From a certain latitude, people in society can be said to be the collection and source of information. The essence of social product development is the precipitation of user relationship chain, and the essence of user relationship chain precipitation is to discover interesting information through people.
Due to work needs, I have been combing the logic and needs of recommending users through big data algorithms recently (the general idea is to recommend people who match them according to users' own preferences). In addition, when discussing the growth strategy of female users with my colleagues yesterday, I talked about the importance of the "attention" function to social products, just as the big data recommendation algorithm can also be applied to the user growth strategy, which inspired me to think about the attention function in Internet products. Today, we will focus on the following three issues, and briefly talk about how to improve the efficiency of users to obtain interested information through product means.
1. What information are users interested in? Why do users want to get interesting information?
2. What problems will users encounter in the process of obtaining information of interest?
3. How to help users solve these problems through product means?
First of all, for social products, what information are users really interested in? Why do users want to get interesting information?
After a period of observation and thinking, I think that the information that most people are interested in is usually the information with the highest personal relevance, mainly two kinds of information, namely, information related to professional fields (work, study) and life fields. Because any information acquisition behavior and motivation are essentially driven by users' own needs, the purpose is to understand and transform the world, so as to improve their survival ability or pleasure. On the other hand, with the continuous development of society, the growth of population and the change of our needs, our decision-making will become more and more complicated, because the effectiveness of decision-making is based on sufficient information, and more and more information will be needed.
For example, when eating, we only need to consider our own tastes, as well as the time cost and economic cost we are willing to pay, so the problem of eating can be easily solved. However, if you are responsible for organizing 10 people to have dinner together, you should not only consider your own taste and financial ability, but also consider the taste and financial ability of at least half of the people and special personnel. Compared with one person, it is a little difficult to make everyone happy. Because the information you need is much more complicated to make everyone happy. Some people may have their period today, some people may have taboos, and they may have to ask in advance which restaurants are more in line with most people's tastes. You have to know clearly in advance or on the spot before you can make a relatively difficult decision for most people.
Secondly, for social products, what problems will users encounter in the process of obtaining interesting information?
With the appearance, development and popularization of Internet and related technologies, the threshold of information release, dissemination and acquisition has been greatly lowered, and human society has entered a real era of information explosion, which can also be said to be an era of "information surplus". However, everything often has two sides. On the one hand, the richness of information and the lowering of the threshold for information acquisition have helped us effectively solve the extremely complicated problems in the past. For example, the prediction of future weather changes and the real-time communication of remote information have been effectively solved to some extent. On the other hand, the abundance of information has also brought many new problems, such as: faced with the vast amount of information, and our time, energy and means to obtain information are relatively limited, how to obtain effective information that we are interested in in in the shortest time has become a major pain point for most people in the new era.
The feasible method is to concentrate as much as possible and give priority to information that is useful or interesting to us, in other words, information related to life and major (work and study). By constantly obtaining this information, we can improve our ability to dig, analyze and solve problems, open up our ability boundaries, and then continuously strengthen and enrich our way of thinking and learning, and finally achieve the goal of improving our understanding and transforming the world.
Take the product manager as an example.
Professional information includes macro national policies, technical information, economic information and psychological information, as well as micro company/organization information, team information, linkable related resource information, professional skill information, industry information, competing product information, business information and user information.
Information in life, the information you need to know includes personal information in the fields of food, clothing, housing and transportation, as well as information about the life, work and study of your lover, family, mentor and partner.
Information here refers to the description of the characteristics, phenomena, essence and laws of things in society and nature. That is to say, the core of any information is concrete at first, which can help people understand, distinguish and transform things in nature or society, and can be spread through symbols, words, pictures, audio and video. For example: "hoe, a tool used by farmers' uncles to farm." "This is a message. The' hoe' in the message is not a message in a strict sense because it has no meaning.
Finally, how to help users solve the problem that it is difficult for users to obtain interesting information continuously through product means?
In essence, it is to lower the threshold for users to obtain interested information, or to improve the efficiency of obtaining interested information.
For example:
1. Look at the information flow on WeChat, and click "Looking (Recommended)" through WeChat friends to help users find interesting content;
2. Shake audio and video recommended information flow. When you stop to watch a short video, the system will automatically push the video with the same theme or related videos under the short video, and help users find interesting content through algorithm recommendation;
3. Netease Cloud and Tencent video information flow. When you stop to watch a short video, the system will automatically push the video with the same theme or related videos under the short video. The principle is also to help users find interesting content through algorithm recommendation;
4. Weibo and Zhihu information flow, through the function of attention and grouping, presents the information flow that pays attention to one's friends, and also filters the information through the relationship chain to help users find interesting content.
The above methods are all similar. They all help us to filter out information that we may not be interested in and present information that we are interested in through people or technology (recommendation algorithm). There are mainly two kinds of people here, one is people who have similar values or are closely related to us in life, and the other is people who are stronger than us in their professional fields.
Having said that, I can understand why the essence of social products is the precipitation of user relationship chain, because we need people who are similar to our values or closely related to our lives or better than us to help us screen and provide the information we need.
At the same time, it can also be understood that one of the core reasons why social products are difficult to make is that it is difficult to drive users to establish and precipitate their relationship chains, just like the problem of chicken laying eggs or egg laying chickens.
First of all, if you want users to stay on social platforms, you need to let them find two kinds of people. Because we need people to get the information we are interested in, there are mainly two kinds of people here. One is people who are better than us in the professional field, and we hope to obtain information in our professional field through them. The other is information closely related to our lives, such as people we like, people we love and people with similar values.
Secondly, it is difficult for excellent people to stay, which makes it difficult for people who want to know high-quality people through the platform and find information in professional fields to stay. Because excellent people also need this product (tool) to achieve the purpose that they are willing to stay on the platform and continue to provide value, and few people can interest them, in other words, it is difficult for excellent people to stay. First, because many ordinary people need information that they don't need, this naturally leads to the mismatch between the information acquisition needs of both parties; Second, it is not easy to find people you like or things with similar values. Excellent people cannot survive, it is not easy to find people they like or things with similar values, and it is difficult for ordinary users to survive.
This is a core reason why the user relationship chain of social or community products is difficult to precipitate and develop.
Of course, it is gratifying that people's needs are not one-dimensional, which is why there are still social or community products that can be developed, such as WeChat, Momo and Zhihu. Because excellent people may not need to get some general information, but they may have other needs such as making money or vanity, because excellent people are a high-quality information source for most ordinary people in the same field. If they can satisfy their needs of making money or vanity by outputting information that users are willing to pay or like, pay attention to and forward, they may still stay. Excellent people are willing to stay, and ordinary people have a great chance to stay.
end~