"Everything can be broadcast live, and everyone can bring goods together", this is the joke of many netizens about live broadcasting. It is undeniable that bringing goods is indeed the most effective way for Internet celebrities and big V to monetize their influence. Following the implementation of the "Butterfly Plan" on the previous video account, grading talents, encouraging merchants, influencers and brands to settle in, and opening live broadcasts with goods, the official account, which is the cornerstone of WeChat's content ecology, has also recently opened up its ability to bring goods.
A few days ago, the subscription account assistant posted, "In order to better help the creators of the official account to bring goods and monetize, and provide users with a better consumption experience, the official account (including subscription account and service account) will support the selection of products from the preferred alliance for promotion." After opening the preferred alliance delivery function, you can promote the preferred alliance products provided by small store merchants."
After watching the creator of the video account next door rely on bringing goods to "eat and drink spicy", the author of the official account can finally find a new way to monetize in addition to advertising and rewarding.
It is reported that the author of the official account with more than 100 fans can not only directly associate with the WeChat store store and promote the products of the corresponding store, but also can directly establish cooperation with merchants and promote related products through the preferred alliance without binding the store store. In order to promote the enthusiasm of the authors of the official account to bring goods, WeChat has given them super flexibility. After all, in this year when short videos have swept the whole network and traditional graphic content is declining, the days of the authors of the official account are long gone.
It is an undeniable fact that the once premier WeChat public account is no longer in its former glory. According to the information released by Yizan Big Data, the overall open rate of WeChat official accounts has dropped from 2.3% in 2018 to 1.1% in 2020, and now it has fallen below 1%. Because since 2018, Douyin and Kuaishou have ushered in explosive growth, diverting the traffic of WeChat public accounts.
To this end, WeChat has also been trying various ways to improve the attractiveness of the content of the official account to users. For example, through more dimensional social recommendations, to help users find good content, from the initial likes and watches, to an independent "take a look" column, and then to the introduction of recommendation algorithms to show users the content that may be of interest.
Unfortunately, WeChat's efforts have not been able to reverse the decline of the official account. In a sense, the decline of the official account is actually inevitable. As a social platform, rather than a content platform, its initial selling point is instant messaging software in the mobile Internet era, which directly leads to the mutual exclusion of chatting WeChat and watching WeChat public accounts. In the early days, a classic design of WeChat was that when users used other apps, messages would be pushed all the time, but if other functions were opened in WeChat, they would not receive pushes.
Experiencing social networking and browsing content are mutually exclusive, which has led to a large number of users developing the habit of chatting on WeChat and watching content on other platforms, which is why even in the heyday of WeChat public accounts, platforms such as Toutiao and Qutoutiao can still grow savagely. When the traffic is abundant, the defects of the official account are also covered up, but when video replaces graphics and texts as the new content consumption carrier, everything changes.
After all, text is the most abstract information carrier, and the requirements for readers' literacy are also the highest, which in turn leads to the creator's writing skills and storytelling ability need to be improved to a higher level. Compared with graphics and texts, videos are naturally more pleasing to the eye, and in addition, text does not correspond to the real physical world one-to-one, but is based on a symbol system.
Without abstract thinking, it is difficult to connect from words to the real world, and video is what you see is what you get. The visual video is also more in line with the needs of the "people outside the Fifth Ring Road", which leads to the fact that the long articles that need to be thought about and understood are not so suitable for this era. In the current era of fragmented leisure and entertainment, if the amount of text is low, it can only express emotions and cannot output content, but once the amount of text is large, it will contradict the fragmented reading tendency of current consumers.
Otherwise, how can the four words "in simple terms" become the most headache for writers? On the other hand, video, as a form of content, covers the characteristics of text, picture, and sound, and the higher information density makes video more acceptable to users than traditional graphic forms. And the short video platform has also added algorithms to the video as a "condiment", making the charm of the video skyrocketing.
Douyin and Kuaishou's short videos can accurately predict users' interests, and then recommend content that users may be interested in to bring instant gratification, and endlessly supply users with satisfying qualities, so that more and more users are addicted to short videos. Under such internal and external attacks, the traffic of the official account has been declining, and the traffic has been lost, and the monetization ability is naturally not what it used to be. Starting from March 2022, that is, the WeChat official account push rules have shifted from subscription to algorithm recommendation, which is a fatal blow to the advertising monetization of the official account.
In this way, at a time when the monetization ability of advertising is declining, opening up the most fashionable monetization channel at the moment has become a "carrot" hanging in front of the authors of the official account on WeChat. Having said that, opening up the delivery function is a huge benefit for official account authors who want to make money, after all, this thing that countless platforms are rushing to is really effective.
The core selling point of live streaming on Douyin and Taobao is "the lowest price on the whole network", and its underlying logic is that the brand conducts marketing in the name of selling goods, while the WeChat public account is more like Kuaishou, which is known for its private domain traffic. The logic of selling goods on Kuaishou can be completely explained with the experience of Simba, the head anchor of the platform, when Simba was exposed to selling fake bird's nest, the fans still shouted "Support the squad leader!" Support Xinxuan! All the time".
Kuaishou's "Lao Tie" buys the products brought by Simba, not the price, but Simba, which reflects the long-term stickiness and trust of a relationship. In the same way, even if the WeChat public account cannot do the "old iron economy" similar to Kuaishou, the stickiness between the official account and fans is better than that of other platforms. Therefore, the WeChat public account is not only not a false proposition, but may be promising.
It's just that for some official accounts that were opened after February 2018, it is also difficult to bring goods. Because since February 2018, the newly registered WeChat official account has been canceled the message function, and without the message function, there is a lack of opportunities for direct interaction between fans and authors, and it is obviously difficult for such public accounts to have too high fan stickiness.
Therefore, for the earlier official account authors, the function of bringing goods will undoubtedly make them suffer from a long period of drought, and the new generation of official account authors need to take advantage of the opportunity of the WeChat official account to open up the message function to cultivate a fan base first, and then have the possibility of bringing goods. But in any case, after the official account has assumed the function of this ecological "blood bank" for a long time, WeChat has brought some hope to the authors who stick to the official account.