How does the current most popular Chinese social network Soul promote social interaction “through your Soul”?
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Under the new social wave brought by Generation Z, Soul is leading the young generation’s social network trend in China. By presenting creative and warm social features and continuously satisfying the spiritual pursuit of young people, Soul is a revolution for the new technology direction and business model of the next generation’ social products.
Almost every Internet entrepreneur has a social dream because social means interaction, interaction means stickiness, and stickiness means the possibility of incubating business models.
In the era of PC Internet, the search engine is a gateway application for users to access the network, while in the era of mobile Internet, a social network is the existence of infrastructure like “water, electricity, and coal.”
Human beings are social animals. From the perspective of sociology, human’s demand for information acquisition and Commodity Exchange is much lower than that for interpersonal communication. Social networks not only occupy a large amount of users’ usage time but also users’ mind for network cognition.
Since the birth of commercial civilization, all transactions have been carried out on the basis of “trust,” and the “trust” is from social relations.
This is the fundamental reason why so many Internet giants are still obsessed with social products, even though they have the “ticket” of the mobile Internet and a huge number of users.
However, how to “socialize” well is never easy.
The people who change and upgrade the old era and create and lead the new era are often young people who are easily despised by the mainstream perspective.
History teaches us that there is no such thing as a “Beat Generation,” only the true builders of the future world who are not being understood.
Growing up in doubt, they are both rebellious and vulnerable. They seek kindred, comfort, and spiritual sustenance in the online world, and they are constantly shaping the online “foundation” of society for the next generation.
Who are they? How are they different? What do they like and hate? What do they think of family and friendship? What are their unique consumption tendencies?
These are seemingly simple but difficult to systematically answer the question, but someone has handed over a good answer.
“Soul” is a kaleidoscope full of unique interest and imagination. Through the lens of “doubt,” a vivid picture of hundreds of millions of young people is unfolded. Under the new social wave brought by Generation Z, Soul constantly satisfies the spiritual pursuit of young people by showing innovative features.
1 A brief history of Internet social networking in China
The brief history of the development of social networks in China can be summarized as “tool age,” “network age,” and “personality age.”
The first era, the representative product of the “tool age,” was the famous QQ.
Like its parent ICQ, QQ is a free peer-to-peer communication tool based on the website. What makes it a breakthrough is that, for the first time, it offers a kind of “immediacy” compared to, say, email and thus has the potential to replace traditional means of communication such as phone calls and text messages.
However, since the social tools mainly rely on the PC platform, and the mobility of the PC is very poor, this kind of service is not capable of completely replacing the traditional communication tools and forming an independent social network.
The second time is the “Internet age,” as a result of mobile communication tools and the popularity of 3G high-speed networks, the user can communicate at any time and place; it allows one-to-many and many-to-many model communication, thus completely replace traditional communication tools.
WeChat as an example, the rise of WeChat has two major reasons. Technically, it starts to use voice as the carrier; In terms of products, the introduction of the “drift bottles and shake” at the early stage helped WeChat to have a successful start.
Every social network, so to speak, begins with more strangers than acquaintances. However, as more and more acquaintances grow on a social network, the less “fun” the software becomes and the more instrumental it becomes, and ultimately it becomes a pure contact tool.
It has to be said that experience is sometimes a terrible “poison”; we tend to get used to repeating what we think is the right pace but do not realize that we are going in circles.
Real social relations is a huge web that connects those that should be connected but also traps those that should not be trapped.
Have these social network startups ever wondered if the real world is an amusement park or a prison for young people? Millions of them, where is the spiritual world?
Therefore, the competitive development of social networks has entered the third stage, which is the “personality stage.” New entrepreneurs try to break the cycle of “from strangers to acquaintances” and try to provide a kind of highly engaged closed loop that meets personalized social needs based on interest rather than “connection necessity.”
This new round of attempts started in 2015–2016, which is commonly referred to as the “second half of the Internet.”
This year, the number of users of WeChat has exceeded 600 million, completely dominating the acquaintances’ social market. This Angle is no longer attractive, leaving no chance to other players.
As a result, new players like Soul have to carve out their own unique path in order to make a new way out.
In fact, all the time, more and more entrepreneurs want to incubate a social platform belonging to the new generation; they put their efforts to find a new breakthrough and entry point, such as sound interaction, video interaction… But it has to be said that these entry points, apart from temporary novelty, do not provide any deep connection, nor can they help users to improve the coupling probability of social success, so they cannot really promote and help “effective and interesting” social interaction, so most of them stay within a very small range.
Then, what is the model that can effectively differentiate itself from WeChat and really promote people to understand each other and communicate with each other based on the understanding? And, in the process, it doesn’t need to sell flirtatious things, but rather share them to attract each other and become permanent, rather than peer-to-peer, disposable social tools.
Soul gives a new answer, that is — interest is the real bond. It is the original intention of Soul to connect people with interests and make them no longer lonely.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether VR is a spontaneous advance in technology or whether it’s a response to the higher dimensions of the virtual world that tomorrow’s young people want. But there is no denying that human beings have consciously or unconsciously projected the thoughts of the physical and mental world into the virtual network, and young people are even more so.
The problem is that today’s youth don’t just need this kind of networking tool; they need a new social meta-universe, which needs to build a truly interest-based network of user relationships in a highly open, free-to-publish, decentralized distribution environment.
Soul’s definition of a social meta-universe, in my view, is that the “meta-universe” is not a fanciful concept; the essence of it is to use the relationships of unknown users in the real world on the platform to precipitate and retain as positive samples and recommend users to generate high-quality new relationships through machine learning based on their social portraits and interest graphs. Users can start communication at a low cost and have high-quality relationships.
2. Let the technology see your interesting soul
What the soul really is maybe a metaphysical question. But at Soul, the answer is clear: user interest profiles and social profiles.
In short, the core model of Soul is that, based on the user’s interest spectrum and social portrait, any individual who comes to the planet can create a pressure-free social space. Soul allows the user to express himself and be recommended to others who might understand him at any time, anywhere.
This is different from all existing social models.
Bilibili, Kuaishou, Weibo, and Tiktok, although there are interactive features, but the essence is the “community” rather than “social,” they are atypical of a one-to-many relationship chain, the core content of their content producers and consumers, there is a gap of the lookup relationships, and even can be thought of as a centralized media community composed of numerous KOL, Its core appeal is to get users to buy content, not to engage with each other, at least not primarily.
Momo and Tantan are more considered as “pure efficiency tools,” their value is mainly to push users quickly get real relations, has some characteristics of “disposable” in the user didn’t intend to have depth of content production, mainly using images as the medium of information, because picture is the lowest cost of production.
But the Soul took a different path than the other three, and it was very difficult.
In my opinion, the most difficult “cold launch” for Soul in its early days was getting users to share “moments” of their lives spontaneously.
The truth is, most social platforms are lonely, but Soul alone has solved this problem. What’s its solution?
Is feedback!
Soul’s theory is simple: you (the user) are responsible for Posting, and I (the platform) are responsible for making connections for you. When you get a lot of feedback, you are interested in making more because the feedback will continue to flow, and new social relationships will be formed that are full of surprises. And all the information after a long time of accumulation and precipitation will build a new and deep connection between users around the world. With high quality and high productivity, each person can show different aspects about themselves, thus forming a meta-cosmic connection.
And what Soul is doing is using technology to solve that problem.
I called it “a trilogy of finding interesting souls through technology.”
The first step is to fully digitize all “people” and “moments” as well as the “interactive behaviors” around them. That is to say, relying on deep learning and big data technology to build “social infrastructure,” including AI, data analysis, information identification, labeling, etc., so that all elements of social interaction can be realized. It can realize digital flow and establish connections in a closed loop;
The second step is to use the leading AI algorithm to draw the user portrait and interest map, which can be used as the “basis” for recommendation, to realize the efficient and accurate recommendation between users and between users and between users and information. Moreover, in this process, the efficiency of algorithm, function, and information distribution function is continuously improved through a large amount of data feedback so as to enhance the stickiness and retention of users, thus forming a benign network effect and flywheel effect.
Third step, various recommendations are made for users to facilitate interaction, let more users in the “yuan” universe of Soul to share their life rich moments, drive the user to take the initiative to go to see a lot of other people’s home pages and release, thus reverse propulsion user own UGC interest, and the distribution of UGC, also with the accumulation of data, more and more relevant and accurate, to thoroughly solve the problem of user retention.
In a way, Soul pushes the value of “interest-based” to the extreme through a variety of mechanisms.
One of the best examples of this is no real profile pics.
For all social interactions, seeing the real person (or picture) is a strong driver; However, it is also because of strong driving force that people often care about the appearance a lot, which goes against the original intention of adhering to the “interest.” As a result, Soul has gone a long way toward creating relationships based on the user’s personality, interests, and other spiritual traits. It doesn’t support a real avatar, deemphasizing appearance, or importing contacts to build relationships, and is completely independent of existing social relationships.
However, being out of existing social relationships does not mean being out of reality. Soul, on the other hand, posts and the relationship between distribution is also more important adaptation degree and the information quality, fair show everyone “moments,” allowing users to express extreme tend to inner truth, to do “make unique Soul can find physical resonance on the platform, and guide users to express themselves, real and not consciously cater to flow when express.”
Another typical example is that despite the high barrier to entry for Soul, the average remaining user stays on it for 40 minutes per session, which is a ridiculously high number for a non-acquaintance social network. But just because of the high threshold of Soul, what remains is that people have real interest and motivation to share “moments” of life and hope to find friends with each other through interest. It naturally isolates some non-information-oriented people outside the platform, thus “purifying” the interest attribute and spiritual conversion of the platform.
Of course, a high bar doesn’t necessarily mean boring. In order to better simulate the interest of users, the gamified social experience became one of the core features of Soul.
To some extent, the games offset the initial boredom, allowing users to quickly immerse themselves in Soul’s platform and make it easier to build relationships.
For example, even though there are no real profile pics, the 3D face-pinching and the interactive video function allow Soulers to have a relaxed and stress-free video chat. At the same time, the app supports “moments” through Soul filters, such as our popular Soul comic face filter, which does not reveal personal identity. In terms of many-to-many socializing, the system also recommends group chat rooms that Souler might be interested in according to its user profile and then communicates freely with more like-minded people so that “interest” becomes the “pass” in the Soul World.
Therefore, Soul’s success is essentially based on the application of technologies such as AI and recommendation systems, as well as deep user engagement scenarios such as super-large user instant messaging, which strongly supports the healthy and rapid growth of the users.
3. The business model
Monetizing social platforms is a very challenging route.
I must admit that the Soul has a very high commercial potential, because the user like it very much and enjoy the ecological — in Z generation, more and more people love the social of Soul because they are not limited to communicating with the people they know. It is their favorite way of life to communicate freely with their peers who have never met in the virtual world. Like Clubhouse, getting information from the people who talk is also a fascinating part of Soul.
So we see a big commotional potential for Soul.
In terms of B2C, Soul is a very playable, highly expressive, game-based platform; there is a lot of potential for value-add services based on interest.
Soul Coins (Soul Coins) has been created to enable users to purchase and spend Soul Coins on the platform for a variety of services to further enhance their experience with Soul apps, including more user referral opportunities.
More specifically, many users buy skin and accessories to personalize themselves and satisfy some kind of social “show off” mentality. Sort of like a mash-up of the early QQshow and games’ buy gear ‘, paying for virtual experiences is one of the oldest and most effective ways in the social space, and Soul is making good money out of it.
Soul is also creative in the details, developing GiftMojis to connect the virtual and physical elements of the Soul app, allowing users to interact in the real world by sending gifts without revealing their real identity.
In terms of B2B, the commercialization of Soul is still relatively shallow, but it has great potential.
In short, Soul started to build the brand-customer ecosystem in the third quarter of 2020 and is now in phase 1.0 of the brand ecosystem. However, unlike traditional advertising models, Soul has focused from the start on building friendly links between highly active users and brand owners.
From this perspective, Soul provides users with a new channel to discover brands and products that suit them and their specific gift needs that express their aesthetic, ranging from popular snacks and beauty products to lifestyle products based on the popularity of the younger generation.
In short, the long-term goal of Soul is to enable brand owners to find more scenarios and opportunities in their Soul products to influence their potential customers.
It must be pointed out that this is the “optimal solution” for a platform to monetize because what is deposited most on Soul, besides “interest,” is “trust.”
In the modern era, the dominant form of interaction is exchange, especially exchange mediated by money, which cannot take place without trust. Because Soul has stripped away many of the “non-spiritual elements” and created a pure atmosphere on the platform, it is naturally easy to build trust, which is conducive to building “transaction trust” between the “individual” and the “brand.”
From another point of view, Soul precipitates a large number of UGC, and these and the brand through is an important channel for monetization, which has been confirmed in Bilibili, Zhihu, and other platforms. There’s every reason to think that Soul, who also took the UGC route and made connections, would be able to find a business model that would work for Soul.
Of course, there’s still plenty of time to prove this, but Soul’s approach has so far been restrained.
I believe that restraint is a good thing because a good platform atmosphere can not be destroyed, and trust must be strengthened. How to find a balance between a good platform atmosphere and a smooth business path is the next test of Soul.
On May 11, Soul filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission to list its shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker SSR. Soul received very good market feedback after updating its pricing range but decided to put the IPO process on hold due to other capital considerations, a decision that was supported by Tencent, the majority shareholder of Soul.
“This is the growth we are looking forward to as we expand the use of our products to more people, bringing kindness, warmth, and authenticity to more Soulers,” the company said in its suspension announcement.
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