The value of micro-letters is much larger than content marketing

In a coterie discussion about two months ago, I have expressed the view that "micro-trust in the future an important goal is to become the user mobile devices, the most important to allow Third-party applications access to the interactive messaging platform, the mobile Internet era is an important application portal." ”

Shortly thereafter, the micro-letter to the public to open the "public platform" service (http://mp.weixin.qq.com), the friends involved in the discussion on Weibo forwarded to me that the service validated my speculation. I also want to take advantage of the flow to write an article, to tidy up the point of view, because, in my opinion, "public platform" is the micro-letter to the third party notice platform to take the first step in the goal.

#1 look at the product form

Micro-letter suitable for dialogue, reminders, microblogging for rapid expression, browsing and dissemination

With the launch of the public platform, many analysts focus on the topic of "micro-and micro-blogging who is more suitable for content marketing," but personally think there is no need to put the two in opposition to each other in the opposite position to do or win-win comparison. Because, from the product form, the use of these two scenarios and user expectations themselves are very different.

Micro-credit "public platform" business and related to the micro-letter main product characteristics are summarized as follows:

① micro-Letter Default interface list, the dialog object is the main distinction, the dialog object is the main body of the default interface, dialogue content is placed in the lower page;

② Public platform mass message is similar to mobile phone MMS subscription, multimedia, standardization, a One-to-many message release form;

③ user and public platform account interaction is one-to-one private interaction behavior, other users are not visible;

④ communication is centered on dialogue relationship, and any individual information generated by public platform push and dialogue cannot be a new independent topic.

⑤ users can transmit some content to more users by forwarding, the receiver is decided by the sending user, when the message is sent, the receiver will immediately receive strong prompt notice;

⑥ micro-letter main products by the Kik, Talkbox and other mobile instant messaging tools derived from the product form, born with a strong reminder of the strength (ringtones, Notification Center message Stop, corner standard, etc.);

The visual elements of the ⑦ micro-interface imply that the "dialogue" component is greater than the "browsing" component in the current behavior of the user;

Such product features make it easier for users to think of information in micro-letters as a kind of information that should be quickly browsed and processed in a short time, and that information is more private rather than public. Moreover, because the micro-letter in the structure with the dialogue relation as the main dimension of information aggregation, it determines that the micro-letter users in the reading information, the current information publishers focus on the high concentration, the possibility of interaction, is very suitable for high quality information of the precision hit.

But at the same time, the use of micro-letters, the "public platform" between the information of relevance, users of other stakeholders, the convenience of browsing the smooth will be greatly discounted.

We have to do some summary of the characteristics of micro-blog related products:

① micro-Blog default interface in chronological order to converge on the user's attention to the publisher of a number of micro-blog information, each micro-blog information in this interface to complete the display, in an interface can be completed on the different publishers to publish a number of information quickly browsing;

The main information dimension of ② Weibo is a single information, which is allowed to be in the form of comment, which is the central topic of this information for a one-to-many open communication;

③ users can be forwarded to the form of a certain micro-blog information to be spread to more people's timeline, the receiver is determined by the concern relationship, the general receiver will not be notified;

④ the user-related messages will be reminded in a weaker way, depending on the situation;

No doubt, from the product structure, interface layout, dissemination of business logic and interference, microblogging is more suitable for the dissemination of a large number of fragmented information and proliferation, users use micro-BO information on the fragmentation of the browsing experience is also more excellent. Moreover, communication centered on topic rather than dialogue can produce more valuable information that is complementary to the central topic.

However, it is the main problem of micro-blogging products that the information is presented in chronological order, which leads to the excessive information, the difficulty in filtering the information, and the accuracy and the quality of communication.

Therefore, in the aspect of content marketing, micro-credit and micro-blog due to the large differences in product form, resulting in micro-letters more suitable for accurate and private transmission of information, and micro-bo is more suitable to promote the spread and dissemination of information, and in the dissemination process to obtain more UGC produced by value-added content Content marketing only needs to choose suitable communication platform and tool according to the actual need.

#2 the greater value of micro-letters

Input and output based on dialogue

In the micro-letter "public platform" in the actual use of the process, I believe many users have found that the public platform account, in addition to the attention of the mass message, but also to receive and deal with the attention of the audience in the dialogue page to the public platform account sent messages. Among them, @ The Internet that thing recently on the Micro-blog on the frequent forwarding of the display of the dialogue screenshot, is a good case. Let us now see the user and the public platform account interaction behavior, tentatively known as "flirt."

The following figure is my simple micro-letter processing "mass" and "flirt" two types of business processes:

As shown in the picture, in fact, ordinary users to the public platform account to send a message, the public platform account before the manual processing of this message, the system according to the default rules automatically sent the response, is a simple "input-> processing-> output" processing process.

If this process is more complex, what will happen? Let's try to add a third party to the process that provides the external processing flow that can be processed based on Third-party applications:

As shown in the figure, the blue process is a newly introduced external processing process based on a third party, it is the same as the manual processing process, after introducing it, the user input information in the dialogue interface, can be used as such as "in the micro-blog to enter a string of text", or "in the search box to enter the content to search the keyword" This type of input behavior is processed, and the normalized data is returned directly to the current dialog interface after processing by a third party server.

#3 Handy Examples

function assumption of micro-letter as input and output center

If you don't have a very cold idea about the concept, consider the following examples:

① will send his position information in the micro-letter sent to the United States network, the United States Mission network immediately return to the location around the preferential information:

② tell Dropbox the name of the file you're looking for and make it look for you quickly:

#4 It's not enough ...

Just now we talked a lot about the possible business functions of input and output based on the micro-letter conversation page, but that's not enough.

Let's look back at the release link:

What happens next? I don't think it's too much to say.

As the beginning of the article my prediction: The Future of micro-trust is an important goal, is to become the user mobile devices, the most important to allow Third-party applications access to the interactive message notification platform, is the mobile internet era, an important application portal.

Micro-letters have been:

Micro-letter has been in the previous foundation, let the user accept: "Micro-letter is a message to notify the center";

Micro-mail has been in the "public platform" function, let users realize: "Micro-letters can be with the official account to interact";

Micro-letters have opened up some of the interfaces that allow Third-party iphones and Android apps to send information about applications to the micro-trust's other friends under active user action;

Micro-letters have been added to the Dialog interface toolbar to jump to other applications of the portal;

Micro-letters are not:

The micro-letter has not yet provided an interface to allow other applications to automatically send notifications to users based on conditions;

The micro-letter has not yet provided an interface to allow other applications to receive and process user-sent micro-mail messages;

Micro-mail has not yet opened to the Web site micro-mail sent interface;

But take a look at this page and guess what the next step of the micro-letter will be?

This article is from @socialbeta's contributing author @ Mohin

Author Introduction:

@ Mohin, graduated from the investment study, from private equity investment Fund analyst transformation of the Internet Product manager, and in amateur Internet development, good at business, product and development and other aspects of the Internet to think across the world.