This article is from WeChat official account:Letter List (ID: wujicaijing)< span class = "text-remarks">, author: Long Teng, Jiang Xiaoting, editor: Ma Yue, title figure from: vision China
The vibrato has added a new fire to the social scene.
According to Tech Planet reports, Douyin has recently tested a “watch video together” function, which is convenient for users to invite friends in Douyin to watch videos together, and supports real-time voice conversations.
According to incomplete statistics on the alphabet list, after Douyin launched the friend tab, many social attributes such as friend browsing history, KTV, friend search, and daily shooting have been added to the page.
During the Spring Festival, the 2 billion lantern gathering activity was seen as a sword pointing to WeChat by the outside world. However, it seems that Douyin is going to enter the WeChat hinterland for social networking, but the direct reason is to spread the content- through social networking to ensure that the content reaches as many users as possible.
“Last year, on Douyin alone, we received 200,000 feedback from users. Sending Douyin links via WeChat was blocked.” At the 7th birthday celebration of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming once explained the reason why ByteDance is social.
In addition to the poor content sharing caused by cracking the micro-envelope lock, Douyin’s social networking itself means an exploration of a grand proposition-can content generate social networking?
Social can generate content, which has been proved by WeChat and official accounts, but content generates social, and there is no successful precedent before Douyin. The failed products of Weibo and ByteDance in the past few years have proven that it is difficult to generate social interactions based on content or entertainment alone.
If you add enough usage time, will the result be different?
According to data from QuestMobile, the duration of short video usage during the Spring Festival increased by 6.6% year-on-year, ranking second with 25.8%. On the other hand, mobile social networking, which ranked number one with 28.8%, declined year-on-year. Tik Tok, the number one on the track, has an average daily usage time of 101.5 minutes per person.
When users use Douyin for a long time, content-based social needs will naturally arise. If Douyin can rely on its own content and algorithm advantages to meet the social needs of users, will it be able to precipitate the social relationship chain of users on the platform?
The current Douyin creates a social scene for users on one side and strengthens interaction within the platform; on the other side, it cultivates users’ product awareness of using Douyin dialogue.
But there is a long way to go. Whether the content can be social is limited to the current vibrato action. The answer is still blowing in the wind.
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“China’s Internet competition entered the stock competition in 2015, and the growth data is the return of lost users. The number of new users and the number of new users added in these years are all due to the loss of Tencent users.” Long-term focus on content Industry investor Wu Hao told the Alphabet List that whether Douyin does social networking or not, it is actually competing for user time from Tencent.
Faced with the continuous rise of Douyin, WeChat will naturally not watch Douyin shake its status as a national app. Faced with the strong demand of users for short video content, WeChat launched the video account function in early 2020, officially entering the short video battlefield.
Since the birth of the video account with social data of acquaintances, there has been a nearly vertical growth line, with a daily activity of nearly 300 million in just one year, becoming the third pole of the short video track.
Tencent’s video account is attacking the basic content of Douyin. 36氪 quoted information from Douyin insiders, starting from the video account’s online DAU breaking 100 million in 2020, “The Douyin decision-making makers unanimously demanded that other needs give way, and defending the video account has become a consistent goal within Douyin.”
Later, Douyin quickly launched friends tab to increase the exposure of social acquaintances.
WeChat’s blocking of Douyin content and the appearance of video numbers strengthened the internal circulation of short video content in the WeChat ecosystem. If due to content sharing and interaction, some users finally abandon Douyin and choose to browse short video content on WeChat, it will undoubtedly be a heavy blow to Bytedance.
Through the current content advantages, extend the social business, try to keep users in the software, and avoid losing users due to the inability to interact and communicate. This is the direct reason why Douyin is social.
“Growth is hard to say. The only need is to strengthen user retention.” In Wu Hao’s view, “Putting social services into the Douyin system is better than putting it on products like Doxan and Feichao for useless trial and error. Effective.”
From another perspective, Bytedance is the leading player in the Internet content field. Its business model is mainly monetized by advertising. In the absence of new business growth methods, it is more necessary to maintain its basic content disk. , In order to protect the core competitiveness.
From this perspective, the war between Byte and Tencent will continue for a long time. Attacking each other’s basic disk is actually a way to alleviate each other’s own crisis and prevent the loss of users. , Is essentially defensive.
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Just like Ali, Douyin does social networking. This road is destined to be difficult.
Mixed raw and cooked, unclear logic-this is the main problem currently facing Douyin Social.
“Half-familiar usage scenarios affect the user experience.” Investor David told the letter list that Douyin is a content platform dominated by strangers, and social interaction is essentially the establishment of interpersonal relationships and the transmission of information. And algorithm driving is naturally two directions. It is difficult to develop a social network of acquaintances. “
For example, Douyin’s friend page is more like a video “circle of friends”. In order to reduce the expressive pressure of users in video creation, the daily functions launched by Douyin are set to be visible for only one day. Through the positioning of the product name, it can be seen that this function is mainly a record of the user’s life.
But the letter list test found that the daily content posted by users on the friends page can still be seen by strangers(non-friends, not following or being followed) /span>, for social acquaintances, the published content is seen by strangers, which undoubtedly increases the enthusiasm of users for content creation.
However, the fact that daily content is visible to everyone is the same as the logic of Douyin content distribution. On the one hand, users are encouraged to produce daily content among acquaintances, and on the other hand, they have the public attributes of the content platform. This confuses the boundary between social interaction between strangers and acquaintances, and may cause confusion to users. This is like combining Momo with The circle of friends is combined into one, and the result may not be happy for users.
“It’s unlikely that Douyin will make a circle of friends.” Wu Hao even poured cold water on him. In his opinion, Douyin’s social development has inherent shortcomings. The platform is dominated by strangers. “Users don’t need to turn the relationship on Douyin into a deep relationship.”
If Douyin is determined to socialize with strangers based on hobbies, it must first establish a community culture and form a benign interaction between content and people. However, according to Wu Hao’s observation, Douyin has not achieved a sense of community so far. “At most, it is the stage where it is on the path to the community, and it has not yet reached it, let alone the development of social business.”
However, judging from the introduction of H5 launched by Douyin Search, Douyin officials seem to have such a need to connect people and people based on content search.
The searched product page has also changed the immersive information flow design of Douyin’s single-column design, and added peripheral content such as related users, topics, and content comments.
” Douyin and the outside world have overestimated the importance of’private messages’ among Douyin users. The basic platform of Douyin platform is social interaction with strangers. Now every time you watch a video, there are some “maybe” “People you know” or people who are suspected of “Contacts” have the effect of discouraging users.” Wu Hao said.
Multi-Flash mainly promotes video socialization. First, there is no background of terminal migration when WeChat was born. Second, compared with WeChat, video socialization does not have a subversive communication efficiency upgrade, and it suffers from the fact that video conversations are more limited than voice social social scenes. , Quickly fell silent.
In Internet traffic, social networking is at the top of the industry, content is at the midstream, and downstream is the last link such as payment tools. The more upstream, the stronger its irreplaceability.
Therefore, Douyin’s attack on the social field through content is actually fighting an ascent war. Compared with WeChat’s entry into the content industry through the social moat, it is much more difficult.
WeChat Pay relied on this advantage to successfully “attack Pearl Harbor” against Alipay; in turn, Alipay encountered Waterloo when it wanted to settle the user’s social relationship by collecting five blessings.
Even if Alipay wants to attack Meituan’s local life business by virtue of its user scale advantage, because of the strong substitutability of downstream locations and its own lack of content advantages, the results are naturally mediocre.
The current situation of Douyin is better than Alipay, but it is limited.
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Judging from the current activities of Douyin, Douyin focuses on serving Douyin’s internal social activities. It is not so much a circle of friends, as it is more like Taobao and Weibo’s private messaging function.
Douyin wants to make a breakthrough in social business, but there are still many difficulties to be solved.
The first thing is to continue to maintain the rapid growth of user scale and usage time. Only a large enough number of users can reduce the cost of using individual transfer communication tools.
When most of a person’s social relationships are already Douyin users, from the softwareAdding friends internally and completing the transfer of the address book is much lower than the cost of adding friends one by one under a new software.
The use time of Douyin determines the intensity of demand for users to communicate with Douyin.
If Douyin is not sticky, users can download the content or copy the password and transfer it to WeChat for communication. And if both parties in the chat are in Douyin, using Douyin to communicate will reduce the cost of content transfer and switching software.
At present, Douyin has launched the function of displaying friends online. This function is also conducive to the timeliness of users’ communication on Douyin, and the demand for communication with Douyin is increased from the product. (lower cost of use, understand The online status of the other party to facilitate timely feedback).
Currently, a large number of users have formed the product awareness of short video creation and life display on Douyin. If Douyin is based on 600 million daily active users, through the display of personal content on the friend page, and then the privacy of users is improved, it may be more helpful for users to realize content production, dissemination, and interaction on Douyin. closed loop.
The friend tab solves the content needs of users’ social relationships that have been precipitated in Douyin, and cultivates users’ habits of using interactive social interaction on Douyin.
But if it is difficult for users in the product to establish contact efficiently and quickly, no social behavior can occur.
Importing the phone address book is primitive and inefficient, and it is difficult to precipitate the social relationship chain that Douyin dreams of.
Search may be one direction, but search is more about connecting with strangers, and there is a long distance from the social relationship of acquaintances such as “add a Douyin”.
For video social networking, Douyin has also added many props and functions to increase the fun in social networking. This also continues Dosun’s intention to upgrade its social form.
However, if you want to cultivate the minds of users who chat on Douyin through video social interaction, you still need concrete usage scenarios to land.
The “Watching Video Together” that has not been officially launched may be a requirement to meet the needs of a specific scenario, but what kind of content can meet the needs of users for timely communication requires Douyin to explore in operation.
The Clubhouse, which was on fire before, gave the public another possibility of socializing. If Zhang Yiming and his circle of friends, Zhang Nan and her byte classmates can often appear in the video version of Clubhouse, it may be able to attract a wave of users to participate in the Douyin social.
There may be social seeds hidden in the live broadcast. Zhang Xiaolong once predicted in the WeChat public class that the form of live broadcast may surpass short video content and be accepted by more people.
In addition, Douyin also needs to improve its own ecosystem.
The reason why users cannot do without WeChat is that WeChat has evolved from a pure social software to an all-encompassing ecosystem. Users can not only communicate and socialize on WeChat, but also read, shop, and pay for most of the virtual world. Demand, WeChat has achieved a one-stop solution.
At the same time, while other Internet products gain traffic within WeChat, they also reduce the cost of using WeChat users, forming a symbiotic ecological relationship.
“It is difficult for users to leave WeChat and come to chat with others on Douyin.” David told the letter list that the social cost on Douyin is much higher than that on WeChat.
The Douyin social network, which originated from the basic content disk, does have a certain opportunity in theory. But from the current point of view, the future development is still unclear.
With the growth of Byte in e-commerce and other businesses, social anxiety that plagued Douyin may also ease. Whether it is Douyin or Byte, how big the subsequent attempts to socialize will be full of variables.
“At the beginning of 2020, the Douyin Strategy Department took the initiative to propose cooperative social projects, including content such as’a stranger or an acquaintance in the social direction’,’voice or video’, etc. But the final project has not taken shape.” A family invested ten A number of top investment agencies for social products told the letter list.
According to his observation, “With the gradual implementation of Douyin’s cooperation in fast consumer and live broadcast e-commerce, the priority of social interaction is significantly lower.”
(Wu Hao is a pseudonym)
Reference material:
1. “Late Exclusive| Douyin brings more than 500 billion yuan of goods a year, and will start cross-border e-commerce business”, February 3, 2021;
2. “Tikyin Wars Spring Festival Gala, intended to be in the circle of friends”, all now, February 1, 2021;
3. “The Byte Beating Social Heart Is Not Dead”, Info Q, April 27, 2020;
4. “About the social, nature and future of Douyin, Zhang Nan said these three points”, 36Kr, January 29, 2021;< /p>
5. “New Short Video Campaign: Douyin, Kuaishou, and WeChat Video Accounts Perform “Three Kingdoms”, 36Kr, February 8, 2021.
This article is from WeChat official account:Letter List (ID: wujicaijing)< span class = "text-remarks">, author: Long Teng, Jiang Xiaoting, editor: Ma Yue