WeChat’s public reading and like counts, what has changed?

Recently, WeChat official accounts are planning to revise their version. After the revision, users will be able to see the number of times each official account article has been read and can like the article.

These two functions may seem like minor changes, but they indicate that WeChat will break its long-standing “weak marketing” attribute. By adding the number of reads and likes function, users can more intuitively understand the popularity of articles and the reading effect. At the same time, advertisers can also deliver more efficiently.

WeChat’s official public information shows that the total number of WeChat public accounts has now exceeded 5.8 million, with the average daily increase rising from 8,000 last year to 15,000; during the public beta of the WeChat platform promotion function alone, more than 8,000 advertisers and more than 1,000 traffic owners participated in it. Judging from this data, the impact of WeChat’s revision is very wide.

From the past "severe crackdown on excessive marketing" to this major revision, WeChat seems to be becoming more and more commercialized. In the view of Yuan Jun, vice president of Yingsheng Advertising, WeChat has inherited Tencent 's wolf-like bloodline and rarely engages in commercial behaviors that will put it at a disadvantage. This revision is the beginning of WeChat's refinement of its future marketing ecology. "In the future, there will be more such rules, not fewer."

WeChat becoming Weibo?

Previously, WeChat has always been conservative about its positioning as a "marketing platform". WeChat public accounts have never launched ranking and user discovery functions, and the number of times articles in public accounts have been read is only displayed in the background. In other words, the number of fans of public accounts and the number of times each article has been read have always been private. In addition to reading content, readers can basically not see any other data or followers.

Even though WeChat always emphasizes the value of "service over marketing", in fact, the mobile social capabilities of WeChat Moments, the information dissemination capabilities of public accounts, and the topic planning capabilities all give it a strong marketing foundation. So since last year, many celebrities, companies, or marketing promotion agencies have attached themselves to this platform, hoping to find marketing value suitable for themselves in the WeChat ecosystem. At present, there are already thousands of companies providing marketing services based on the WeChat platform.

Under such circumstances, WeChat gradually changed its secretive attitude towards the "marketing platform" and began to formulate rules to support the marketing methods it accepted. An obvious example is that while WeChat cracked down on the "likes" and other behaviors of marketing accounts, it launched the WeChat advertising platform in cooperation with "Guangdiantong". Many industry insiders pointed out that WeChat, which is working hard to load advertisements, seems to be developing towards "microblogging".

"It should be said that WeChat's attitude towards marketing through public accounts has gone through three stages," said Yuan Jun. In his opinion, the first stage was a "courtesy interpretation". WeChat has always used the warning of "not repeating the path taken by Sina Weibo" to refuse to play the role of a marketing tool. At this stage, WeChat has not figured out how to balance the interests of marketing in this ecosystem.

The second stage was "demonstration-based suppression". During this period, many self-media accounts used various marketing techniques to attract money, which began to arouse public disgust. In order to prevent "excessive marketing", WeChat launched several "suppressions" on public accounts. For a time, self-media were in danger and no longer dared to make a big fuss, but made their marketing methods more obscure. WeChat itself also paved the way for launching its own advertising platform.

In the third stage, with the public beta of the advertising platform, WeChat, based on commercial interests, "recruited" those self-media big accounts and incorporated them into the money-making system. The public reading and likes can be seen as WeChat's refined carving of marketing rules. You know, in the marketing ecosystem of Weibo, the content, forwarding, comments and likes of an account are all public, and even the relationship chain is transparent.

"From this perspective, WeChat is not resisting marketing tools, but resisting being a marketing tool like Sina Weibo," Yuan Jun said. "As long as public accounts do not destroy the ecological environment and are willing to be included in WeChat's business system, WeChat does not mind taking a bite of their food."

Data "Attack and Defense"

At present, before WeChat releases the number of readers and likes, advertisers who want to use public accounts for marketing can only estimate the effect of advertising based on the number of fans reported by the operator. But in fact, many public accounts that claim to have countless fans have very average advertising effects. This is because many public accounts do not interact actively with readers, and the reading rate of articles is very low. This phenomenon directly leads to inflated advertising prices.

In an ideal situation, when various data of public accounts are made public, advertisers will have a basis for their promotion and can then invest their limited marketing costs in public accounts with large readerships and high interaction rates.

"In the past, some self-media played very wild games. Under the new rules, they should be more restrained," said Yuan Jun. He told reporters that on average, the opening rate of an article pushed by a public account is 10%, and it is rare to reach 20%. In other words, multiplying the number of readings by 10 can roughly determine the real number of fans of the public account. For example, if a public account has 100,000 fans, but an article is only read 1,000 times, then the real number of fans of this public account is about 12,000, and the rest are "zombie fans."

But then again, as long as there are indicators, counterfeiters will have an opportunity to take advantage. For APP rankings, there are companies that inflate rankings; for websites, there are companies that inflate traffic; for Taobao , there are companies that inflate crowns and transaction volumes... It is foreseeable that once WeChat makes public the number of views and likes of public accounts, those "fake data" companies will swarm to inflate the number of fans and views. In this case, how to judge the authenticity of data has become another problem faced by advertisers and WeChat platforms.

Yuan Jun doesn't seem too worried about this. "WeChat marketing is different from Taobao's crown-brushing. Taobao's data is relatively closed, and it is facing an IPO, so it is difficult for the outside world to know how much sales the store has." He said, "In comparison, everyone basically knows the conversion rate of pictures and texts on WeChat."

In his eyes, WeChat’s public disclosure of data is actually a step forward in measuring the effectiveness of advertising, but in fact, advertisers can take more approaches to measure the true effectiveness of WeChat marketing. For example, brands can publish information about offline activities on official accounts to see how many fans actually participate in offline activities. If the number of fans on WeChat is three times the number of people participating in offline activities under reasonable circumstances, but the number of people actually participating in offline activities is very small, then it is not difficult to know how much water there is in WeChat official accounts.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.