Editor's Note: There are many players on the Stranger Social Track who are trying to compete for a place, and Soul is one of them. And as Soul proposed the concept of a "social metaverse," industry insiders were curious: Could this idea really be realized? In this article, the author made an analysis and evaluation of Soul's social product, let's take a look at it together.
First, experience the environment
Second, the market background
Recently, the author found that the concept of metaverse continues to explode, and the acquisition of Activision Blizzard from Microsoft for $68.7 billion has once again detonated the metacosm.
In the acquisition of PICO by byte, to The renaming of Facebook to Meta, and then to Tencent's acquisition of Black Shark, the giants' repeated shots are even more enthusiastic about the market, and the emergence of various concept stocks has attracted many companies to follow the trend.
At the same time, at the beginning of 2021, Soul proposed for the first time in the industry to build a "social metacosm" If the metacosm is the next station of the Internet, then Gen Z is the first generation of the metacosm. No matter what stage, human beings are inseparable from social activities, and the social scene of the next generation is the "social metacosm". Let's take a look at and explore Soul's efforts towards the social metaverse!
THIRD, market analysis (capacity analysis)
1. User size
Source: Ai Media Consulting
According to ai media consulting analysis since 2015, the scale of Chinese stranger social users has continued to rise, and it is expected that the scale of Chinese stranger social users will reach 649 million in 2020. According to this annual growth trend through the above data analysis, it is expected that the user scale of 700-800 million will be the ceiling bottleneck of the stranger social industry. As various products in the stranger social market stand out, the products that entered early, such as Tantan and Momo, not only need to retain their own users, but also resist the violent impact of new products.
The author found that although the Chinese stranger social market has existed for ten years, there has been no specific monopoly position of the product, and there is still room for growth for new products that subdivide social networks. In the context of this industry, it is recommended that new products need to create staggered competition, strong user stickiness, targeted user groups, and marketing play.
2. Stage of industry development
Source: Mob Institute
Through the analysis of the development stage of the industry in the above figure, the current stranger social market has gone through four stages, namely the budding period, the development period, the outbreak period, and the precipitation period. Based on the stranger social leader Momo, the main design is based on lbS geographical location to establish a range of stranger social relationships mainly through the release of dynamics, to understand the user's interests and hobbies to chat and chat the main way.
In 2014, Tantan launched the yan value social to adopt the left slid no interest, right slide like the screening social game, improve the screening efficiency but strengthen the threshold of social chat, starting from the face value of a faction of users. In 2015, Soul's chat social play through personality tests exploded in viral marketing of mobile phone ads, novel ads, and promotional videos in various places. Coupled with the slogan of finding you through the soul, quickly attracting the user's mind, the special way of no real-name registration, lowering the threshold of user social chat.
Source: Analysys
From the analysis of the above figure, it can be seen that the social market has shown a stage of heavy and deep ploughing, and the product functions of each manufacturer have gradually matured, and the personality of users has been deeply excavated. The rapid growth of products is all in the differentiation of product strategy and service innovation, such as love chat efficient matching method to help users quickly and satisfactorily match. Diversified gamification gameplay helps users quickly break the ice and alleviate embarrassment, the platform vigorously supervises to ensure user safety, and decentralized algorithms benefit ordinary users.
Through the experience of Soul, the author found that this product focuses on the user's soul interest exchange, and at the same time builds a chat community, mainly matching through personality testing + anonymous social networking. At present, the market presents emerging social software such as Uki and Jimu, which are all socializing strangers. It can be seen that deeply cultivating the personalized social needs of users is the unified direction of the current development of the stranger social market.
3. Social market ecosystem
Source: Analysys
Through the user-level analysis of the products in the above figure, the current social market is in a highly mature stage, and the head player pattern is stable in the acquaintance social market of hundreds of millions of users such as WeChat and QQ. In the subdivision track tens of millions of leaders such as Soul, Tantan, Momo and other tens of millions of users occupy the middle waist position of the social market.
Soul promotes it through the slogan of differentiation: Follow the soul to find you! Deep into the user's mind and the love of many post-00 Z era, in the product user growth rate is also the top few. At present, users want to quickly obtain value content and entertainment services, and the demand for major manufacturers to improve the social vertical sinking of community, content, service, game and other levels for each product positioning.
4. Market recognition of Soul (popularity)
The 14th 21st Century Business Model Summit Forum and 21st Century Innovation Capital Research Institute Chao Economic Dialogue won the "21st Century Excellent Business Model Company" award for its technology and business model innovation in the past year.
The author digs deeply mainly to find out that Soul launched the personality mall function at the end of June 2021, the platform invited face pinch masters to settle in, put on the shelves of personal original avatar works and completed the monetization of face pinch works, realized the 0-1 business model innovation, and then won the recognition of the 21st century China business model competitiveness research list, which is Soul's new model towards the "social meta-universe", creating personalized digital avatar value through face pinching.
The author brushed in the Douyin era of finance and economics, there are nearly 80 face pinchers in the soul launch of the personality mall harvested, with their own knowledge creativity and face pinching hobby to create a way to realize the value of interest realization. According to senior users of Soul, some face pinchers earn nearly 45,000 per month through the Soul Personalized Mall Face Pinch Service.
At the same time, at the same time, WISE 2019 "King of the New Economy" annual enterprise list was announced at 36Kr, and Soul was awarded the title of "King of Community Social" together with large social applications such as WeChat and Weibo, which can be seen that the market is optimistic about Soul's recognition in the social field and continuous innovation and development.
Source: Asia-Pacific New Economy Conference 2020
At the recent 2020 Asia-Pacific New Economy Conference, Soul also won the 2020 China New Economy Excellence Achievement Award, which is enough to see the industry's recognition and recognition of Soul's achievements in the field of stranger social track.
Soul has won many awards inseparable from the efforts of the company's R & D personnel and the innovative mining of social field functions, highlighting the company's values of simplicity and openness, continuous progress, pursuit of essence, and meeting user needs, and has experienced continuous optimization of the 2.0 to 4.27.0 version and the strategic positioning of the "social meta-universe" in the iteration of the version.
Fourth, the core of the product (features, positioning)
1. How the soul socializes
Soul lowers the threshold of user use by weakening the value of the face and adopting anonymity. And through the use of geographical location, personality test, planet classification, gravity tag and other functions to achieve the algorithm's accurate matching social chat.
Soul's interest map algorithm fills in the primary and advanced soul tests from the heart of the three views, personality, hobbies, etc. obtained by the user test, and conducts database overall analysis to gather people with similar test results together and generate a desire to chat.
Users can attract each other through the instantaneous content they publish, resonate with each other, generate topics and then help users find friends with the same hobbies that they can talk about in the sea of stars.
The source of information in the square is not known to strangers to publish, similar to the WeChat circle of friends function architecture, reverse use can make strangers comment, Soul can comment on content in the square, mainly to encourage users to make new friends and emotional resonance and find topics.
There are three categories in the square: Recommendation, Attention, and Discovery. Under "Follow", the content displayed is for users who are interested in using the collection before. Under the "Discover" page, the content posted by users with different interests is sorted and sorted in chronological order.
For example, the instantaneous content of the niche group segmented by the selection, food report, and singing is targeted by default, and the default positioning is "recommendation" through the algorithm to calculate the type of user who is interested in browsing and following the current user before browsing, and personalized recommendation.
Click "Love" in the upper right corner, you will enter the love bell settings, you can find a nearby ta for a soul social networking through gender, ideal age, fate card and other options to match strange users to chat.
Through recent use, when you chat with a strange user for the first time, two chat opening statements will appear in the lower right corner to help users solve the guidance process of social icebreaking and intersection. Greatly improves the user DAU and solves the embarrassing situation of not knowing how to start the conversation when chatting for the first time.
2. Product Positioning
Soul was founded in 2016. Data precipitation and retention as samples are carried out for the weak relationship (stranger social relationship) of users on the platform, and the social portraits and interest maps of different users are generated, and relevant content or potential matching objects are recommended for users through algorithms. A variety of rich gamification gameplay on the superimposed app is positioned as a virtual social networking platform for young people in the Z era.
Current slogan: "The other self in the world"
Let users judge the corresponding planet through the soul test, build their own interest model through the user's establishment of their own gravitational signature, and find stranger social products with the same characteristics of the same spiritual partners.
V. User analysis (role, scene, city)
1. User Portrait
From the data, it can be seen that the number of Z generation under 24 years old and users over 40 years old has increased rapidly, and the social demand of the incremental population of the performance segmentation is strong, mainly including the intersection of interest groups such as two-dimensional community, star-chasing rice ball, game social, sports health, learning social, and voice social.
Source: Mob Institute
Although the overall mobile Internet has entered the stock stage market in 2022, the user structure of the stranger social market still has a relatively profound change, and from the perspective of age distribution, the proportion of young users aged 18-24 has increased to 21.7%. The user group over 40 years old has grown the fastest to 19.5%, which is the main incremental group in the current stranger social market.
The social needs of young users under the age of 24 are personalized. The trend of decentralization is obvious, and the preference for voice social, voice play, video social and other subdivisions is obvious. At present, it is used less specifically for people over the age of 40.
Their social needs are basically through national policies, to promote the major manufacturers to achieve aging software completion. For example, WeChat's planning of large fonts, voice input, and elder mode. The difference in the application of the current market is not outstanding and ideal.
2. User scenarios
Name: Xiaoyi; Age: 18 years old; Occupation: College student; Emotional status: Single.
User characteristics: Social fear wants to meet friends do not know how to start.
User story: Xiaoni is a college student, usually the community fears to love home, coupled with the usual study courses, unwilling to participate in various clubs and social activities on campus, like the home dormitory Internet, the social circle is narrow. A person living in a foreign school, feeling lonely and eager to meet new friends, while watching his roommates have objects one by one, he also wants to meet the right boys to try to develop CP relationships.
Use scenario: Seeing that there are roommates using Soul to meet the boyfriend, Xiaoyi downloads and starts to use through the guidance of the roommate, opens Soul's "love bell" soon, matches to the same city Xiao wang with a distance of less than 2km and a high degree of matching, Xiao Wang takes the initiative to greet Xiao Yi, the interesting opening attracts Xiao Yi, so Xiao Yi also replied to him, and then within a month intermittently contact each other, the two sides gradually familiarize themselves with their respective backgrounds and preferences, there are many common topics. So the two met offline, met in depth, and the two had a good feeling for each other and were ready to develop a CP relationship.
Name: Xiao Li; Age: 28; Occupation: Fitness Coach; Emotional State: Single.
User characteristics: long working hours, frequent use of mobile phones, easy to get bored, like to share interesting things about life and learn about various novelties.
User story: Xiao Li usually knows fewer friends who have the same hobbies in his work and life, and through the publicity ads for Soul on the Internet, he is attracted by the advertising slogan of people who have no loneliness in the world, and tries to download and register to use.
Through personality and other tests, the first matching planet, met Frankenstein, through simple communication and exchanges found that both sides like fitness, extreme sports, bungee jumping, basketball and other hobbies, the next three months, often sharing their own life fun, became an indispensable good friend in life, while the two sides plan to go to Wudang Mountain to play bungee jumping together on May Day Labor Day.
3. Urban gender distribution
Source: Mob Institute
In terms of age distribution, Soul's users are mainly concentrated under the age of 35, accounting for 63%, of which users aged 24 and below account for the highest proportion, indicating that Soul's most important user population is Generation Z.
Generation Z is not only the main force of the Internet, but also the indigenous people of the mobile Internet, and its age growth period is accompanied by the high penetration rate of the Internet. According to QuestMobile statistics, as of October 2018, the number of Generation Z users exceeded 369 million, accounting for 30% of all Internet users, contributing nearly half of the growth rate of the mobile Internet.
4. Z-Era group traits
1) Socially, Gen Z has its own unique form
Extremely tolerant of new things, like to try all kinds of niche social networking, and have a higher degree of participation and integration than users of other age groups. A taste of early adopters and an elusive personality is a characteristic social style of Gen Z groups.
2) In the socialization of strangers, pay attention to accurate matching and seek like-mindedness
Because the only generation of Generation Z does not lack the company of family, but longs for a sense of belonging and identity from their peers. The core appeal of its social networking is not to dispel loneliness and cathartic desires, but to find a favorite atmosphere and environment. So whether there are shared values, topics, or the same hobbies is crucial for Gen Z strangers to socialize.
4. What user problem does Soul solve?
Through data analysis, it can be concluded that the needs of social users mainly come from: meeting new friends, expanding social circles, passing the time to reduce loneliness, and understanding information gossip from social networking. At the same time, Soul is a niche and outlier in the social circle of strangers.
The main feature is "soul test, personality matching, accurate push, interest information, private chat dating", compared with other value social software, it brings a good social atmosphere to the Z generation social networking, such as planet lab, masked gossip, explosive bomb meow, campus bar, interest group, chat party and other novel gameplay to Z era users rich play, social, atmosphere, interest and other different experiences.
5. Soul's business model
The author analyzes the process that stranger social software cannot do without:
User matching - user screening - social icebreaking - relationship building - strengthening relationships - understanding each other - adding WeChat to each other.
Find that Soul's profit points are mostly:
- Ad placement (loading, content pages)
- Top-up service (Soul Coins, Props)
- Extended function aging (chat video)
- Personality Mall (Avatar Decoration)
- Social gifts (love, glow sticks)
- Personal prediction: live broadcast of talents (likes and tips) + training and teaching (skills and knowledge) + psychological counseling (relationship processing)
Current face pinch service:
Although some face-pinching masters have been carried out in Soul's personality mall, creative monetization is rare. Personal feeling is more of Soul's model attempt at the social meta-universe, how to establish their own IP operation face pinch works and attract users to pay for the works is the goal that the reacher needs to challenge!
It is said that Soul currently has systems built in social spaces such as Xiaoice Island, Asahi Lightyear, etc. It can be predicted that in the future, Soul's social space can highlight a different user image, and in the new Internet occupation released by the state, face pincher, script writer, and storage division have officially become regular occupations. Hopefully, Soul will continue to tap into personalized face-pinching avatars and traffic support for the celebrities. So that users have a digital legacy like QQ and WeChat after my death to Soul that can be passed on to the next generation of collection value.
VI. Product Analysis (Content Disassembly)
1. Product architecture diagram
1) New features
On November 19, 2021, Soul launched a number of new features such as who is undercover, turtle soup, sound business cards, entertainment patting, masked gossip and other novel gameplay, strengthening user social activity, improving users' laziness to Soul Entertainment's social play and community operation strategies.
2) Soul's rich active activities
Rich topic activities to promote users in the software activity and a variety of ways to play, to promote users to open their hearts to make friends, through the sharing and release of instant attention, participate in the topic content to express personal inner experience, views, angles, become many people in WeChat, QQ can not be in the acquaintance of the emotional value and release of emotional value, Soul brings users a release of the emotional tree hole, it is expected that Soul will add many activity types and innovative teaching meta-universe conference mode at the psycho-educational level.
3) Soul's various gameplay matching algorithms
2. Product matching process
3. Planet Lab (Exploration of the Social Metaverse)
1) Masked small talk
You can select 8 topics in the page for topic algorithm recommendation matching Users can do 5 free matches per day, unable to view user avatars and moments. Within 30 minutes of the specified time, you can chat about the other party's favorability and love according to the topic of the other party to view the information of both parties. The curiosity of the user makes the user continuously improve the time spent in the software, and the probability of purchasing soul coins increases the gameplay time.
2) Boom meow
Q version of the card style gameplay, through the hole card to draw the bomb if the bomb can not be removed convenient will be out, and strive to survive to win the final victory. There are individual five-person games, team competitions 2v2v2, exquisite painting style novel card play, enhance the user's DAU degree in the software to improve, users are difficult to replace the operation of other social software user habits, to promote users to active software to improve the consumption rate.
3) Soul werewolf kill
Customized according to the popular social games of Generation Z, the new social gameplay can be used to justify their identity through voice and typing confusion, which is the part of all players speaking and voting during the day. The winner is eliminated and leaves a last word so "night-day-night" loop, until one side of the faction reaches the victory condition, then the game ends. The ability to test the user's reasoning and analysis is deeply loved by post-00 users, which can improve the user's laziness to Soul social play.
4) Group chat parties
According to the added interest tags, the algorithm gives priority to recommending group chat parties that meet the user's interests in, such as interested in communication, singing and listening to songs, interesting debates, emotional stories, small talk and nagging, tachycardia, etc., and builds a rich interest community with multi-person online voice and wheat small groups, and gives users a long honor and other rankings in the active group chat through the soul force list and the Planet Hall of Fame, enriching the monotonous gameplay of users typing and socializing, and strengthening community cohesion.
5) Interest groups
Users create groups through interest classification, and build secret chat groups of close friends to play games together, about sports, share music, industry exchanges, encourage each other to learn, etc. From single-person social evolution to group socialization, to promote users because of the existence of groups, increase emotional time, relationship maintenance investment and develop into close friends Suggestions can produce Soul exclusive contact information such as mailbox, telephone number, activity link, etc. is a necessary condition for the development of acquaintance social development.
6) Chat opening remarks
In the past, I always struggled with how to chat with interested girls, did not know how to break the first sentence to open the hearts of girls, afraid of a simple sentence affecting girls, and my impression has always been the first difficulty in the use of social software for strangers.
Until the soul of the king launched the AI algorithm recommendation (improve the excitement of the user experience) the user is more easy to accept the opening statement, to meet the user's shyness, fear, fear after all, not everyone is social, greatly improving the user experience and reducing the user's threshold for loss at the beginning of the chat, so that the user's opening statement is simplified operation.
VII. Existing Problems and Summaries (Experience Experience)
1) User retention is difficult
- In Soul, friends who generally chat well will be transferred to WeChat, QQ and other acquaintance social platforms for in-depth chat, users often use Soul as an entrance to make friends, and they do not deeply root in the user's psychology in their minds, feeling that it is a social community that can develop relationships and be familiar with close friends.
- From Soul's previous slogans, it can be seen that version: version 3.7.41 follows the soul to find you, to version: 3.7.45 of the interesting soul shelter, in the version: 4.24.0 interests come to Soul to swim in the social metaverse.
- It can be seen that Soul's development strategy from attracting user groups to vertical community operations, coupled with the use of Soul coin in the form of payment, can find suitable users within the same city, regional screening, and it can be seen that Soon Soul will dig in the direction of acquaintance socialization.
2) Covert sexual harassment
With the expansion of Soul's user volume of tens of millions of people, resulting in uneven levels of square speech, user private chat, etc., the product tone is biased by many bad atmospheres such as excessive showing off, rubbing the edge, fishing words, etc. The appearance of product reputation has a bad impact, while stranger social often appear fraud, excessive speech, fishing, etc. Affect many user experiences, how to judge supervision is a problem that Soul and major unfamiliar social software must solve.
1. Recommendations
1) Turn on multi-planet coexistence
Through the analysis of Tantan, Momo, UKi, and Yi, most of the competitors cannot escape the evaluation of the appearance value, after all, the starting point of the face value is the first feeling of human beings on the visual senses.
Can't escape the user need to burst photos, attract, share life, dig deeper is actually different users need different product experiences such as Xiaomei likes to take photos, likes to share in Soul and Xiaoli is not confident in her appearance and likes to share music.
Through this user scenario, the required functions are derived, and the user's usage scenarios are freely switched. Adding Yan Value Planet, Sharing Planet, and Interest Planet to Soul's Square can help improve user retention and increase rich gameplay by subdividing the square into subdivisions to meet the use experience scenarios of different users.
2) Add chat training courses
According to the analysis of user emotional consumption data, the post-70s, post-80s, and post-90s groups have different emotional service needs for emotional content, love teaching, emotional counseling, and emotional redemption, and the post-90s are the main force of emotional content consumption; love teaching services are the largest emotional service needs after the 80s; love management is the emotional keyword of the post-70s, and emotional redemption and emotional counseling account for nearly 80%.
In Soul also saw recently, well-known university teachers to popularize love knowledge, you can see that soon Soul will launch a similar "love knowledge classroom", the design of chat skills, dating experience, business love, quick recovery, enhance self-confidence, etc. to meet the user's awkward chat in the chat, can not go deep, lack of opening statement, business love and other pain points, to further improve user retention.
3) How to break through the circle of acquaintances to harvest
Based on personality + hobbies, create interest gatherings in the same city. Prove and organize interest tags, talents, pictures, etc. Online registration and offline participation, breaking through today's "face-watching era" from the "talent interest" offline dating activities, so that more strangers, niche hobby groups to develop deep relationships.
Consolidate Soul's social position in strangers, while reducing the outflow of users to QQ, WeChat and other giant software. Vertically increase the use of DAU by users in Soul, focusing on the dual-idea mode of online communication + offline expansion.
2. Summary
1) Industry level
Referring to the chaos of the education and training industry in 2021, the government has formulated a series of double-reduction policy supervision, speculating that there will be a serious imbalance in the stranger social market in the future, and the government will also join the supervision, which will lead to the industry becoming a positive energy, regularization, and interest in the form of community segmentation demand, and at the same time, products need to strengthen their own management and reduce the impact of vulgar content and negative comments, in order to reduce the product removal and rectification and elimination.
2) Scene level
With the rise of emerging technologies such as big data, virtual reality, and cloud computing, which will lead to the incubation of new technologies to more new social scenarios, how to continuously expand the direction of products in the future, is what each product should think deeply about, based on new technologies to empower product commercialization is the future trend, product mastery of core technology is also a new core to resist the scene-based social trend.
3) Product level
At present, most social products are stuck in the process of strangeness to understanding, most of the users who use Soul will exchange weChat, QQ and other acquaintance social software in the chat to be familiar with the intimate relationship, and the users are indirectly tapped by competitors to take away the user, lack of users from online to offline development such as face base, dating, party, etc., while the user demand sinking to be mined and developed.
4) Operational level
On the basis of Soul's soul matching, continue to deepen the verticalization of community interest matching to improve the user experience, improve the retention of more and more users of the square content above Soul, there will be some forged information and connotation paragraphs, fishing stickers, so that the advantages of real-name authentication without threshold have also been left, product disadvantages are vulgar comments, fishing connotation paragraphs, lack of sincere chat, low user quality and other issues to dissuade some old users, It is hoped that Soul will expand the company's scale while not forgetting its own product positioning, resulting in the larger and more confused.
This article was originally published by @Confidence Travel on everyone is a product manager, and reproduction without the permission of the author is prohibited.
The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol.