Last week, many colleges and universities announced that they would suspend the use of WeChat payment due to the fee charged. WeChat apologized and said that it will continue to maintain zero fees in non-profit scenarios on campus. Follow [Rongyun Global Internet Communication Cloud] to learn more
WeChat responded very quickly, but it still rushed to the top of the hot search list many times. It can be seen that for a social giant with more than 1.2 billion users, any action will have a huge impact.
Since the birth of the first-generation iPhone in 2007, we have officially ushered in the "mobile Internet era" and completed the transfer of communication methods from phone calls, text messages to network messages.
This is the "iPhone moment" that we mentioned countless times later, changing the way of human-computer interaction and directly bringing human society into the next economic era.
Also in 2007, Fetion, which was developed by Rongyun's core team, was born, and the IM product with 100 million daily active users was born in China.
Since then, WhatsApp, WeChat, Telegram, and Discord have come out one after another, and they still occupy the main table of social products.
In this article, we will explain in detail the main scenarios, evolution process, and product background of the four social giants, try to answer the question "How do social leaders develop?", and look for the "success code" behind the giants.
01 The family history of the boss, the scene is prioritized to become bigger and stronger
WhatsApp launched in 2009, Tencent launched WeChat in 2011, Telegram in 2013, and Discord in 2015. The four social giants all started with communication services, and then went out of their own different growth paths.
The scene is the priority, and the scale is king.
An overview of the important strategic layout and ecological evolution process of the four major applications. They all identified a main application scenario, and then tried their best to enclose the land in the new scenario .
Among them, the pace of WeChat is the most intensive, and has largely become the imitation object of other applications.
At first, WhatsApp was a mobile phone address book application that could update the status, but this feature was not welcomed by users. Instead, many users used the status bar to chat.
In 2009 , using the push notification function of iOS, WhatsApp2.0 realized the message function. Users only need to bind their mobile phone numbers to realize the basic social functions of acquaintances. Since then, WhatsApp has been focusing on information exchange while iterating other scene functions.
Launched in 2011 , the main scenario is to socialize with acquaintances in China—connecting people, and then expand the scenario around the realization of user traffic, and make a defensive layout for the development of competitors.
Telegram
Launched in 2013 , it focuses on the social scene of acquaintances who pay attention to personal privacy and other security issues; users can set up a lot of personalized communication tools; it has excellent product performance, supports various large file (doc, zip, mp3) transmission, has Super group with 20W user cap and subscription group with unlimited number of people.
Discord
Launched in 2015, it mainly solved the problem of voice and text communication in the game scene at first, and later exploded potential in the community & interest social field, becoming an online "third space" that gathers a large number of young users .
02 Where do the giants go, genes determine who you are
After the emergence of national-level products, the outside world always likes to explore "what did this company do right".
For example, the recent Little Red Book relies on the splash of live broadcast to attract the vigilance and hunting of competing products.
As a content community, Xiaohongshu is struggling to find a monetization model. Now I finally touched the stone of realization outside of the advertisement.
Going back to the source, Xiaohongshu started with “outbound shopping strategy”, and its early core users were young women with overseas travel and shopping background and needs. This established the product tone of its "planting grass community", and the road to e-commerce in the later stage was smoother.
In the process of giants growing into behemoths, they all have their own unique paths and genes.
WeChat, there is no retreat
WeChat also participated in the hunt for Xiaohongshu.
This year, the WeChat official account has launched an almost one-to-one replica of Xiaohongshu's picture message function. In terms of interaction, the picture is placed in a more eye-catching position, and it is accompanied by short texts to improve flexibility and stimulate people's desire to share.
However, apart from making WeChat's jealousy towards Xiaohongshu more obvious, this action did not change the inherent image of the official account created by long pictures and texts.
With WeChat as the core scene, every time Tencent attacks emerging forces, a new branch will grow in WeChat. Just like the video account is to Doukuai, and the merchant applet is to Taobao e-commerce...Now, this super application has realized chatting, payment, e-commerce, games and other services through a single interface and unified entrance, and it is sitting on a huge traffic Jinshan , and make money through advertising, payments and in-app purchases.
Tencent's great achievement has even attracted the envy of overseas giants. Whether it is "Little Tencent in Southeast Asia" or "Little Tencent in the Middle East", it can be seen that they worship the Tencent model, and even Musk has publicly expressed his greed for the WeChat super app many times.
However, the seemingly impeccable ecology is not without worries.
Time has entered the GPT era, and Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have contracted the front page of the news. Back in China, there are not a few people who pull the banner to enter the market. It is still unclear whether the general-purpose large-scale model is a meal for the giants or a new opportunity for start-up companies .
On the other hand, the traffic peaked, and various giants walked into each other's tracks to run laps. It seems that no one can shake the top spot of acquaintance social networking, but there has been no shortage of chargers. At the beginning of this year, Douyin launched IM chat, and last year, there was also a metaverse social explosion, supported by Rongyun Communication Services, which once surpassed WeChat to top the list of downloads.
There is no real calm in the market, and the pressure is on the video number. The video account has stabilized its position in the short video field, and has been given more expectations by Tencent. However, the commercialization process of video accounts still needs to wait and see.
Trillion Tencent, there is no retreat at all.
WhatsApp, the number one imitator
“Buy Twitter, Copy Wechat.”
Musk has unabashedly expressed his longing for a super app that "can almost live on it", and the acquisition of Twitter has also been dubbed the "WeChat dream".
But obviously, it is not the only one who wants to have a WeChat version of the super app, and Zuckerberg is not too far behind. We can see this from the fact that WhatsApp’s product evolution path is almost a copy of WeChat’s.
After being acquired by Facebook in 2014, WhatsApp launched WhatsApp Business & API in 2018, launched payment in 2020, and launched Cloud API last year. The function is very similar to the layout of WeChat.
In 2020, WhatsApp has more than 2 billion global users, compared to 1 billion and 1.5 billion users in 2016 and 2018, respectively. In the steep growth curve, the rapid development of global e-commerce is an absolute contributor.
WhatsApp has well grasped the trend of digital upgrading in emerging markets . In the process of "gradually leveling" the digital economy in these areas, relying on Business App/API to smoothly undertake the needs of local business life to shift to online.
As a business communication platform, WhatsApp Business supports merchants to carry out online marketing, and at the same time provides a wealth of business functions such as sending mass messages, setting automatic replies, creating chat tags, and using message templates through the API.
This allowed it to harvest a large number of users from Southeast Asia, Latin America and other regions, breaking through the previous user composition that was relatively concentrated in Europe and the United States.
With the improvement of the payment function, WhatsApp has further developed from a simple communication tool to a social e-commerce platform with complete transaction and service functions.
Zuckerberg recently said that WhatsApp Business is now serving more than 200 million users on its platform, a fourfold increase from three years ago.
The growth of the business news user base has come at a good time, especially when we consider the many developments that have been hindered by Meta in recent years-
Tens of billions of capital have been invested in the metaverse to make a huge splash, the growth of social platforms has stagnated and the business is overly dependent on advertising, and the AI big model has been excluded from the category of "leading companies" in the White House...
Today, WhatsApp, which is still in the early stage of commercialization, this app that looks more and more like WeChat, has become the next pillar of Meta's revenue.
Telegram, Warrior or Dragon
Telegram is more or less one of the beneficiaries of Meta's poor development.
Whenever Facebook gets in trouble for overuse of user data, users turn to Telegram.
This is a secure communication application featuring end-to-end encryption. In theory, Telegram officials cannot obtain users' chat content, and it is difficult for the outside world to crack through technical means.
In fact, Facebook has always played an important role in the growth history of Telegram. Its founder, Pavel Durov (Pavel Durov), created a social application very similar to Facebook before making Telegram, and developed it into the largest social network in Russia.
It was this influence that got him embroiled in a political battle that eventually led him to leave Russia, and in the process he realized the importance of a perfectly safe communication tool.
Thus Telegram was born, and Pavel Durov constantly advises people to stay away from Meta products "because they are surveillance tools".
In addition to the name of security, Telegram is also favored in the blockchain field and is a standard configuration for every project.
But at the same time, Telegram is also a favorite of illegal transactions and extremist organizations. According to foreign media, Telegram was suspended in Brazil until it complied with an order to freeze some accounts spreading false information.
Another difficulty with Telegram is funding.
With a focus on privacy and security, Telegram couldn't leverage user data without violating its fundamental promises, and they had to consider other ways to make money.
Based on the close relationship with the currency circle, issuing tokens was originally a natural financing method for Telegram. In 2018, Telegram launched a token plan and raised funds through an ICO, but was opposed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission and had to abandon the project and return funds and submit fines.
At present, Telegram, which is longer than its product strength, has not yet determined the final business model.
According to public information, Telegram is waiting for an IPO, and the time point is set for this year.
Discord, adults also need to know how to choose
Different from general content communities, Discord's community atmosphere emphasizes user communication and real-time interaction, and it is this feature that made Midjourney choose it.
To use Midjourney, you need to first enter its Discord channel.
This is undoubtedly a win-win situation. Discord provides Midjourney with a co-creation soil, creating an atmosphere where many people chat, learn and play in one room; Midjourney enriches Discord's content ecology and brings new users to it. and revenue sharing.
Discord has gradually completed the generalization of user groups starting from game communication. The decentralized relationship chain it has always emphasized allows the community to complete growth under the self-iteration of users.
This product form is undoubtedly more in line with the social aesthetics of the new generation, and it is also closer to our yearning for a social ecology in which a disenchanted big V center has the right to speak. Moreover, real-time communities can be extended from various platforms such as games to help various applications build user communities and deepen user operations.
Because of this, as a new type of conversation specially built for real-time community products, Rongyun super group has recently achieved significant growth.
Being user-centered and relying on user behavior to shape appearance is the common thread of community products. The confrontation between "community" and "commercial" is also the unanimous fate of such products.
We are all too familiar with the stories of the Chengye community and the Baiye community. The last piece of news on Tianya was a live broadcast of self-help, raising 200,000 yuan; Bilibili is still struggling between maintaining the community atmosphere and seeking cash channels; Unsurprisingly, it went downhill after several failed wayfindings.
Discord is no exception. For a long time, Discord has relied on subscriptions as its main source of income. Monetization mainly depends on Discord Nitro value-added service subscriptions, server subscriptions that share 19% with creators, and in-app purchases of digital products that are still under test.
This makes it look a bit "shabby" in terms of income among products with the same number of users, which is undoubtedly a huge challenge for the helm of the enterprise.
However, rather than holding high and playing fast to death, "not playing the poker table" is more a test of the charm of the product and the courage of the manager. Discord has always firmly chosen to maintain the community atmosphere and is very cautious about monetization.
The community is still growing and has become home to many new entities, such as NFT projects and DAOs.
Perhaps, this is the real metaverse world that leads to the next era, because it is a living organism and has not yet fully evolved.