The title map is from Visual China, this article is from WeChat public account: Xuanong Marketing Apocalypse (ID: xunkong2005) < / span> , author: find empty

Recently, there are media reports that the public account has been quietly revised, and some new features have been added, including personalized recommendation of subscription number, public account article comments can be built, album function, etc. Among these functions, I think the biggest impact on the future is the personalized recommendation of subscription number.

Personalized recommendations, currently reflected in the list of subscription numbers for some users no longer displayed in chronological order, but rather disrupted. According to the public account InfoQ, WeChat is performing a grayscale test on this function, as shown in the figure below, but the CCTV news content released after the time is instead ranked in front of the new oxygen.

(picture: Mantou Business School)

WeChat calls this new feature “optimization of reading efficiency.” The WeChat team introduced the new feature in this way:

After adding this new feature, the subscription number disappearsThe order of the information will dynamically change based on comprehensive factors such as the quality of the subscription number, the user ’s preference for the subscription number, and the content quality of the mass-posted articles.

Users can read the content of interest more efficiently.

Although the current “personal recommendation” method is only reflected in the change of time sequence, this may only be the beginning. From the description of the WeChat team, “According to the quality of the subscription number, the user’s preference for the subscription number, and the quality of the content of the mass-post articles, dynamic changes.” These may directly overturn the inherent fan subscription logic of the subscription number.

This small change may be the beginning of subscription number content distribution logic from “fan logic” to “algorithm logic”.


Subscriber ’s fan logic

Since the birth day of the WeChat public account, the content distribution logic is the fan logic. A user who follows or subscribes to a public account can see the information of the public account, and the public account has one more fan.

This kind of fan logic is a method commonly used in the web2.0 era. Early Facebook and Weibo were all such logic. A creator attracts fans’ attention by creating content. The more fans follow, the more chances of exposure. This logic has a cumulative effect. The fans of creators range from 0 to 100 to 1000 to 10,000, and their exposure gradually increases, and the brand effect also continues to increase.

However, the fan logic of content distribution continues to expose defects in the mobile Internet era.

For readers, the mobile Internet era is an era of greater information explosion than the PC Internet era. There are more and more creators and more and more content. It is more and more difficult for readers to choose the content they are interested in. After all, the content you subscribe to is limited, and it is limited to these content. It is inevitable that you will miss more content that you are interested in.

For creators, fan logic is easy to form a Matthew effect. Once a creator becomes a big V, its content will inevitably get higher traffic, even if the content of bad content is higher than ordinary creators. A large number of accounts with good content but lack of fans, including many new accounts, often have difficulty getting traffic. This mechanism is not friendly to new creators and creators with high-quality content and lack of traffic.

Algorithm logic becomes the mainstream way of information distribution

The advent of the mobile Internet has accelerated the decline of fan logic and the rise of algorithmic logic. The content distribution method under the algorithm logic is mainly algorithm recommendation. It will recommend content that the user may like based on the user’s interests, tags, attributes, etc. The algorithm continues to learn and improve to achieve the goal of recommending more and more accurate content.

Today, algorithm logic is basically used by major content platforms other than subscription numbers, including Toutiao, Weibo, Zhihu, Baidu, Facebook, etc.

Compared with fan logic, algorithmic logic has several advantages.

For readers, the algorithm logic can judge reading interest through his reading history, thereby recommending more content that may be of interest to readers. At the same time, under this logic, the efficiency of the reader in obtaining content has been improved to a certain extent. He does not need to find the content himself, but waits for the content to find himself. This is often called “information to find people.”

For creators, the algorithm logic will push good content to readers other than fans to increase exposure. Especially for some newly-entered creators, even if there is no fan, if the content is captured by the algorithm, it may get a large amount of exposure. For example, on a platform like Toutiao, an author with only a few hundred fans may get 100,000+ good content. On WeChat, this situation is more difficult to happen.

Of course, content distribution under algorithmic logic is not impeccable.

For readers, the content under the algorithm logic only recommends the content that the reader is interested in, which may make it difficult for readers to expand their horizons, forming an “information cocoon room” effect.

For creators, the most important thing is that the instability of the algorithm leads to the instability of the traffic. For example, an author with tens of thousands of fans on the headline may have only two or three digits of reading for a piece of content. . The increase in fans does not necessarily represent an increase in the exposure of its content.

WeChat ’s algorithmic logic is getting closer and closer

As information becomes more fragmented today, the algorithm logic of content distribution is more and more superior to fan logic. The typical representative is Douyin. It actually contains these two distribution logics. The focus is fan logic, and the recommendation is algorithm Logical, but only a few users will get content through attention, most of them get content through recommendations. If one day, the Douyin “Follow” button disappears, you must not be surprised.

If you still know about it today, you will find that there are also “Follow” and “Recommend” buttons, but of course the platform recommends the “Recommended” button.

In the face of the siege of algorithmic logic, WeChat is not indifferent. Regardless of the “read”, “video number” or related reading in the content of the WeChat “discovery” portal, WeChat attempts to carefully explore the content distribution mode under the algorithm logic. This revision I also see as WeChat’s trial of algorithm logic.

In recent years, faced with the brutal growth of the byte beating system under the algorithm logic, the content ecology of WeChat has been somewhat conservative. In the era of mobile Internet, the subscription number can be said to be the only platform that sticks to the logic of fans in the large content platform. It represents the “last stubbornness” of the subscription system.

Now it seems that this “last stubbornness” also needs to release your hands and put them on.


This article is from WeChat public account: Marketing Apocalypse (ID: xunkong2005) , author: find empty