In January 2022, the "Youth" App, an independent community under Ali , launched internal testing to position the interest community for planting grass and trendy good things.
Just like the slogan of "Study whatever you have", the main audience of this app is aimed at young trendy enthusiasts, aiming to promote users to recommend good products through the platform, drive social interaction with interests, and land on the consumption track of grass planting.
has become a hit since Xiaohongshu, and the grass planting economy, a market of hundreds of billions, has attracted a lot of attention. ByteDance's " Douyin box" and "croissant"; the mini program "Jingdong that JD has tested; the app "pie" launched by NetEase, etc., are all focusing on combining vivid, rich and reference sketches with the concept of "circle" that strengthens user identity, but no platform has copied the results of Xiaohongshu . This move Alibaba has made in this direction.
When the trend of "people look for goods" gradually turns to "good look for people", the platform needs to actively explore the needs of users. Whether friends can take on the banner of Alibaba's specializing in grass planting track still needs time to test.
6Ali’s determination to plant grass
Media research report points out that after users are planted, more than 80% of them will place orders within one week; 74% of users have purchased products that have planted grass; more than 60% of users will be affected by the content of planting grass when making product decisions. Today, with the e-commerce shopping model constantly upgrading, it is the general trend to plan and plant grass. Even Taobao's open-screen Slogan has changed from "anytime, anywhere, just go shopping" to "it's so easy to visit", from emphasizing portability to emphasizing content volume and cultivating a comprehensive ecosystem of "social + e-commerce + content".
As the largest shopping platform in the country, Taobao has obvious advantages and disadvantages - it has an unparalleled traffic entrance, and the product link jumps to the purchase page with one click to facilitate users to complete grass planting conversion; but at the same time, Taobao is also limited to traffic-based grass planting, and the pages are mostly filled with merchant advertisements, which cannot arouse users' interest in actively planting grass.
Under the general trend of focusing on traffic and social interaction, in order to improve grass planting efficiency, Taobao's grass planting page has been reshaped and changed from the graphic and text period to the short video period.
As early as 2016, Taobao's "Good Goods" section had attracted users' attention. This function is embedded in the recommendation column of Taobao homepage, and shows users the products they may be interested in according to the algorithm. Each product comes with high-quality evaluations written by the user after real experience. It has both pictures and texts, and is one of the earlier forms of grass planting. After
, Taobao launched the "must-buy list" as another content channel, which is also displayed in the form of pictures and text. The common point between the two is that merchant registration plus platform screening is finally displayed to users under the recommendation of the algorithm. Most of the content creators are Taobao certified experts and merchants, and the content marketing nature is strong and not vivid and interesting enough.
After testing multiple grass-planting sections, Taobao launched "Bang Shuan" in December 2020. The channel is placed at the first-level entrance at the lower end of the app, which shows its weight. Wandering can be called the complete work of Taobao’s grass planting function. It not only upgrades from graphic and text grass planting to short video grass planting, but also creates a private domain community for each seller, with the number of fans it has and the content it likes being clearly visible. Sellers can not only upload product videos to show their truest state, but also publish related topics in the private domain to guide users to participate, forming a community-style communication ecosystem - planting grass and adding communities, where the prototype of friends has been shown.
Accurate algorithm, massive SKU, experts with rich experience in product planting, and one-click UI settings for purchasing links to build the shortest link from planting grass to placing orders, and the conversion rate is rapidly improved. There are few Taobao’s competitive platforms that have such a complete grass planting ecosystem. Xiaohongshu, which has the strongest grass planting ability, lacks e-commerce functions and categories. Therefore, the current competitiveness given by shopping in grass planting is still considerable.
In addition to browsing this large channel, Taobao has also launched short video operation tools such as "personal photo shoot" to assist. The conversion method is similar to the yellow shopping cart on Douyin. The purchase link is built into the video, and the official will provide traffic support for the videos posted on the platform. The existence of personal photos further expanded the coverage of grass planting, and the existence of multiple tools shows that Taobao is serious about playing grass planting.
Friends and the past and present lives
Since the grass planting function of the browsing channel has been improved, and there are related professional tools to supplement it, why should we independently launch a brand new friend?
On the one hand, there are too many e-commerce elements of Taoshi Zhongcao Channel, which affects the content ecosystem. In essence, most of the content that has good goods and shopping is actively published by merchants, and the marketing and traffic diversion properties are stronger. Advertising-style video covers are likely to cause visual fatigue to users. The reason why Xiaohongshu has become the most influential grass planting platform is closely related to the user's active content creation trend; at the same time, the content in the browsing has become saturated. If friends are forcibly placed in this channel, it will not only affect the visual sense but also appear to be mixed. If Alibaba wants to be a professional grass planting platform, it is the only way to build an independent app, and friends will become this carrier.
In fact, the birth of friends and other things was not achieved overnight, but has undergone multiple upgrades and adjustments. The predecessor of Youji is an app called "Lingping" that is positioned at home and is mainly about planting grass, but the coverage area is relatively more vertical after upgrading. The lying flat UI design is refreshing, and the grass planting form is only open to the pictures and texts, which is very simple and pure. The lying flat picture and text grass-planting posts and Taobao-related good products links means that although the app has a simple function, the grass-pulling chain is very short, which makes it easier to monetize traffic.
In January 2022, the company officially upgraded to a friend and opened internal testing. Its predecessor focused on the vertical business of home furnishing grass planting was undertaken by Alibaba's independent app "Wu Yan" launched in April. The range of grass planting for friends has expanded from home products in a narrow sense to the entire trend culture, becoming an interest-driven content community, and its audience scope has been further expanded. The positioning of the Trendy Goods Research Institute makes the UI interface design of friends more cartoonish and Japanese. The layout of the page of
friends is also relatively simple, with only four sections: "Home", "Research Institute", "Message Center" and "Personal Center". The homepage will push the grass planting information flow after big data calculation and provide users with accurate search functions; the research institute is the core of friends, similar to the "circle" in major grass planting apps, displaying the latest developments of various interest communities, and undertakes multiple social functions such as sharing good things, answering questions and solving problems. The type of "research institute" is not determined by the user, but the 44 types selected by the system after calculation are covered by various trend cultures such as lipstick to blind boxes. These subdivided logos are presented in 3D patterns, which meet the preferences of users who pursue trends and freshness. In addition to displaying likes, comments and other information, the news center also opens community functions for fellow friends to communicate.
is precisely because of the community's pursuit of "small and beautiful" that Youxi has a small user base in the short term, and its audience is mostly vertical trend culture enthusiasts. However, during the internal testing period, the existence of friends and other things is more inclined to extend the retention time of Taobao products and cultivate users' grass-planting minds. As a member of the rich product matrix, Youji also reflects Alibaba's plan to focus on multiple consumer groups, but the effect still needs time to prove it.
In July 2022, Youshi will temporarily be offline after the internal testing period is over. But Alibaba's exploration of planting grass has not stopped. What will be the form of friends appear again, leaving a question mark.
6 Community battle under traffic anxiety
What are the two keywords that focus on, one is planting grass and the other is community.During the internal testing period, due to the small open scope, it is impossible to make an objective evaluation of the effect of planting grass in the short term. However, the purpose of developing the community is very clear - by cultivating interest circles to gather like people, and then building a new consumption scenario that combines social and retail through the form of attracting traffic or built-in links, that is, social e-commerce.
In this era of traditional e-commerce traffic peaking, and at the same time as YouWi's development, multiple platforms have already made efforts from different fields to accelerate the frequency layout of communities to seize new traffic depressions.
In the past year, ByteDance's community-style app has shown explosive growth, worthy of the name of "App factory", but has not achieved significant results in the short term. In April 2022, its reading interest community "Recognition Zone" started internal testing. Its fields are different from those that are concerned about but similar routes. They are all driven by interest. The internal testing has ended.
In July of the same year, ByteDance's "Crocolate" App was launched, and its business functions were directly benchmarked against Xiaohongshu, focusing on the short video and graphic grass planting track to achieve e-commerce traffic. Since the Douyin ecosystem is opened, Crocodile has a huge traffic entrance, and most of the creators come from mature Douyin users; but it is precisely because of its dependence on Douyin that Crocodile cannot present an independent grass planting community ecosystem. Most of its grass planting videos are synchronized from Douyin. The grass planting content is essentially just a platform migration, and its quality has not been significantly upgraded. It was only 2 months after it was launched, and Crocolate suspended operations due to business adjustments. In the same month as Crocola was launched, ByteDance also deployed an online virtual community " Party Island ", reshaping social scenes in the form of a metaverse, and has been removed from the shelves.
Sina launched the trendy life community "Hobby" at the end of February 2022. Compared with other vertical grass planting platforms, Hobby combines many elements, including grass planting, interesting short videos, same-city parties, community exchanges, etc., but it also reveals a problem - everything has, but nothing is exquisite. Hobby's fuzzy positioning in function makes it look more like a comprehensive service platform, with few innovative highlights of each function, and almost all alternative competitors can be found. Due to too many elements, each functional section uses abstract expressions such as "galaxy" and "gravity", which shows that the patience of new users is easily wiped out.
But compared with other apps that have rushed to this place in the app store, Hobby currently has nearly 1,500 monthly downloads in the App Store and is still being promoted in various colleges and universities. The resources invested in it can also show the high expectations Sina has for it.
Tencent 's game social community "Noknok" and NetEase's video interactive community "Biying" are continuing to develop. 2022 can be said to be the year of community-style app explosion, but while it exploded, a large number of new platforms that had survived less than a few months quickly collapsed. This also shows how charming and attractive this traffic depression that has made major manufacturers continue to go on. However, standing up is not a real success. How to go further and faster is still a very challenging problem.
Source: "Knowledge Economy"
