Tencent and Douyin Develop New Recommendation Strategies

Chinese internet giant Tencent is quietly testing a new recommendation project called “Penguin Huimai,” Tech Planet reported Wednesday. In addition, ByteDance’s short video app Douyin has again tested the use of a new recommendation function. First, the “Like” button on short videos has been changed to “Recommend,” and commodity links can be added to recommended content. This change links content recommendation to monetization.

Tencent‘s Penguin Huimai is a recommendation platform linking local stations and Tencent cooperative brands. Users can shop in the Penguin Huimai mini program on WeChat. The platform covers food and beverage, fresh food, personal care and other categories of goods.

Penguin Huimai has changed since its previous iterations. It now pays more attention to local communities apart from content recommendation, and increases order transaction rate and repurchase rate through refined operations.

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As for Douyin, after launching the function of “recommend pictures and texts” and testing a recommendation channel, the ByteDance-owned platform has tried several new ways of recommendation, replacing the “Like” button on short videos with a “Recommend” button. It also has added “notes” and “commodity” functions on the short video page. If users fill in information required by these two functions, the platform can push recommended content to users more accurately.

Douyin has also tested the function of commodity links in recommended content to help creators or merchants sell more goods.

Xiaohongshu is an example of a successful business model incorporating commodity recommendation. Inspired by Xiaohongshu, Chinese internet giants have launched 16 recommendation-based products and functions since last year, including Tencent’s e-commerce recommendation platform “Xiao’e Pinpin,” which was shut down not long ago, Douyin’s graphic recommendation function, Alibaba’s e-commerce recommendation app “Taibang” and more.