spent half of the time describing the origin, development, and future of the video account.

"Video expression is the theme of the content field in the next decade", "Official accounts are only suitable for people who write long articles, and most people can't actually write long articles"... His words show his determination to develop video accounts, but also reveal the shortcomings of official accounts.

While video accounts carry new dreams, will public accounts become "abandoned children"?

WeChat public account-style micro video account is coming

The WeChat Employment Influence Report contains stories of several ordinary people who have changed their lives through WeChat. One of them mentioned a hearing-impaired girl named Maizi who chose to start a business on WeChat public accounts after resigning from her job. She created content by publishing her daily diary and accumulated a certain number of fans. Through advertising monetization, Maizi's monthly income can reach 50,000 yuan at its best, and an average monthly income of 10,000 to 20,000 yuan on weekdays. Now, she has saved enough for 300,000 yuan for surgery.

Maizi's success story can be seen as a microcosm of many self-media people on the WeChat public platform. In 2012, the WeChat public platform was launched, and high-quality writers entered the WeChat public account, while the public account continuously incubated new self-media. For a time, it became a holy land for "literati", and creating a hit "10W+" also became the desire of every content creator.

But after 8 years of development, WeChat official accounts are finally declining. The content of official accounts has been folded, high-quality original works have been plagiarized, and short videos have taken away users' fragmented time. At the WeChat Night of the 2021 WeChat Open Class Pro version, Zhang Xiaolong gave a 2-hour speech, shifting the focus to "short content". It is mentioned that video expression should be the theme of the next content field.

Let’s go back to this day last year, which was the day when the video account was born.

Regarding the original intention of creating a video account, Zhang Xiaolong said bluntly, "Only a few people are suitable for writing long articles on public accounts. Most people cannot write long articles. We should create something under the circle of friends... I just thought of a name called non-circle of friends. In the circle outside the circle of friends, you can only post some short articles or photos and videos, so it is symmetrical with the circle of friends. Once, Pony and I talked about this point during dinner, and Pony particularly agreed with this direction."

In his opinion, the data of the video account has not been ideal after the internal testing. It was not until the emergence of the version of "likes by friends" in May that the team saw hope. Moreover, the team of the video account is not large, with only more than 100 people. "When WeChat makes video accounts, it will not use user time as a KPI assessment. Time is just a result. The video account is a carrier of structured videos. WeChat does not make content, does not produce content, and will not spend money to buy content. It hopes that more ordinary users will use the video account, rather than a place for only Internet celebrities and big Vs to perform."

A year ago, Zhang Xiaolong announced the launch of the video account

In fact, he analyzed the information flow in last year's WeChat Open Class. He believes that the breadth and quality of information have always been the problem that WeChat needs to solve. The development of the Internet has brought about several dimensions of influence, including the surrender of privacy, passive information acquisition, the expansion and complexity of social relations, the rapid dissemination of information, the difficulty of information selection, the diversity of information and the difficulty of searching.

When talking about the extension of "information diversity", Zhang Xiaolong mentioned two mistakes made by the official account back then. One was that for a long time there was only a PC web version, which limited the scope of content creators; the other was that the official account was made into an article as a carrier of content, so that other forms of short content were not presented.

It can be seen that in the current short video platform chase, WeChat failed to seize the opportunity to make up for its shortcomings, Zhang Xiaolong still has some regrets. "The content of group messages is not the focus, it should be all kinds of content, such as text, pictures, videos, etc." He emphasized that WeChat's short content has always been the direction of focus.

Ten days after the speech, WeChat Video Account officially started internal testing. The WeChat team defined Video Account as "a platform where everyone can record and create, and a window to understand others and the world." At that time, the short video market was already divided equally among Douyin, Bilibili, and Kuaishou.

Compared with Douyin's 600 million daily active users, Video Account, which exceeded 200 million DAU in mid-2020, still has a large gap. In this regard, industry insiders believe that Video Account mainly recommends potential interested groups through friends' recommendations rather than content matching, which is not conducive to the establishment of creators in vertical fields. "It is very easy to become a corporate marketing account to obtain traffic through social relationship recommendations." In terms of product experience and video quality, (Video Account) cannot be compared with professional short video platforms for the time being.

After Zhang Xiaolong announced the WeChat video account, some netizens said that "it is not far from being uninstalled."

Video accounts connect to small shops to realize e-commerce dreams

The video account, which was born only a year ago, has not yet outperformed similar players in its field. Tencent has added the burden of e-commerce to it. In August 2020, WeChat Mini Stores were fully opened. In October of the same year, WeChat Video Account launched live broadcasting, and users can achieve a closed loop of e-commerce transactions through "mini stores" during live broadcasts.

You must know that in the field of e-commerce, Tencent can be said to have been defeated time and time again, but it keeps fighting.

Taobao was born in 2003, and Tencent Paipai, which was intended to compete with Taobao, was launched in September 2005. After two years of development, Paipai had nearly 50 million registered users in the second quarter of 2007, with more than 10 million online products and a 9% C2C market share.

After that, the two gradually drifted apart. According to data from the China E-commerce Research Center, Taobao has an absolute advantage in the C2C market. As of December 2013, Taobao accounted for 96.5% of the market share, while Tencent's PaiPai.com only accounted for 3.4%.

Tencent attributed the failure of PaiPai.com to two reasons: first, it failed to find a balance between community relations and business relations, and second, it operated in a violent manner. In 2014, Tencent acquired a stake in JD.com, and PaiPai.com, as a non-core business, was incorporated into JD.com. Two years later, PaiPai.com was completely shut down.

However, Tencent did not stop its ambition in the e-commerce field. After PaiPai.com, Tencent also launched B2B QQ Mall and QQ Online Shopping. On May 18, 2012, Tencent officially announced the establishment of Tencent E-Commerce Holdings Co., Ltd. In March 2013, QQ Online Shopping and QQ Mall were merged into one, with QQ Online Shopping becoming the only brand of Tencent's e-commerce open platform.

Like QQ, WeChat, as one of Tencent's social trump cards, cannot be absent in carrying the "e-commerce dream". Therefore, in July 2020, WeChat brand mini-programs started public testing, providing two authentication methods: "general brand authentication" and "e-commerce brand authentication". The characteristics of small stores are "no development, zero cost, one-click generation of sales mini-programs", which include the entire chain from product browsing to purchase and ordering, and support live streaming.

In the view of Yang Hangzhou, founder of the Weidianpu SaaS platform, Tencent's re-entry into e-commerce is mainly due to its traffic advantage of more than 1 billion WeChat users and its ecological advantage of the entire product matrix of official accounts, mini-programs, Moments ads and video accounts. "The resources of Douyin live streaming are concentrated in the top players, which may not be suitable for most people. WeChat focuses on the decentralized e-commerce model, and small and medium-sized merchants have greater possibilities." However, You Xi, the author of "Ant Financial", believes that in the era of traffic exhaustion, commercial competition has entered the era of stock game, and whether to do everything is something Tencent and WeChat need to think about.

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Can the payment method of “pay later after use” boost e-commerce?

In the pursuit of e-commerce dreams, if video accounts provide transaction scenarios, then WeChat Pay Points provide more possibilities for online shopping. At this year's WeChat Open Class, data revealed by the WeChat Pay team showed that the number of users using WeChat Pay Points has exceeded 240 million, saving users more than 200 billion yuan in deposits, and more than 10 million users have used the express delivery service of "pay later".

The payment score was unveiled in January 2019 and officially launched in June 2020. Users can use the payment score in multiple scenarios to avoid deposit or enjoy it first and pay later. Since its birth, the outside world has inevitably compared the payment score with Ant Sesame Credit. However, the WeChat Pay team has repeatedly emphasized that the payment score "is not a credit report and has nothing to do with finance" and is intended to solve user experience problems.

So far, WeChat Pay Points covers more than 1,995 merchants in five major industries, including shared rental, shopping and entertainment, transportation, life services and accommodation reservations. In addition to services such as "ride first, pay later", "ride first, pay later" and "ship first, pay later", WeChat Pay Points' "enjoy first, pay later" has created new imagination space for the e-commerce field.

According to reports, in the e-commerce industry, WeChat Pay's "pay later" feature allows users to place orders for free and pay after confirming receipt. It also provides priority refunds for users who meet the score threshold, and users can quickly receive refunds after submitting return logistics information. "Pay later" can reduce users' decision-making costs before purchasing, increase order conversion rate and repurchase rate, "among which e-commerce order conversion rate increased by 14%, and retail merchant repurchase rate increased by 73%."

In the future, it remains to be seen whether payment points can reshape Tencent's e-commerce with a new shopping experience.

Zhang Xiaolong has previously emphasized in public speeches that mini programs are not specifically designed for e-commerce. "We will not specifically support applications in a certain field on a platform. We hope to make the platform abstract enough so that different industries can gain better and innovative space in it."

As the founder of WeChat, Zhang Xiaolong has an extreme pursuit of product shaping. He once quoted a sentence from Steve Jobs: "Products are a combination of technology and art." Tencent is a great Internet company, but its accumulation in art is very weak. In a nearly two-hour public speech this year, Zhang Xiaolong only mentioned e-commerce once. Perhaps e-commerce is Tencent's dream after all, but it does not belong to WeChat.