Although the enthusiasm of Internet manufacturers in giving red envelopes around the Spring Festival this year is no longer as high as in previous years, there are still large manufacturers who choose to keep this project, such as Alipay's "Jiwufu" and Douyin's "Laughter Chinese Year" series of activities. And the reason why these manufacturers are still willing to come up with real gold ** is naturally to ask for something, as for what they are looking for, you can get a glimpse of one or two from the specific activity gameplay.
Taking Douyin as an example, during the "Chinese Year of Laughter" event, users can participate in limited gameplay such as collecting zodiac signs, sending blessings, and playing group chats to obtain multiple red envelope benefits. Specifically, Douyin has launched the short red envelope function, which supports bloggers to mount red envelopes in short, so that users can receive red envelopes while swiping. At the same time, exclusive tasks have also been launched in the friend conversation box and group chat, and users can receive red envelope rewards by participating in activities such as AI group photos and exchanging red envelopes. In addition, Douyin will also distribute red envelopes from time to time in group chats, as well as the "Zodiac Blessing" that imitates Alipay's collection of five blessings.
It is not difficult to find that in this activity of Douyin, group chats and friends appear frequently as keywords. It can be seen that one of Douyin's goals this time is still to strengthen its social attributes, that is, to try to increase the probability and frequency of users opening friends and group chats. And in the case that most of the peers don't have too many actions, Douyin still chooses to give away real gold**, which can obviously attract more attention.
In fact, ByteDance's intention for the social track has never been extinguished. Even if we put aside a number of independent such as Flying Chat, Duoshan, Party Island, and Douyin Chat, we have only focused on the Douyin APP, from "friend chat room" to "face-to-face, add friends" and other acquaintance social functions, and then to stranger social functions represented by "Shake" and "Circle in the same city", many attempts have been made in different directions.
However, despite a lot of exploration, due to the fact that users' usage habits have long been solidified, ByteDance has never been able to make much movement in this track. Now, Flying Chat, Party Island, etc. have been annihilated, and there have been no waves after the multi-flash makeover. As for Douyin, although there are many hot stalks such as "WeChat can not chat, but the spark of Douyin cannot be broken" on the Internet, it is obvious that regardless of the number of users, or the breadth and depth of use scenarios, Douyin is obviously difficult to shake WeChat's position in the social track.
But ByteDance has not given up on the social track because of this, as evidenced by its actions during the Spring Festival. In fact, it is not difficult to understand why ByteDance is so obsessed with social networking, after all, for Internet companies, social networking is the best glue and catalyst for their complex business ecology, and it is also one of the best ways to retain users and revitalize traffic, just like QQ and WeChat are to Tencent. In addition to ByteDance, content communities such as Xiaohongshu, and even platforms such as NetEase Cloud** have also been actively working on the social track.
Although affected by the development of the industry, ByteDance's past "app factory" model is no longer viable, but Douyin, which holds the trump card of content and traffic, still has the confidence to continue to try. As early as the 2021 Geek Park Annual Innovation Conference, Zhang Nan, then CEO of Beijing ByteDance, focused on explaining the social logic of Douyin. At that time, in her opinion, Douyin's social networking is a natural logic, as the scale of users grows, people will become more and more accustomed to seeing their acquaintances on Douyin, and more and more users will shift from consuming content to self-expression, which is the foundation of social networking.
What's more, Douyin itself has a huge content pool, and content naturally brings sharing. From content to sharing, and then to open chats and group chats between users, this is obviously a smooth logic. In addition, the biggest advantage of Douyin is traffic and algorithms, so it is easier to form a circle-like social form with interest.
From the perspective of business prospects, if ByteDance can really build a social network with the help of Douyin, it will have the imagination space to rely on social to feed back content, e-commerce and other businesses. For example, in the past and even today, many live streaming merchants have taken the initiative or have to divert private domain traffic to WeChat, and if Douyin can launch its own alternative products or services, merchants can complete the acquisition and maintenance of private domain traffic on the site, thus forming a closed loop. And for content creators, the enhancement of the platform's social attributes is also expected to bring more traffic beyond public domain recommendations.
Although it is difficult for Douyin to shake the market position of WeChat and QQ in the social track at this stage, it is also undeniable that QQ no longer seems to be able to retain young people, and the number of WeChat users has gradually reached the ceiling, and in the case of gradual slowdown in innovation, in recent years, there are even more and more voices accusing it of becoming more and more "bloated".
In addition, in the past year, WeChat not only began to charge technical service fees for first-class merchants, and fully charged "tolls" for first-class business cooperation, but also promoted the enterprise WeChat to charge per capitation, and **ice-breaking, fully open support for ** advertising, and put forward the concept of WeChat pan-internal circulation advertising, almost "making money" written on the face.
Under the increasing pressure of commercialization, WeChat's relationship with users is bound to face new challenges. Nowadays, the short ** is still popular, and AI also has the momentum to reconstruct everything, in this changing market, ByteDance may not have the opportunity to overtake in corners.
And looking further, stepping into social networking may be only part of ByteDance's plan. In other words, the desire for social business also reflects ByteDance's determination to use this as a link to further expand the boundaries of its business.
In the past few years, from content communities to search tools, from e-commerce platforms to local life services, ByteDance seems to be making great strides in the direction of "owning everything". Not to mention, not long ago, it also launched a one-stop AI bot (AI chatbot) development platform Coze in the domestic market, which not only supports users to generate AI bots without **, but also launches a bots store similar to GPT Store, hoping to close the gap with other manufacturers in this AI wave.
In fact, this is also the consensus of similar content products and even many tool products. After all, it is already a consensus that traffic growth has peaked and traffic is becoming more and more expensive, and if you want to further tap the value of existing users, manufacturers naturally need to come up with more attraction. You don't see, even Alipay, which is firmly on the leading position in the field of mobile payment, has been intensively laying out businesses such as short** and live e-commerce. With the continuous overlap of business areas of many large manufacturers, it is almost foreseeable that the market competition in the Internet industry will become more fierce in the future.
This article is from the Internet