On May 21st, the National Day for Helping the Disabled, Soul App held a unique online public welfare event, inviting visually impaired users to serve as "apprentice worry-relief teachers", telling more "imperfect" stories in more corners of the world, and showing life more Possibly, convey warmth and love.
The "Apprentice Anxiety Teachers" participating in this party are all users on the Soul platform who are full of positive energy and have experience as "wild Anxiety Teachers". For example, the 25-year-old @金色的光, although he was trapped in a "self-enclosed" life and unable to reconcile with reality due to congenital visual impairment, through the Internet and social platforms, he bravely " Going out” and found a new way to embrace life.
These young people who are not trapped by "shortcomings" show the full personality and interesting and full soul of the Z generation group. And these stories that happened in all corners of the world also let us see that the Z generation is on the rise, they put forward new requirements for social networking, and also bring more possibilities to the social industry.
1. Let young lonely souls meet
Social media has become an integral part of our daily lives.
According to KAWO's "2023 China Social Media Platform Guide", as of December 2022, the number of netizens in my country has exceeded 1.067 billion, and the Internet penetration rate has reached 75.6%, of which the number of social media users accounts for 95.13% of all netizens. The number of users is approaching the ceiling, and the social media industry is gradually slowing down.
Source: KAWO
However, "social networking for all" does not mean that the social industry has lost room for evolution.
Despite the emergence of more and more social platforms, there are still some user groups who don't like to post on Moments, are not keen on maintaining social relationships, and are not interested in "social appearance". They may feel anxious about familiar social environments, or do not want to be defined by superficial conditions and labels, or they may desire to pursue a more authentic aesthetic identity.
And the group with these unique social value propositions is the Generation Z user group that has gradually grown into the main force of Internet consumption.
As a new type of open social platform, the popularity of Soul is inseparable from the personalized and diversified social needs of this group.
On the one hand, Soul has established a purer social ecology, creating a "stress-free social" environment for young people, attracting those young people who hope to find emotional support and sense of identity on the Internet, and do not want to feel lonely and helpless.
Sinolink Securities pointed out in a report that this generation of young people has no family of their own, and the relationship between classmates or colleagues is relatively weak, let alone the relationship between neighbors and neighbors. They are atomized individuals, isolated and helpless souls.
Growing up in an era of rich material consumption, users of Generation Z want to share their true selves in order to find inner satisfaction. But in the various concerns of the real social circle, these wishes are often difficult to realize.
Soul hopes that users can use pinching tools to create their own unique images, instead of uploading real photos, so that they will not be bound by reality in social networking, and the purpose is to focus on sharing and making friends.
At the same time, Soul's square creation is not a PGC model, but allows more individuals to participate in value creation with Soul as a connection, with strong social attributes. Users can express their opinions, share life and exchange interests in squares, personal homepages or interest parties, and then recommend users and posts to people who may understand TA through algorithms, forming instant and high-frequency interactions.
Under the trend of e-commerce of many social platforms, Soul's social ecology is more pure and high-quality, and users can have a higher degree of social immersion.
On the other hand, Soul has achieved social decentralization, allowing more young people to use their interests to cross mountains and seas and connect the vast world.
Eileen Chang said that seeing the same kind is also being seen, this is social interaction.
Based on powerful algorithms, Soul helps users match people who resonate with their souls through the Lingxi system (an intelligent recommendation system based on the full-scene portraits of platform users), breaking the principle of traditional social 1-to-1 "matching" and breaking A single screening mechanism based on geographic location allows users to meet more like-minded friends from different regions. Various gamified and scene-based social methods, such as "cute face matching", "bomb meow", group chat parties, and "instant" squares based on interests, allow every type of user to meet the real " Similar", and continue to interact and establish deep links.
And a purer social environment and a high-quality content ecology centered on interests have also become the key factors for Soul to break out of the "social red sea". In 2022, the daily active users of Soul App will spend 46.4 minutes per capita, and the proportion of Gen Z users on the platform will increase from about 75% in 2021 to over 78%.
At the same time, focusing on the Generation Z user group who is most sensitive to new trends and new technologies, Soul also maintains a high degree of emphasis on innovation, and constantly iterates the platform gameplay to make high-quality and sustainable development possible.
2. AI "generates" new social gameplay
"Soul users are mainly 'Generation Z'. With the growth of 'Generation Z', social products are slowly changing."
At the theme seminar of the "AI×Science and Technology 100" event, Zhang Gaozheng, vice president of Soul App technology, said that on the basis of self-research, Soul is committed to bringing users more immersive, smarter, and deeper social interactions through cutting-edge technology exploration. experience.
In fact, Soul's business model determines that it attaches great importance to cutting-edge technologies represented by artificial intelligence.
Firstly, Soul is a typical non-standard two-way matching product, which has higher requirements for intelligence.
Also playing with algorithms, content-based social e-commerce platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu only need to use one-way matching and satisfaction as indicators, that is, only user satisfaction needs to be considered. At the same time, their modeling complexity is relatively low. Taking Xiaohongshu as an example, its content and consumption scenarios only need algorithms to push users to "plant grass", "buy" and "share".
As an open social platform, Soul needs to aim for two-way matching satisfaction. Each user's different interests, occupations, personalities, and even different interests for different people lead to extremely complex modeling. The degree of matching between people also affects key indicators such as user information click-through rate, information viewing time, use time, daily visits, and dialogue frequency.
Second, as a UGC platform, Soul’s core barriers are content, relationships, and gameplay. Continuously creating high-quality experience and novelty for users is the key to becoming a big winner on the social track.
In addition to recommending content and people that users may be interested in through algorithms, Soul's various interactive functions such as voice interaction, video interaction, and game interaction are inseparable from technologies such as natural language processing, computer vision, and deep learning. At the same time, Soul's self-developed image AI algorithm is the guarantee of the originality and quality of user content.
Soul is the first social platform to use AI technology to solve the needs of connecting people. Since its launch in 2016, the biggest difference between it and traditional social platforms is that it has realized the "traffic inclusiveness" mechanism with AI empowerment. In terms of intelligent dialogue, image generation, voice technology, etc., Soul has always been leading the social track.
The intelligent recommendation system "Consonance System" based on the full-scene portraits of users on the site, the intelligent dialogue robot "AI Goudan" that can conduct multiple rounds of personalized communication with users, and AI painting... These new functions and gameplays that expand the new boundaries of social interaction, This is the reason why users maintain a high degree of enthusiasm for Soul.
The ultimate pull between Xiaobian and Goudan
It is precisely because of this that in the new wave of technology, it is one of Soul's most important propositions at this stage to promote the deep integration of AIGC and the social field, thereby innovating social gameplay.
From intelligent dialogue to assisted creation, it is not difficult to foresee that with the integration of user-based UGC and system-based AIGC, Soul will further create a scale effect of ecological construction, and will gain more driving force for upward growth.
It is worth mentioning that while AIGC is enriching the content ecology, it is expected to help Soul break the traditional path dependence of the open social platform - focusing on user growth, complex sources of social content, and uneven information quality.
Optimizing the content ecology is a must-answer question for social platforms. On the one hand, content regulation is becoming increasingly strict, and all social platforms are facing the challenge of ecological security governance; on the other hand, low-quality content seriously affects user experience, and a clean and pure content ecology is an important moat for Soul.
As the scale of the product and the number of users continue to expand, the difficulty of governing violations and inappropriate content is also increasing. According to the "Ecological Security Report for the First Quarter of 2023", Soul has exposed more than 5.45 million person-times of anti-fraud security reminders through content, squares, private messages, etc., launched 1,000+ risk control strategies, and intercepted more than 98% of guides on a daily basis. The incidence of diversion fraud and diversion spillover cases fell by more than 75% year-on-year this quarter. At the same time, Soul also cooperated with the public security organs to crack down on a diversion fraud gang and a diversion gambling gang.
Previously, under the empowerment of AI, Soul launched the "Dynamic Duplicate Check" function, providing users with tools to identify the contents of the transfer, false personalities and even "killing pigs". In the future, artificial intelligence will become a helper for Soul to monitor and filter bad content and maintain a healthy social ecology. Using the combination of artificial intelligence and manual review, the platform can establish a complete content review and filtering system.
Of course, the integration of artificial intelligence technology and the social field itself is also inseparable from security and compliance. As Zhang Gaozheng said: "AIGC is in an irreversible development process. All walks of life should actively embrace this technology, and Soul will also cooperate with supervision. departments to jointly promote the application of this technology.”
epilogue
The birth of Soul is a symbol of the continuous innovation of business models in the social field. This new social force proves that with the advancement of technology, the social industry structure is far from the end.
The prosperity of generative AI technology has brought more possibilities for open social interaction.
From the perspective of Soul, AIGC can improve the content quality and diversity of social applications, increase the retention rate and activity of users; it can also improve the content innovation and imagination of social applications, so that users can experience more openness and exploration. world".
In the next step, Soul should move towards a closed loop of high-quality supply, user growth, and successful commercialization, and promote the arrival of a new generation of social networking.
Source: Songuo Finance