What kind of WeChat will we need in the next 10 years?

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"WeChat has changed again." Meng Qingqing, who spends more than four hours on WeChat every day, has discovered that WeChat seems to be brewing a "big change."

The most obvious change is that the WeChat friend adding interface has undergone a new change. The much-criticized friend circle permission setting function has been moved to the front, and relevant settings can be made directly when adding friends.

Changes followed one after another. First, WeChat search was officially upgraded to "WeChat Search"; the "Goods Circle" with a very deep entrance was renamed "WeChat Circle" again; in addition, the public accounts responsible for the content ecology have also undergone many new changes, and the intelligent recommendation mechanism is gradually taking shape.

In fact, WeChat has been labeled as "restrained" for nearly 10 years. This may be due to Zhang Xiaolong's persistence and judgment, but when WeChat carries a huge amount of traffic, Zhang Xiaolong has to make compromises and make more attempts to carry a larger and more complete ecosystem.

Amid the common arguments that "the world has suffered from WeChat for a long time" and "everyone wants to teach Zhang Xiaolong how to be a product manager", social products that claim to subvert WeChat are emerging one after another. It is hard to say whether there will be the next "WeChat" among them. How to avoid being eliminated or replaced by new products is the key proposition for WeChat in the next decade.

WeChat becomes Toutiao-like

"It's getting harder and harder to run a public account," this is a common lament made by creators within the WeChat public account ecosystem.

It is a consensus that relying on content to increase followers has shown signs of fatigue. The main reason is that the opening rate of WeChat public accounts is declining day by day, and users generally no longer subconsciously click to follow.

A creator who opened a WeChat public account in 2014 and really started to make a profit in 2017 said that after missing the bonus period, it is quite difficult to expand the WeChat public account simply by relying on content to achieve the goal of making (big) money.

But judging from the recent changes in WeChat, a new wave of traffic dividends seems to be being injected, and intelligent interest recommendations will become a new source of dividends.

Tech Planet (WeChat ID: tech618) noticed that WeChat public accounts and website links have begun to display their sources directly in the WeChat dialog box. More importantly, there are "related reading" recommendations under public account articles; the public account information flow is also being grayed out and new public accounts are being recommended to users.

In December last year, WeChat made its biggest revision in history, introducing the "Take a Look" portal. WeChat began to explore a new content recommendation mechanism, giving the highest weight to user friends. After the user clicks "Like (now changed to Reading)", the content will be recommended to friends in the "Take a Look" interface. This social attempt is to hand over the right to select high-quality content to WeChat friends.

Now, this recommendation mechanism has also changed. "Take a Look" first added a "Featured" entrance to display the content of public accounts recommended by other non-friends, and then introduced a manual recommendation mechanism in this module, where editors manually recommend content.

Tech Planet learned that among the first batch of recommended content, traffic from Kanyikan accounted for more than half of the total data. However, the "stupid method" of manual recommendation is obviously not sustainable in the long run. In the future, Kanyikan will also add a machine recommendation mechanism.

Toutiao, launched in 2012, quickly rose to become a star product by relying on its big data intelligent recommendation of information. However, WeChat public platform, launched in the same year, has always been a subscription-based platform and does not rely on intelligent recommendations.

"We can indeed feel that WeChat is gradually becoming 'Toutiao-like'. After experiencing the increase in forwarding in Moments and social networks, it seems that turning on smart recommendations for content and public accounts may bring new growth. However, the recommendations are not accurate now and this is just the beginning," analyzed a WeChat public account content entrepreneur.

In addition to WeChat official accounts, WeChat search announced that it would be officially upgraded to “Search 101”, which was also interpreted by the outside world as a move to snipe at Toutiao.

When you enter certain keywords in WeChat search, you will find that the search recommendations are pinned to the top. In the past, you had to scroll to the bottom and click on search to enter. However, after trying it, Tech Planet found that not all entries will trigger the search recommendations to be pinned to the top.

Some media analysts said that Kanyikan and Souyisou will threaten Baidu's search business and Toutiao's content distribution business. But judging from the current progress, WeChat still has a long way to go if it wants to truly compete with them.

Why has it changed?

For WeChat, which has 1 billion users, every small update is enough to become the focus of public discussion.

The latest beta version of WeChat obtained by Tech Planet (WeChat ID: tech618) also has a key update. WeChat has finally compromised with users and is testing support for system-level dark mode. Dark mode can be called one of the key ideas proposed by "popular product managers". During the internal test period alone, it successfully became a hot topic and was listed on Weibo hot searches.

Looking back, in addition to viewing and searching, WeChat has also undergone many important functional updates.

For example, if WeChat changes to follow the mainstream information products, the way of displaying the content of the public accounts will be replaced by information flow, rather than a folded and aggregated content format.

While users were complaining about not adapting, the industry generally believed that this would accelerate the elimination of public accounts and users would return their attention to the content itself. At the time, the opening rate of WeChat public accounts was decreasing, and information flow platforms such as Toutiao were relying on big data to accurately match and attract more users to use the platform.

Today, the backend of WeChat official accounts has gradually opened up more data to creators, such as frequent readers, content reading rate and other refined operational indicators.

But this seems unable to reverse the current situation of declining opening rates. Data from a previous survey of 7,242 public accounts by Xinbang showed that the proportion of frequent readers of public accounts is generally 11%. In terms of content opening rate, the overall opening rate of the platform is currently about 1.9%, while the opening rate of headlines can generally reach 4.3%.

In fact, the changes in "Take a Look" and public accounts are all in line with the changes in users' reading habits. In particular, at a time when the general opening rate of public accounts is less than 3%, WeChat needs to find new rules to arouse users' interest in opening them.

The pre-sou search has also injected new power into the public account to a certain extent. As Toutiao began to pay more attention to the search business, a new competition started between Baidu, Toutiao and WeChat. WeChat may not intend to separate search and make it a core business, but search is bound to be an important part of WeChat's commercial ecosystem.

As early as the PC era, Tencent intended to develop its search business and launched "Sousou", but WeChat lost in the competition and "Sousou" was acquired by Sogou. After that, Tencent did not restart its search business, but became the overlord of the mobile social era with QQ and WeChat.

Today, the ecosystem covering life and work scenarios, including WeChat Pay, mini-programs, and mini-games, is gradually maturing.

On the other hand, more content ecosystems have been nurtured in the soil of WeChat. After Tencent launched several independent short video products that failed to activate the market, WeChat added the function of shooting "video dynamics"; the trend of planting grass is everywhere, and WeChat launched the "Goods Circle" which is regarded as the "Little Red Book" in WeChat, and recently changed its name to "WeChat Circle". It supports WeChat Circle to be embedded in public account articles for promotion, and will also be displayed on the discovery page.

Behind these changes are changes in content formats and the filling of WeChat's own ecosystem. In the social environment where the post-00s shouted "escape from WeChat", WeChat has gathered the most consumer-powerful people and has a huge user base. At the same time, WeChat also has a WeChat public platform with millions of active public accounts and hundreds of millions of content every month, which is enough to support WeChat to undertake a larger ecosystem and business scenarios.

As an industry insider said, WeChat may decline and its number of users may decline, but it will never fail.

The next 10 years

If you ask any WeChat user: "What features do you want WeChat to add?" "What aspects of WeChat do you think need improvement?" most people will probably be able to satisfy their desire to be a product manager and make all kinds of requests.

WeChat does have many pain points. Chat records take up too much memory, the voice progress bar cannot be dragged, leading to "voice phobia", deleting a reply will delete the chat record, the quality of pictures in Moments is compressed, and it is impossible to set single Moments permissions for specific groups of people. But even so, most people find it difficult to separate themselves from WeChat in both life and work.

In the past decade, countless product managers and startups have tried to break through WeChat’s moat and change the inevitable fate of social products that end with “add WeChat”. The end result is often that product managers meet by chance on major social platforms and then return to WeChat groups for discussions.

Apart from QQ, WeChat, and Weibo, there are few social products that have survived for decades. It is difficult to define WeChat simply as a "social product."

WeChat Pay, mini-programs, SouYiso, business operating systems that serve merchants, etc., more and more huge ecosystems are being established. It can be said that today's WeChat has become a new service platform.

The CEO of a marketing company said that WeChat is widely used in China, so the user experience is better. WeChat has a rich open interface and a powerful ecosystem, so basically any application scenario you can think of can be connected to WeChat, including live broadcast, online university, file storage, etc. In other words, relying on mini-programs, public accounts, etc., WeChat can be made into its own "portal site."

The inevitable path for WeChat to evolve in the future is to become more and more intelligent.

While the recommendation mechanisms of text, audio, and video platforms have become increasingly precise and everyone has begun to discuss the resulting "information cocoon", WeChat is still in the earliest stage of manual recommendation.

Tech Star (WeChat ID: tech618) learned that WeChat's precise content recommendation function is currently being tested internally, and the distribution mechanism is still unknown. However, it is foreseeable that WeChat public accounts may usher in a new harvest period, and the first batch of people who step on the rules will reap the first dividends.

In the early days, Pinduoduo and Youzan exploded in WeChat, allowing more people to see the fission effect and commercial value brought by WeChat groups. This allowed more people to see opportunities, but it also caused WeChat to face a major problem: everyone wanted to take advantage of WeChat's traffic.

The behavior of WeChat merchants and purchasing agents using the Moments as an advertising wall is extremely annoying and is emerging in an endless stream. Everyone has more or less received advertisements or spam messages. Complaints such as “I treat you as a friend, but you treat me as private domain traffic” are heard everywhere. Black and gray industries are rampant, but it is difficult to eliminate them on WeChat.

At this time, WeChat needs to be simpler. It is reported that WeChat for Business will open WeChat Moments for Business, and the Moments sent by enterprises will be distinguished from personal Moments; at the same time, WeChat for Business will allow the establishment of mixed groups of WeChat for Enterprise and personal users, with group size limits of 100, 500, and 2,000 people.

More often than not, WeChat plays the role of a "commercial traffic portal". Perhaps in the future, moving these business activities to WeChat for Business will be a better choice for WeChat.

Today, Tencent is the leader in social networking among acquaintances, but with the end of the demographic dividend era, WeChat, which has spent ten years building an ecological moat that the public cannot escape from, is also facing the problem of declining user activity. What can WeChat rely on to survive in the next decade of technology?