As an important graphic content platform in the Chinese Internet, the official account has undergone a series of revisions and adjustments in recent years. These changes have sparked widespread attention and discussion, with some arguing that the official account is losing its original charm, while others see new opportunities. This article will start from the two dimensions of the change and unchange of the official account, and deeply analyze the logic behind the revision of the official account.
As a classical product in the WeChat system, the official account born in 2012 has a very low frequency of product logic iterations for a long time.
However, in the past two or three years, the pace of updates to this old product has quietly accelerated, from opening up the video account and launching the “Little Green Book” to “changing the chronological order” and launching the “take a look”.
As an observer of the official account ecology, today Wei Xi will try to analyze the possible logic behind the change of the official account from my perspective –
First, let’s start with two official accounts with very different styles
Since the days of blogging, I have been a reader of Mr. Ruan Yifeng.
As a living fossil of science and technology authors, Mr. Ruan began to update his “Technology Lovers Weekly” in 2018, which was released on time every Friday, with a total of 353 issues for 7 consecutive years, like performance art.
In my opinion, “Tech Enthusiast Weekly” has the shadow of a digital replacement version of “Global Overview”: no nonsense, no sensationalism, information, insight, and purely rely information density and information increment to attract readers.
For some technology practitioners, reading the weekly magazine “more punctual than the aunt” has become a kind of ritual every Friday.
To achieve these three challenges, product managers will only continue to appreciate
Good product managers are very scarce, and product managers who understand users, business, and data are still in demand when they go out of the Internet. On the contrary, if you only do simple communication, inefficient execution, and shallow thinking, I am afraid that you will not be able to go through the torrent of the next 3-5 years.
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At the beginning, when I was updated on the official account, I remember that there were only about 4,000 readings, and I sighed at that time that “the fragrance of wine is also afraid of deep alleys”, and 7 years have passed quietly, and the reading volume of today’s weekly magazine has stabilized at about 16,000.
Teacher Ruan has become a friend of time.
Let’s take a look at another public account with a very different style – Li Jigang.
As a big name in prompt words, Mr. Jigang’s official account was only registered in September last year, and it was called “Write Prompt” at first.
Updates are also very casual, sometimes daily, sometimes more a day, sometimes every few days, this new account in less than a year has updated a total of 141 original content so far.
Among all AI-related official accounts, Li Jigang’s account is an outlier, not only because his articles do not have shocking titles and no sense of marketing, but also because he has been exploring different possibilities for writing prompts.
From “structured” to “compressed”, from “resonance” to “story”, many prose-like prompts make him self-contained among the “AI dream weavers”.
I consulted his account data two days ago – 63,631 total followers in 9 months, 12,100 regular readers, and 20% of regular readers.
I asked him what he thought about writing the official account, and he replied concisely and purely –
“As long as you express it sincerely, you will be seen by people on the same frequency.”
Ruan Yifeng and Li Jigang are not super large in the typical sense, but in my opinion, this old and new is just a microcosm of the lasting vitality of the official account.
In fact, my favorite living fossil accounts that have been updated for more than 10 years or more than 10 years are also –
The ancient author and Caitou (“The Past by the Trough”), the sharp and nagging Cheng Lingfeng, the cold-eyed Wei Wuhui (“Nitrogen Collection”), the classical Internet author Liu Ren, the “cat pen knife” of the financial day, the ancient blogger Wang Jianshuo, the six gods of reading Jin Yong, the irregular Keso, the Internet Bai Xiaosheng Cao Zheng (“caoz’s dream”), the marketing genius Li Ke, Hua Shan’s younger brother Hua Nan (“Someone writes poetry”), the simple chatter technology author Chi Jianqiang (“Mactalk”), Buddhist update Feng Dahui (“niche news”), word dismantling genius Wang left, middle right, slash author Ah Chan (“maybe”), marketing celebrity Xiao Ma Song, pen cultivation of three tables (“three tables dragon gate array”), annual change author genius red panda, cross-border author Li Xiang, all-rounder Wang Dengke (“super Wang Dengke”), podcast anchor Liu Fei “Liu Yanfei Language” and so on.
And there are more authors like Li Jigang who have newly opened a new official account – Fellou founder Xie Yang (“Tide Unextinguished Light”), hard-core technology analysis “Information Equality”, business talk Wei Shijie, digital life Kazik, Zhang Xiaodong (“Zhang Xiao, east, west, north, south”), get the co-creation “Kuaidao Tsing Yi” (registration is very early, the data has taken off in the past two years), business review “On the Mountain”, science and technology author “Shannong Down the Mountain”, investment creator “Penny’s World”, personal comment “Liu Zhiqu”, and Teasing Dad “Calm Father” “And so on.
That’s right, although every revision is controversial, in my opinion, the official account is still the best platform for graphic content assets in the Chinese Internet.
So the question arises – what is the logic behind this conclusion? Isn’t it said that the official account has made headlines? Didn’t you say that no one looked at the official account?
That’s right, the original myth of “XX fans overnight” is less, and there are fewer miracles and gimmicks that are known to the world once they become famous, but an official account with fewer stories is actually a more ecological and mature official account, and today I try to interpret the logic behind it –
2. The change or unchange of the official account – what is the change?
Obviously, the official account is indeed changing, why is it changing?
The only answer is to fight against product entropy.
When you don’t change the architecture of any product, the entropy will naturally increase, which is an unchangeable physical law.
So, what does its entropy increase refer to in terms of the corresponding official account?
In my opinion, the core is two points –
1. Difficult content selection.
At first, the official accounts that users follow are limited, and the content is what they love to watch, but when there are more and more accounts that users pay attention to for various reasons, the choice of content becomes a problem. (The same logic applies to folding and folding the circle of friends.) ）
2. The efficiency of the discovery mechanism is reduced.
When the official account was first born, Moments sharing became an important way for users to discover high-quality content, but there were two problems with relying on the discovery mechanism of the circle of friends –
The first is the objective decline in the desire to share caused by social pressure after having more friends;
The second is that the circle of friends is a social personality display after all, which determines that it must be some kind of “show” content, and the content of the “show” is destined to be a subset of the content that everyone is willing to consume.
In my opinion, these are the two biggest changes in WeChat in recent years – “changing the chronological order” and “launching a look at the recommendation”.
An ironclad fact is that anyone who opposes the revision of the official account has not solved the above two objective problems by not revising the version.
Many people have a classical product complex and think that chronology is the fairest way –
“An official account often posts low-quality content, and users themselves will take it off.” “Realizing that someone is taking the customs, the author himself will naturally balance the quality of the content”, “Since an account can get the attention of users, it must be because it has provided high-quality content, and the platform should give such an account the right to publish advertising content”.
Yes, this is the simple hypothesis of “market effectiveness” in economics, but don’t forget that in economic reality, the “invisible hand” still needs to be adjusted by the “visible hand” after all, and the market does not need only an “idle hand”.
Users are lazy after all – when a user follows 500 accounts, opens the list, and sees that 70% of them are mediocre content, he will most likely not do it manually to see which accounts are posting advertisements and inferior content and then unfollow.
A more likely action is to reduce the number of opens of the official account and turn around to brush short videos.
If your subscription account has only 20 articles in total, it doesn’t matter if you don’t sort them, you can scan two or three screens and finish it.
But if you subscribe to enough accounts and have a total of 200 articles to read, then believe me, it must be a disaster not to sort at all.
The reason is very simple – if you don’t sort all the official accounts that users follow, it is equivalent to defaulting to a premise – all official accounts are equally important to you, whether they are added by default by scanning the code or your own treasure must-read account.
And this is obviously not in line with reality, this is the simple logic of the necessity of sorting.
Recommended content such as “take a look” is to solve the problem of information discovery after the desire to share decreases, and the reason is also very simple –
When a person listens to music while driving, he always expects to listen to his favorite songs, and the conservative choice is to only play the songs on his list, but after a long time, he must want to listen to new songs and other songs that suit his taste, and “take a look” is actually to give users the entrance to discover “new songs and other songs that suit their taste”.
Don’t underestimate this change, in fact, sorting improves the consumption efficiency of watchlists, while “take a look” effectively increases content increment.
At the micro level, “take a look” also gives the new account a chance of being seen.
In fact, in the past, it was very difficult to start the official account cold, even if a person was very talented, it was very difficult to survive the novice period with little positive feedback.
The current political trumpet “Luke Wen” shared that he once wrote silently for a long time without anyone caring, and most people couldn’t continue to write like Lu Kewen, even if the feedback was average.
But today is different, the recommendation of “take a look” allows even a new account with 0 fans, as long as the content is material, there is a chance to get traffic, even a large amount of traffic.
A small transparent account, once it gets tens of thousands or even “100,000+” readings, is a huge incentive for the author, and this incentive can effectively help the author get out of the “novice village” to a large extent.
In fact, the official account has also launched a function such as “Growth Footprint”, and in the initial stage, after small milestones are achieved, they will receive official traffic support.
Of course, the accuracy of WeChat’s “take a look” recommendation algorithm can be further improved.
At present, one point that many authors criticize is that the efficiency of recommending traffic is significantly lower than that of natural sharing traffic.
My friend Wang Zizhong is a senior editor who has worked in Tencent and Tiger Sniff, as a “content hunter”, his experience of the changes in the official account is –
“In the previous official account system, many large accounts and widely recognized accounts by the public came from the original media system, and they quickly adapted to the new media style of play, using the skills cultivated by traditional media to produce the content that the public loves to watch in a systematic and elite way, and a perceptible trend in recent years is that some more relaxed, more down-to-earth, and more pyrotechnic authors are actively or passively joining this ecology.”
Zizhong showed me a case, this account called “Middle-aged Fluttering Girl”, every article is basically a few paragraphs of light content, obviously a non-professional amateur author.
Among these texts, thanks to the system’s recommendation, we can see 84,000 readings, 7,000+ readings and 200+ readings connected together.
Before “taking a look”, such casual and breathing content could not be seen, but now, these down-to-earth market contents have an outlet.
Looking at another example, this account called “110,000 Intersection”, the author usually updates his daily life very casually, reading books, movies, and recording a plain but flavorful life.
The latest article, “Grassroots Survey: The Current Status of Ride-hailing Drivers’ Income”, records the real status of 50 ride-hailing drivers in 10 cities where he travels.
This detailed, true, and steaming long article finally received 82,000 reads, and another interesting soul was seen.
In this sense, I clearly support the revision of the official account, and a simple logic is: I would like to see more such vivid content.
3. The change or unchange of the official account – what is the constant?
Although the official account has undergone a lot of iterations over the years, there are still some things that do not change, and this unchanged thing is very subtle.
This subtle sense of control is reflected in both content consumption and content production;
Let’s first look at the “sense of control” on the content consumption side.
The reason why many people who have requirements for reading choose the official account instead of reading various headlines is that in addition to the official account being more suitable for sharing reading in the WeChat native system, more importantly, in the official account, I can make the decision to a large extent what I read:
I subscribe, I want to be able to read; I often read, I want to be able to read it conveniently; Even if you recommend me, you must give priority to recommending things that are really relevant to me (friends like it, friends read it, friends follow …..).
Some people complained –
“The official account has become “headlined”, the official account is distributed by algorithms, and the subscription account cannot be read…….
In my opinion, this is a laziness in thinking to a certain extent, and when we really look closely, we will find that the official account still does a very fine job in providing a “sense of control” and “certainty” –
First of all, at the top of the list of official accounts, is your frequently read account, how long has anyone noticed how long this list is?
The answer is that there is no clear upper limit! The official account will give you the absolute priority exposure of enough accounts according to your reading habits.
For example, my own, I counted carefully, and there are as many as 50 frequently read accounts.
In fact, my own experience is that as long as I am slightly interested in an account, such as reading it two or three times a month, I go to the homepage and flip through it, and it will appear in the list of frequently read accounts.
This presentation even returns to the logic of the “number list” when the official account was first launched, which is actually to ensure that users can read any treasure official accounts and ensure that there are no fish that slip through the net.
Secondly, even the “take a look” recommendation is very different from the fundamentalist recommendation.
We can see that first of all, it is below the normal list, not mixed in the entire information flow (it seems that it is also testing the function of inserting “guess what you like” on a small scale, but it is still strictly different from push content), that is, the user can clearly know that he has entered the “take a look” territory.
And let’s take a closer look at the recommendation logic of “take a look”, we will find that it will use an extremely clear logo to tell you why this recommendation – “XX friends share”, “XX friends have read”, “frequently read accounts”, “accounts followed”, “friends publish”, “news”, etc., the rest is pure recommendation, which gives readers a great sense of control and security.
In addition, it’s not over yet, if you are an extremely uncertainty averse user, the official account also provides a choice, you can select “more” in the list, and you will still enter the original interface, that is, the official account is very convenient to give you the right to ignore “take a look”.
If there are “strange” users who pursue a more extreme sense of security (I used to be), the official account actually provides a hidden skill – turning off the personalized recommendation of the official account, when you turn it off, the “take a look” disappears, replaced by the “subscription selection”, and it is indeed the content of your account that you pay attention to.
In fact, I don’t recommend this, because “taking a look” is in a sense a way to break the information cocoon.
My personal intuitive feeling is that compared with the information I actively ingested, the content of “taking a look” provides a subtle window of information diversity –
“It turns out that so many people in the circle of friends like to watch this”, “Which four of my friends will share this?” “, “Well, this article was actually published by my friend”, “I didn’t expect that I still like this number”…….
In short, this kind of content that is relevant to you but not what you usually read is an important source of my information increment.
Let’s look at the “sense of control” on the content production side.
Content consumption and content production are two sides of the same coin, and through the above different measures, we see that WeChat still follows a principle while revising – “making it easier for readers to see their favorite accounts”.
From the perspective of the production side, it has become “making it easier for authors to reach loyal readers”, and if your fans really like your content very much, there are countless ways for the official account to let them see you.
Therefore, for many authors, instead of complaining about the decline in open rates, it is better to optimize an indicator – the number of frequently read users, that is, this actually represents how many real fans you have.
As for how to optimize, the core is to return to common sense – refuse to “lie down and win” thinking, don’t be so blunt in advertising, use less AI brainless generation, write more content that can generate reading increments, don’t eat old books, and make new contributions.
In fact, it is a sentence – “more sincerity, less routine”.
Authors also need to think about a simple problem – when we still produce content according to the original routine, this is an objective increase in entropy due to the addition of new authors, the adaptation of users to content expectations, and the erosion of attention by short videos.
Here I will give a case of a fierce account – a perfect laser gun, the author is a student of Hengshui Middle School, but it is written about a nightclub subculture theme with a strong sense of contrast.
You can feel his rough and fierce talent from his top 100,000+ article “Nightclub in Hengshui Middle School”.
The author only started updating in 2019, when he had just graduated from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.
Despite many revisions over the years, we see that his reading volume is still 100,000+, usually tens of thousands, and a tip he shared two years ago to improve the quality of content is——
“My content used to be one out of ten, but now it is about one out of thirty, there will be 20 topics that I think are LOW, 9 topics that I think are not interesting enough, and only one topic can take into account both fun and business.”
What is a profession? This is called professionalism!
Therefore, the Red Queen hypothesis – “we can only keep running to stay where we are” is worth thinking about for every author.
It’s true that the revision is not good for an author like me who doesn’t update frequently, but I accept and embrace it very rationally and calmly – it makes me think more seriously about how I should produce content that is more sticky to readers. epilogue
The “wolf is coming” of the official account has actually been shouted many times, from the initial subscription number folding, to the later “number list” to change to “information flow”, and then to today’s “modifying the chronological order” and introducing the recommendation system to “take a look”.
Many people only see the changes in the revision, but do not see the core of the official account that has not changed – making content an asset.
Therefore, for authors who pursue content, revision is never a problem, and the key variable of the content function is always the content of life.
