The Rise of "Friend Recommendations" Usher in a New Dawn for Small Accounts

The Transformation of WeChat Official Accounts: The Rise of "Friend Recommendations" Usher in a New Dawn for Small Accounts

WeChat official accounts have long held a pivotal position in the vast landscape of content creation. However, in recent years, the overall traffic of official accounts has been on a downward trend, and it has become increasingly difficult for creators to gain traffic in this field. But at this moment, a subtle change may bring new opportunities to many creators. That is, the WeChat team has taken a series of measures regarding the "Friend ♡" entrance in the official account information flow. This change indicates the increase in the weight of "friend recommendations" and seems to herald that the spring for small official accounts is about to arrive.

## Friend Recommendations: The New Favorite in the Official Account Information Flow

It has been reported that the WeChat team is expanding the testing scope of the "Friend ♡" entrance in the official account information flow and has optimized the product by adding a label of "XX updates" in the upper left corner of the entrance. This "Friend ♡" entrance is quite special. It consolidates the articles that WeChat friends have recently clicked "♡" (that is, "recommended"). In January of this year, the "recommendation" function evolved from the "liked" function. Now, it is placed in a very prominent position in the official account information flow. Through testing, it has been found that the "Friend ♡" entrance often appears at the top of the official account information flow, even higher than the content of the official accounts that users have subscribed to. Currently, the general push order of the official account information flow from top to bottom is: "Quick News" - "Friend ♡" - "Subscribed Official Accounts" - "Followed Videos" - "看一看". The order of the top four positions often changes.

## The Transformation of the Traffic Pattern: Social Recommendations Emerge Prominently

In the context of the continuous decline in the traffic of official accounts, any change in the traffic distribution mechanism is of great significance. In recent years, WeChat has paid more and more attention to content distribution based on social relationships. This trend is of great significance to creators, not only related to their income but also concerning the fairness of traffic distribution and public discourse power.

Once upon a time, in 2017, the average open rate of WeChat official account articles was as high as 10%. However, with the diversion of public attention by short videos, by around 2020, this figure dropped sharply to 1-2%. According to the data from Xinbang, in 2024, official accounts cumulatively produced more than 444 million articles, but only 30,780 articles achieved a reading volume of over 100,000, accounting for less than 0.07%. Among them, the proportion of original articles was even less than 0.03%. Although it is still extremely difficult to obtain traffic in the overall official account market, the traffic distribution mechanism is changing for the better. Compared with 2023, the number of articles with a reading volume of over 100,000 in 2024 increased by 39,000, and this was achieved even when the total number of articles decreased (448 million articles were produced in 2023).

In the process of obtaining traffic, the role of social recommendations has become increasingly prominent. Taking a representative official account matrix account as an example, the proportion of traffic brought by "recommendations" in the total reading volume increased significantly from 24.3% in August 2023 to 45.9% in March 2025, even surpassing the contribution of "official account messages" and becoming the largest source of traffic for this account currently.

The WeChat team began to try to increase the weight of social recommendations in the traffic distribution of official accounts many years ago. In 2017, the "看一看" function was launched, and the like button for official account articles became "Nice". The content that users clicked as "Nice" would be synchronously recommended to "看一看". This function is located on the "Discovery" page of WeChat and is divided into two columns: "What Friends Are Reading" and "Selections", representing social recommendations and machine recommendations respectively. In June 2018, the subscription account information flow began to display the articles that friends had read (that is, "Read by X Friends"). In subsequent adjustments, part of the push content of the official accounts that users subscribed to was folded, and the weight of "看一看" in the information flow gradually increased. However, it should be noted that the "看一看" in the subscription account information flow is a combination of social recommendations and machine recommendations, which is different from the pure social recommendation "Friend ♡" nowadays. The core idea of the adjustment of the content distribution logic of official accounts in recent years has been to emphasize recommendations over subscriptions. The fact that the weight of the "Friend ♡" under testing in the official account information flow is higher than that of "看一看" is strong evidence of this.

## Opportunities for Small Accounts: Breaking the Monopoly of Head Accounts and Ushering in Growth Space

As a unique platform in the whole network that does not publicly display the number of followers, WeChat has always been committed to "de-heading" and "decentralization". For head accounts with a large number of followers, the adjustment of increasing the weight of "friend recommendations" is not good news. But for new creators and small accounts, it means the opening of growth space.

From the reading volume source data of a certain head official account in a week in March 2025, it can be seen that the share contributed by "recommendations" only accounts for 2.2%, which is much lower than the proportion of this category in its matrix small accounts. This is because head accounts have a large number of followers, and the official account message push can reach more users. Now, with the unchanged overall WeChat traffic and the increased weight of "social recommendations", small accounts can benefit more from this compared to large accounts. WeChat tends to give more opportunities to latecomers. This characteristic is not only reflected in the official account ecosystem but also in the video account field. In the 2025 WeChat Open Class, the video account team mentioned that currently, for new creators and ordinary UGC-oriented creators, the video account gives much more traffic inclination and support than other platforms.

## The Equalization of Content Distribution: The Return of Power to Users

The continuous increase in the weight of "friend recommendations" is of great significance. It means the transfer of content distribution power, which has gone through three transformations: from creators to the platform, and then to users. Initially, the display page of official accounts only presented the content of the subscribed accounts arranged according to the publication time. At this time, the content distribution power was in the hands of the creators. Later, it changed to a disrupted arrangement order and displayed the platform-recommended content that users had not subscribed to, and the power shifted to the platform. Now, on the premise of a disrupted order and folding part of the subscribed content, the content recommended by friends is preferentially displayed, and the power gradually returns to the users.

When the content distribution power is in the hands of users, it is relatively the most fair. When relying on the subscription relationship, early creators are likely to squeeze the space of latecomers due to the head effect, and platform recommendations may lead to unfairness and information cocoons. Under the "friend recommendation" model, although users with more friends have more power, the number of WeChat friends has an upper limit, so the power will not be overly concentrated. The current official account information flow has truly achieved the separation of power: "Quick News" is determined by the platform, "Subscription Messages" are determined by the creators, "Friend ♡" is determined by the users, and "看一看" is jointly determined by the users and the platform.

Zhang Xiaolong, the founder of WeChat, once said in the 2019 WeChat Open Class: "I have always believed that obtaining information through social recommendations is the most in line with human nature. Because in reality, when we accept new information, it is not the information that we actively search for in the library or on the Internet. In most cases, we obtain it through the recommendations of people around us. I don't want machine recommendations to just give users what they want to see." This set of "power separation" logic also applies to video accounts, but the system has relatively more authority in video accounts. At the 2021 WeChat Open Class, Zhang Xiaolong asserted that one day in the future, the consumption ratio of video views, follows, friend recommendations, and machine recommendations should be 1:2:10. That is, a person should on average watch 10 videos of followed accounts, 20 videos liked by friends, and 100 videos recommended by the system.

Looking back a few years ago, when the platform-recommended content of unsubscribed accounts was added to the subscription information flow of official accounts, the outside world was worried that WeChat official accounts would become the next "ByteDance Toutiao". But now it seems that the product at that time was not perfect. Although the WeChat team's progress is slow, it has always persisted, allowing the official account ecosystem to maintain its own uniqueness.

In the wave of the increasing weight of "friend recommendations", small WeChat official accounts have ushered in a rare development opportunity. For the vast number of creators, this is an opportunity to re-examine their creative direction and tap into their social potential. In the future, we may see more high-quality small accounts thriving in this soil and injecting new vitality into the official account ecosystem.