The weight of "recommended by friends" has increased, and it's the spring for small official accounts on WeChat.

Text by | Wang Yuchan

Edited by | Qiao Qian

36Kr has learned that the WeChat team is expanding the testing scope of the "Friends ♡" entry in the official account news feed and has optimized the product by adding a label of "XX new updates" in the top - left corner of this entry.

In the "Friends ♡" entry, articles that recent WeChat friends have clicked "♡", that is, "Recommended", are folded. The "Recommendation" function evolved from the "In - view" function in January this year. This new entry is placed very prominently in the official account news feed. According to 36Kr's test, the "Friends ♡" entry often appears at the top of the official account news feed, sometimes even higher than the content of the official accounts subscribed by users. Currently, the push order in the official account news feed from top to bottom is: "Flash News" - "Friends ♡" - "Subscribed Official Accounts" - "Subscribed Videos" - "Discover". The positions of the top four are not fixed and often change.

Left: Screenshot of the official account news feed page; Right: Screenshot of the new news feed page after clicking on the Friends ♡ card

Given the downward trend of the overall traffic of official accounts, the change in the traffic distribution mechanism is very important for over 20 million official account creators. From the adjustment trends of the WeChat team in recent years, it can be seen that WeChat is paying more and more attention to content distribution based on social relationships. This is not only related to the income of creators but also to the fairness of traffic distribution and public discourse power.

Social recommendation is more friendly to small - scale accounts

In 2017, the average opening rate of WeChat official account articles was as high as 10%. However, as the public's attention was eroded by short - videos, this figure dropped rapidly to 1 - 2% around 2020.

Data from Xinbang shows that in 2024, official accounts produced over 444 million articles in total, with 307,800 articles reaching a reading volume of over 100,000, accounting for less than 0.07%. Among them, 118,700 were original articles, accounting for less than 0.03%.

Although it is still difficult to win the traffic battle in the official account market, the traffic distribution mechanism is improving. Compared with 2023, there were 39,000 more articles with a reading volume of over 100,000 last year - and this was on the premise that the total number of articles decreased (WeChat official accounts produced 448 million articles in 2023). 

In the process of obtaining traffic, the traffic from social recommendation has played an important role.

Sources of the reading volume of 36Kr's matrix account "36Kr Future Consumption" in a week in August 2023

Sources of the reading volume of 36Kr's matrix account "36Kr Future Consumption" in a week in March 2025

From the above two figures, it can be seen that the contribution of the traffic brought by "Recommendation" to the total reading volume of 36Kr's matrix account "36Kr Future Consumption" increased from 24.3% in August 2023 to 45.9% in March 2025, squeezing the share originally contributed by "Official Account Messages". Currently, the largest source of traffic for this account is recommendation, not push.

The WeChat team has been trying to increase the weight of social recommendation in the official account traffic distribution for many years. In 2017, the "Discover" function was launched, which was also the first time that WeChat showed users the content recommended by friends. At that time, WeChat changed the like button of official account articles to "Nice", and the content that users clicked "Nice" would be synchronously recommended to "Discover". It was initially an independent function module located on the "Discover" page of WeChat and was divided into two columns: "Friends in - view" and "Featured", one for social recommendation and the other for machine recommendation.

In June 2018, the subscription account news feed began to show articles read by friends (i.e., "Read by X friends"), which is similar to the social recommendation logic of "Discover". In subsequent adjustments, the push content of the official accounts subscribed by users was partially folded, while the weight of "Discover" in the news feed gradually increased.

It should be noted that the "Discover" in the subscription account news feed is also a combination of social recommendation and machine recommendation, which is different from the pure social recommendation of "Friends ♡" we mentioned.

Emphasizing recommendation over subscription is a core idea in the adjustment of the official account content distribution logic in recent years. The fact that the "Friends ♡" under testing has a higher weight in the official account news feed than "Discover" also proves this point.

As a platform that does not publicly display the number of followers, WeChat has always been committed to "de - heading" and "de - centralization". For top - tier accounts with a large number of followers, such an adjustment is not necessarily a good thing. However, for new creators, it means there is room for growth.

Sources of the reading volume of 36Kr's main official account in a week in March 2025

From the above figure, it can be seen that in the traffic sources of 36Kr's large - scale WeChat official account, the share contributed by "Recommendation" is only 2.2%, far lower than that of the matrix's small - scale accounts. This is because as an account with a large number of followers, the official account message push can reach more users. Therefore, when the overall WeChat traffic remains unchanged and the weight of "Social Recommendation" is increased, small - scale accounts can benefit more than large - scale accounts.

WeChat tends to give more opportunities to late - comers, which is not only reflected in the official account ecosystem but also in the video account. At the 2025 WeChat Open Class, the video account team mentioned that currently, the video account gives far more traffic inclination and support to new creators and ordinary UGC creators than other platforms.

Friend recommendation: Equal rights in content distribution

What does the increasing weight of "Friend Recommendation" represent?

Those who have more and better - quality social relationships will have more power in content distribution.

The owner of the power has changed three times. The display page of WeChat official accounts has changed from initially "only showing the content published by the accounts subscribed by users and arranging them by publication time" to "disrupting the arrangement order and showing the platform - recommended content that users have not subscribed to", and then to "on the premise of disrupting the order, folding part of the subscribed content and giving priority to showing the content recommended by friends". The power of content distribution has also gone through three rounds of changes, that is, "in the hands of creators" - "in the hands of the platform" - "in the hands of users".

Compared with the first two situations, when the power of content distribution is in the hands of users, it is relatively the fairest. Because when relying on the subscription relationship, early - coming creators are more likely to benefit from the head - effect and squeeze the space of late - comers, while platform recommendation is more likely to lead to unfairness and information cocoons. In the third situation, although users with more friends naturally have more power, there is also an upper limit to the number of friends on WeChat, and one person's power cannot be out of control.

The current official account news feed seems to have really achieved power - sharing - "Flash News" is determined by the platform; "Subscription Messages" are determined by creators; "Friends ♡" are determined by users; "Discover" is jointly determined by users and the platform.

"I've always believed that obtaining information through social recommendation is the most in line with human nature. Because in reality, when we accept new information, most of the time, we don't actively go to the library or the Internet to find it. Instead, we get it from the recommendations of people around us." Zhang Xiaolong, the founder of WeChat, said at the 2019 WeChat Open Class. "I don't want machine recommendation to just give users what they want to see."

This "power - sharing" logic not only applies to official accounts but also to video accounts - it's just that the system has more permissions. At the 2021 WeChat Open Class, Zhang Xiaolong said that in the early stage of the development of social recommendation, he wrote an assertion on the blackboard: One day in the future, the consumption ratio of video views from subscriptions, friend recommendations, and machine recommendations should be 1:2:10. That is, on average, a person should watch 10 videos from subscribed accounts, 20 videos liked by friends, and 100 videos recommended by the system.

Several years ago, when platform - recommended content that users had not followed was added to the subscription news feed of official accounts, the outside world was worried that WeChat official accounts would become the next "Toutiao". However, at present, it is obvious that the product at that time was still an "unfinished" one. Although the WeChat team is still as "slow" as ever, the official account ecosystem has not lost its uniqueness.