The platform has strengthened supervision and restrictions. A coin has two sides. The positive side is to gradually bring HE Tuber the barbaric chaos under control, but the negative side of commercialization is also obvious:

This year WeChat official accounts have changed their policies. After August, all main advertisements of official accounts must be mutually selected from the platform.

The general environment has greatly reduced the number of advertisements placed by their sponsors, and the advertising revenue of countless public account owners has been cut by more than 2/3. If you dare to go against the trend and pick up Hiroko privately without using the mutual selection platform, then your tweets will not be pushed out or will be deleted even after they are pushed.

Even if you join the mutual selection platform, there are strict restrictions on many categories or content in the mutual selection platform. Categories, titles, covers, many categories will not have the sponsor dad to vote for it, but now he is willing to vote for public account pictures and texts. Guangzi generally covers money-making, educational and training categories, adult categories and some white-brand product categories. However, many categories are not available on the platform, and the content review is also very strict.

It has a particularly big impact on large players with more than 200,000 fans. Although they are supporting small and medium-sized players, if the big brothers no longer play, and only a bunch of juniors are left, the influence of the platform will definitely be weakened.

If you are an organization that produces hot topics + knowledge-based paid products, you will be more impressed. In the past, you relied on eye-catching copywriting titles + emotional content that stimulates pain points and joy points to guide the conversion of goods and services. Now you still want to It is also becoming increasingly difficult to get a piece of the pie this way.

The mechanism of sensitive words is triggered. If the title fails to pass the review, if the content is inconsistent with the product, you will be deleted for violation of regulations. More importantly, if it involves the use of words, pictures, videos, etc. that are exaggerated, tempting, and contrary to objective facts, maliciously inciting, confusing, Misleading users' judgment results will result in a ban on your account.

The title is greener, the content is healthier, and the product effect statement is more objective. It can be seen that the conversion rate drops off a cliff.

The two-sided nature of the platform's strengthening of supervision has left various types of institutions that used to live in public accounts to become more single-minded in their commercial strategies. Old profit-seekers have withdrawn, and content reshuffling and new business models have begun.

Therefore, after summarizing the external and internal troubles, the overall traffic trend of public accounts is downward. The core is that user traffic and attention are not on public accounts, and the information flow recommendation model is currently unable to compete with Toutiao, and content must be viewed on other platforms. .

2. Platform Line: Models and Playing Methods of Three Major Types of Public Accounts

Judging from this year, the WeChat platform has done a lot of capabilities and actions to support public accounts. I think public accounts are an important component of the WeChat ecosystem, and the base of public account fans is still there. WeChat will continue to iterate. Let’s take a look at the public accounts. Some iterations of this product this year:

There are three aspects of update strategies that deserve our attention and insight:

It is obvious that the graphic and text form of Little Green Book is obviously a "stealing" of Little Green Book. The layout is highly similar, and both focus on displaying pictures. The title is below the picture, and the user's avatar and name are in the lower left corner of the picture and text card. Like The number is in the lower right corner.

This also clearly shows WeChat’s intention to expand the form of short content with pictures and text. Looking at Xiaohongshu and Douyin, a data report from 2022 shows that the average interaction rate of Douyin’s pictures and texts is 1.32 times that of videos. The collection rate of pictures and texts is 1.47 times that of videos. Picture messages that focus on picture planting obviously have the potential of short and concise content. WeChat complements the picture planting ability, lowers the content production threshold for public account creators, and further improves the content. ecology.

One is to upgrade the publishing function. Subscription accounts are sent in groups once a day, which is upgraded to publishing, that is, sent in groups once, but can be published multiple times. Although the published content is not pushed to subscribers, it is displayed on the homepage and has the opportunity to enter public domain traffic. Recommended to suitable users.

Another one is the increase in public domain traffic entrances for public account articles. Take a look at the end of the article and take a look in the subscription account information. This opens a new public domain recommendation mechanism for past closed-loop public account articles and is tagged with more similar reading interests. of users will make recommendations.

I think that with the subsequent opening of public accounts and the improvement of public domain information recommendations, there will be more and more actions to break product limitations. But the problem is that on WeChat, which is mainly social chat, it is left to public accounts to open up traffic and ensure user experience. The restraint will be greater and greater.

To sum up, of course, some of the above changes are only small interactions, but judging from the important capability updates and blessings of the public account this year, two major operational signals will be released:

(1) The public account will continue to open the "content" traffic port, and the public domain recommendation mechanism will support the ability of public account content to make traffic recommendations;

(2) As a connector in the WeChat ecosystem, the important positioning of public accounts will not change. Mini programs, video accounts, ask questions, take a look, search, bring goods, etc., are still the universal connectors for operations.

We see the challenges that public accounts are currently facing, and we are also concerned about the capabilities and attitude of the WeChat platform towards public accounts this year. So to go back and answer our original question, do public accounts still have a chance? Can it be done?

My answer is yes, but it must comply with the rules of the platform and focus on high-quality content that users vote for by raising their hands to drive the growth of fans, get more fans to read and interact with the next push, and enter the public domain recommendation traffic pool:

Content increases fans

It is usually applied to subscription accounts (of course service accounts are also suitable, but subscription accounts are more effective). The overall logic is that the number of fans increased = the number of article reads (total number of tweet exposures x click conversion rate) Expanding the audience is the key, while the public account’s attention rate is left to the content of the article and guidance.

Therefore, recommendation, search, sharing, and association diversion are the four major methods that determine how many content fans you can acquire when your content becomes more popular. The characteristic of content fans is that they are interested in your content. They are highly accurate and relatively speaking mainly come from Content production costs are relatively low.

But the disadvantage is that if no hot articles are produced, the rate of increase in fans will be slow, and the main content will increase the number of fans in the long tail.

Promote fans

It is usually suitable for service accounts (the same applies to subscription accounts, but it is mainly recommended that service accounts be promoted to increase followers). The overall logic can currently be used to increase followers through fission and placement, but now the quality of fission users is also poor, and the placement fee Continue to rise, so when using these two methods to increase followers, you need to pay attention to the production-to- production ratio based on the subsequent realization of sales after fans add public accounts . If the production-to-production ratio is less than 1, then you need to adjust and optimize, or you cannot choose this model to increase fans.