Do you still use WeChat after ten years?

Where is the future development direction of WeChat?

Wechat is a lightweight small product, but it is also a platform-level big product, bearing too many hopes and games, especially since the WeChat charging storm at the beginning of the year, no new measures have been seen. Under the influence of many internal and external factors, such as unclear business model and low activity of WeChat official account, the control of WeChat has become stricter and stricter. Its essence is a strategic loss, which may lead to more missed opportunities.

Wechat is not the Wechat of that year.

A friend who follows the development of WeChat products said that WeChat is constantly innovating and revolutionizing, and it is also good at controlling the rhythm. An investment friend said that the commercialization of WeChat is well controlled, but the progress is slightly slow, and the business ecology has not yet formed, which makes entrepreneurs very frustrated.

Through the passionate road of "killing SMS", "redefining walkie-talkie" and "redefining dialogue", WeChat is no longer Zhang Xiaolong's WeChat, but a product that saves Tencent and subverts QQ. Wechat is no longer a symbol of the value of innovative products, but the weight of Malaysia's dream of internationalization.

Wechat is a lightweight small product, but it is also a platform-level big product, which carries too many hopes and games, especially since the WeChat charging storm at the beginning of the year, the new measures of WeChat in China seem to be gradually slowing down. Under the influence of many internal and external factors, the control of WeChat is getting stricter and stricter. Its essence is a strategic loss, which may lead to more missed opportunities.

The user scale has been fixed, but the business model is not clear.

In two years, WeChat has grown to 400 million users (unofficial), relying not only on breakthrough products, but also on the power of word of mouth. In the early stage, through the pull of stars, the cross recommendation of QQ number and the mutual promotion of mobile phone address book, WeChat quickly achieved the orders of giants and began the international development path.

Compared with Line, which recorded $58 million in the first quarter, after this carefree growth period, WeChat is faced with the need to think about how to realize it, at least to give those shareholders and investment analysts a satisfactory explanation. Although the government has tried social games, it doesn't seem to be ideal. The bold commercialization route is afraid of repeating the old road of Weibo.

The biggest competitor is QQ.

It should not be overlooked that a small number of white-collar workers in first-and second-tier cities do not use WeChat because mobile QQ fully meets their needs, or both. In third-and fourth-tier cities, WeChat is not attractive when its functions are similar. The friend information and relationships retained on QQ have made users inseparable. The function of circle of friends, which we highly admire, is not as good as QQ space in their view, so although it is opened, it is not used much.

Therefore, similar products of WeChat include WhatsApp, TalkBox, Line, Mi Chat, Wing Chat and so on. However, due to the high degree of consistency between functions and user scale, WeChat's actual competitor is QQ, which is competing for users' fragmented communication time.

Some users who use QQ and WeChat at the same time said that WeChat's earliest offline QQ messaging function, mail receiving, friends circle and other functions are the main reasons why it is sought after by many hipsters. Now, the latest version of QQ, through "internal innovation", has completely imitated the voice, free picture sending and group chat functions of WeChat, and even the shape of the dialog box has been imitated. Although this product was quickly "returned to its original shape" within one day, the positioning of the two products has always been a sore point for Tencent.

Mark should have his own ingenious ways in this matter. As early as a few years ago, Tencent's QQ team also launched a Q letter, but then PK died. Now, he encourages the revision of QQ, causing controversy, and has been vomited by thousands of netizens, telling the QQ team what is the user's needs and what is their mission, and taking the responsibility of launching the "new version of unreliable QQ" by himself. Such management wisdom is convincing.

In fact, mobile QQ has long seen the development trend of WeChat, but it can't be completely done because of the organizational structure. "I found that many products are good for the team, but there are problems with our own architecture." Ma once said.

At present, the number of monthly active users of mobile QQ is twice that of WeChat. In the future, mobile QQ will still have to compete with WeChat in a differentiated way, which is a very difficult game.

The low activity of WeChat official account is an invisible pain.

According to the "20 13 China wechat public platform user research report" recently released by ai media consulting, the users of wechat public platform are highly concerned, but the actual number of active users is not particularly ideal, and the proportion of users who frequently use wechat public platform is 24. 1%. On the other hand, we have always stressed that the arrival rate of WeChat is 100%. In fact, many professionals have analyzed that the arrival rate of WeChat is actually not 100%, and the actual click and interaction rate is also very low.

Of course, this has a lot to do with the fact that the official WeChat account is buried deep in the client, users are not easy to find, and the name is relatively uncommon. It is better to make the enterprise WeChat more intuitive.

Swing the product route of public platform

Although Ma said at the two sessions that the public platform is very valuable, it is said that there are limited personnel in charge of the public platform and operators. I wonder if there is any adjustment now. Don't tell me it's just an increase in customer service staff for auditing.

At present, the custom menu that has attracted much attention in the industry has stopped reviewing, which makes people outside the door unhappy. Secondly, the experience and interactive functions of public platforms have not been optimized. Some companies and teams with development capabilities are doing some secondary development and interfaces. For example, Lexiang WeChat provides a large number of user query interfaces for small and medium-sized enterprises and automatically generates H5 page services, realizing the concept of WeChat LightApp.

At the same time, the timetable for WeChat payment and open platform has been delayed, which has led to more wait-and-see mood among entrepreneurs and enterprises. Wechat is self-media except for grassroots size, and there is not much high-quality content.

The threshold is getting higher and higher, does it reduce the vitality?

Two days ago, Tencent began to clean up the WeChat authentication. The information of WeChat WeChat official account does not match and needs to be re-authenticated. A well-informed person said that the post-application of WeChat official account may only be issued once a week, and the authentication of WeChat needs the attention of 1000 users.

Looking back on the development process, we can apply for more than one ID card, and now there are only two. From application to strict review process, from click to review, we can push it for several hours. We found that the operation and management of WeChat is becoming more and more standardized, and we try to block services that affect the user experience. At the same time, in order to avoid WeChat marketing and junk content, a large number of WeChat tubs have been killed, which will cool down the booming WeChat marketing and contribute to the sustainable and healthy development of WeChat.

Wechat is a revolutionary product with great market value. Because the government has not launched substantive industry solutions, enterprises without development and operation capabilities need to have good secondary development and open up CRM or related databases, so the threshold for doing enterprise-level WeChat is not low. This will directly affect the enthusiasm of large and medium-sized enterprises to use WeChat.