Kuaishou APP operation and promotion skills!

Almost two months ago, the editor launched a poll on WeChat Moments:

"As we all know, the top mobile app with the highest 7-day retention rate for new users in China is WeChat (nonsense), so which top app has the second highest 7-day retention rate? "

About 100 of my WeChat friends participated in the voting, and the ones with the most votes were: Alipay, Douyin, QQ, and Meituan. The correct answer - Kuaishou , received only 10% of the votes. Of course, the "7-day retention rate" data is based on the report of QuestMobile and may not be completely correct; in fact, the 7-day retention rates of QQ, Douyin, and Kuaishou are comparable. I was surprised that so few people guessed Kuaishou.

When I announced the correct answer on WeChat Moments, many people were shocked: "Is Kuaishou considered a top app?" "Kuaishou's 7-day retention rate is higher than Douyin? I don't believe it." "What's so interesting about Kuaishou?"... Most of my WeChat friends are in first- and second-tier cities, and they really don't use Kuaishou much. To be honest, I don’t use Kuaishou very often, but it is one of my favorite mobile apps; my “favorite list” includes WeChat, Bilibili, Pinduoduo, NetEase Cloud Music, Baidu Tieba, and Kuaishou.

When it comes to Kuaishou, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? "My friends, today I am going to show you how to eat a piece of raw fat meat"? A gangster-like tattooed uncle smoking and playing guitar? Can 1.36 million items be sold in one live broadcast? The leader of the three giants in the sinking market (the other two are Pinduoduo and Qutoutiao)? Both make sense, but neither is comprehensive. Anyway, Kuaishou is a very interesting place, very interesting. If you spend too much time on Zhihu, Tik Tok, and Weibo, we strongly recommend that you go to Kuaishou, where you can see the real China.

How Kuaishou rose to prominence: from a GIF community to a short video giant

Kuaishou was founded in March 2011 and was originally called "GIF Kuaishou". It is a mobile application for making GIF images. The real short video version was the V4.09 version launched in April 2014 with the dubbing function. As a tool product, all the content produced by GIF Kuaishou was disseminated on Weibo. At that time, interesting animated pictures could easily become popular on Weibo (Weibo was in a period of rapid development, with monthly active users approaching 100 million by the end of 2012). Kuaishou, as a mainstream GIF tool, also enjoyed this wave of dividends. The seed users of GIF Kuaishou can be aptly described as a group of creative GIF enthusiasts. "Parody and funny" are the mainstream styles of GIF, and "grassroots, loser, down-to-earth, rebellious, and young" have become the labels of this group of seed users.

• "Don't forward": Weibo's forwarding function was very popular at the time, and it was very easy to copy it, but Kuaishou did not do so. (About 80% of Weibo content comes from forwarding) The product thinking of founder Cheng Yixiao is "as long as a user posts a content, it will be displayed to you." This is a very equal logic. Once forwarded, the head effect will be very obvious, and there is no way to ensure that everyone will be seen fairly.

As a tool application, GIF Kuaishou initially used communities such as Weibo and Renren as its application scenarios to accumulate initial users. However, during its rapid development period, Kuaishou still has a sense of crisis and anxiety - "Tool-type applications can easily be replaced by others, and monetization also poses great challenges. Once they reach a certain scale, it will be difficult to change users' perception."

It is based on this kind of thinking and anxiety that Kuaishou embarked on a "painful" two-year transformation and exploration period. As early as the V2.4 version launched in October 2011, Kuaishou added the "Hot GIFshow" community module, which was regarded as the first step and preparation for the transformation of the community, and increased the operational strength of the community section. However, the operation of the community is very difficult. Users have long been accustomed to viewing Kuaishou as a tool. After half a year of operation, the "Hot GIFshow" received mediocre response, and the top-ranked videos had less than 10 reposts and comments. Kuaishou remains determined to transform into a community.

In version V3.40, which was launched in November 2012, a forced transformation was implemented, and "community" was made its main function without any warning. Version V3.40 is also the lowest-rated version in Kuaishou's history. This transformation can be said to be very abrupt and rough, and user reviews can be described as "a flood of bad reviews." The DAU also dropped from nearly one million at its peak to tens of thousands, and 90% of the daily active users were lost. In the following V3.X dozen versions, we added sections that are still preserved today, such as "Discover" (V3.40), "Same City" (V3.48), and "Follow" (V3.94) (enriched with functions such as "People Nearby", "Blacklist", "Weibo Entry", and "Who Likes Your Work"), and it took 8 months of iteration and operation to finally achieve results.

• "Generation Z": When Kuaishou transformed into a community in 2013, 87% of its users were born in the 1990s, and 46% were born in the 2000s. Many of those who like Kuaishou are elementary school students, middle school students, and college students. Kuaishou also meets the needs of young people to express themselves and expand their social circles. At that time, the three main types of content on Kuaishou were: beautiful selfies, children, and pets. Investors familiar with the Internet should now think of another well-known Internet company - Bilibili. They never thought that the two completely different companies with the same goal were so similar.

(Kuaishou V3.40, finally looks a bit like today’s Kuaishou)

In the early days of mobile Internet applications, as long as the product was good, there was no shortage of traffic.

In the summer of 2013, Kuaishou founders Cheng Yixiao and Su Hua met for the first time. This meeting, known as the "Long March Meeting", also laid the foundation for Kuaishou's "rocket-like development." Cheng Yixiao is good at products, and Su Hua is proficient in algorithms. Before coming to Kuaishou, Su Hua studied machine learning at Google China, and was later poached by Baidu to be responsible for the construction of the Phoenix Nest system. He is well versed in search and algorithm recommendations.

After half a year of running-in, Su Hua applied "algorithm recommendation" to content distribution, and the user experience was immediately improved. Thanks to his experience in the field of artificial intelligence and Baidu's business search engine Fengchao, Su Hua's methodology is exactly the same as Toutiao, and Kuaishou's application of algorithms was even earlier than Toutiao.

After the algorithm was launched in the spring of 2014, the slope of Kuaishou's downloads became noticeably steeper. By July, the number of daily active users exceeded one million, and by January 2015, it exceeded ten million. The 100-fold user growth rate in one year was enough to justify the "algorithm." (It should be noted that Kuaishou’s App Promotion Department was only established in the second half of 2016, and the above growth came from natural growth.)

• "The right time, the right place and the right people are all essential": Compared with the single factor determinism, I prefer the "suitability theory", that is, the right time, the right place, and the right person do the right thing. What is the right time? In 2013-2014, 4G/WIFI/smart phones became popular, mobile Internet was in its infancy, there were both demographic dividends and time dividends, a continuous influx of users and time waiting to be consumed. What is geographical advantage? After going through the pain of community transformation, the content generated by users belongs to the platform. In 2014, Kuaishou's average daily upload volume reached millions, and a large amount of user content was waiting to be distributed. What is harmony among people? We have both supply and demand, the key is how to match them efficiently. The algorithm is like an "accelerator". Users feel it very clearly. No matter what video they click on, more and more similar videos will appear, and before they know it, they will have both long duration and stickiness.

(Comparison of Kuaishou downloads and version updates on the App Store)

Top content creators often represent the tone of the community, such as "Li Jiaqi to Douyin", "Lao Fanqie to Bilibili", and "Sanda Ge to Kuaishou". From the end of 2014 to the beginning of 2015, Kuaishou experienced a wave of migration of YY anchors, who together with Kuaishou’s native content creators formed Kuaishou’s “grassroots Jianghu” ecology. These YY anchors have strong appeal, "jianghu spirit", high fan loyalty, and have formed native Internet celebrity guilds such as the "Sanda Family" on Kuaishou. This "grassroots Jianghu" also plays a role in promoting the user structure of "Tik Tok in the south and Kuaishou in the north" and "local trends sinking". These former YY anchors are widely present among the top content creators on Kuaishou.

The story begins with a man named "Li Tianyou". MC Tianyou used to perform live rap on the chat platform. His rich social experience and original ability made him quickly become popular.

In 2014, a friend told him that his rap song "Ladies, Listen Up" went viral on Kuaishou, so MC Tianyou registered an account and posted a seven-second video, "I won't change my name, my surname is Li Tianyou." He woke up and had 400,000 followers.

In October of the same year, MC Tianyou joined YY. Before the official live broadcast, MC Tianyou released a short preview video on Kuaishou. As a result, the number of viewers in the live broadcast room exceeded 10,000 on the same day of his first show on YY, making him the first anchor in YY's history to have more than 10,000 viewers in the live broadcast room on the same day. At that time, after years of development, YY's guild power became increasingly stable, and the upward channel for anchors became increasingly narrow. The rise of MC Tianyou undoubtedly stimulated other anchors on the platform, and a large number of anchors flocked to Kuaishou.

In February 2015, a post titled "Ranking of YY Anchors' Kuaishou Fans" became popular on the YY forum. The ranking included many typical live broadcasts that became popular with Kuaishou, including MC Tianyou, and called for "the future development trend to be mobile terminals, so anchors should quickly take advantage of it."

After a one-year sweet period (Kuaishou attracts traffic, YY realizes cash), Kuaishou launched the live broadcast function in April 2016, and many YY anchors began to "work part-time" on Kuaishou. However, YY was busy dealing with mobile live broadcasts such as Yingke, Huajiao, and Douyu and had no time to take care of other things. It was not until March 2017 that it issued regulations to severely punish gold medal anchors for working part-time on other sites, but it was already too late to reverse the situation. In fact, these top anchors also laid the foundation for Kuaishou to monetize in the fields of live streaming and selling goods.

• "Grassroots Jianghu": Most of the top anchors on Kuaishou have a "jianghu spirit". Among the top 20 anchors, 8 are from Northeast China and 4 are from Guangdong. Northeast China and Guangdong should be the places in China where "loyalty" is the most important. Except for the new popular stars - "CCTV News", Wang Zulan and Xie Na, most of the top anchors on Kuaishou are still grassroots or local tycoons. In addition, 8 of the TOP 20 anchors have been or are currently broadcasting on YY, especially Sanda Ge, Langzi Wu Di, Fangzhang and Liu Damei, who are quite famous in YY. YY, which has come all the way from online games, has the characteristics of sinking. It is not known whether "Kuaishou's sinking users chose YY anchors" or "these anchors led Kuaishou's sinking". In our opinion, it is more of "adding fuel to the flames".

(Most of the top anchors on Kuaishou come from YY, and most of them have a gangster vibe)

Kuaishou becomes TikTok-like, TikTok becomes Kuaishou-like

From MC Tianyou to Wang Zulan, Kuaishou is becoming more and more like Douyin, and of course Douyin is becoming more and more like Kuaishou, but the values ​​of the two will not change. For a product with nearly 400 million MAU and 200 million DAU, simply "sinking to rural areas and the north" is not enough to cover its users, whether from the creation end, with the participation of a series of stars such as Xie Na, Wang Zulan, and Deng Ziqi; or from the user end, the daily active users in first- and second-tier cities have increased from 40 million in January to 60 million in July (50% of the daily active users came from first- and second-tier cities), or the daily active users in the south have exceeded 80 million. Kuaishou is undoubtedly becoming more and more popular among the people.

Judging from the daily active user growth curves of Kuaishou and Douyin, Kuaishou is obviously more "Buddhist", while Douyin's growth is completely explosive. However, in the fierce competition, Douyin has also boosted Kuaishou's fighting spirit. From April 2018 to January 2019, the growth rate of Kuaishou's daily active users has also increased significantly.

Kuaishou does not have a manually operated traffic pool and is relatively restrained in its advertising placement (it began placing large amounts of advertising in elevators, subways, etc. in first- and second-tier cities in early 2018). However, Toutiao, which has rich experience in battle, is very "formidable" in terms of user growth, product operation and commercialization.

On the one hand, Douyin has made great efforts in its investment, and its presence can be seen in various pre-installed channels and variety shows. Behind it is its strong commercialization capabilities, which enable it to achieve self-sufficiency.

On the other hand, Toutiao has very strong operational capabilities. A series of operations drove the growth of Douyin by nearly 30 million during the Spring Festival in February 2018, and it directly surpassed Kuaishou in April. (In the early days, TikTok invested a lot of money to find choreographers from dance academies, and tested which music and dance were popular on Toutiao, concentrating traffic to the top and creating strong explosive power.) Don't fear the future, and don't dwell on the past, the short video revolution is not over yet.

• "Not Buddhist": Kuaishou, which has just passed its 8th year, has grown from the initial 4 staff members to 8,000 people, with 200 million DAU. But for most people, Buddhist attitude and slow company seem to be the labels of Kuaishou. The original intention remains unchanged - "Every ordinary person's life is worth recording, sharing, seeing and respecting." Now Kuaishou wants to become a great company rather than just create a great product. Next, Kuaishou will transform its organization, optimize its structure, and integrate the concept of pursuing perfection and speed into its work. The next goal: 300 million DAU by the 2020 Spring Festival.

(DAU of TikTok and Kuaishou, unit: 10,000)

It has been an open plan for Kuaishou to make a big effort during the 2019 Spring Festival and strive to achieve a DAU of over 300 million. This is both a defensive and an offensive plan.

• Defensiveness: Every Spring Festival travel season is accompanied by a “downward penetration” of TikTok, as returning college students and workers will bring TikTok back home. From 2017 to 2019, Douyin's continuous downward penetration did not affect Kuaishou, because the short video market was not yet saturated at that time; now, the penetration rate of short videos has peaked, and Douyin's increase in the sinking market is likely to be a decrease for Kuaishou, and Kuaishou will definitely not allow this to happen.
• Offensiveness: Currently, there is still a gap of about 20% between Kuaishou’s DAU and Douyin, but this gap can be made up. 2020 may be the last time window for top content apps to "expand their user base". The time will not come again, and it is worth it even if it costs a lot. Expanding the user base of the Kuaishou App will also help Kuaishou to achieve an App matrix similar to Toutiao and occupy more market share.

(A war is imminent, and it is hard to predict who will win)

Kuaishou's user stickiness comes from content tone and interaction

It has been proven that video creation brings higher user stickiness and higher retention. Compared with content consumers, video creators put more effort and more memories and fan relationships into the community, which brings higher loyalty. We analyze the ecosystem of various short and medium-length videos from the perspective of stickiness and interaction:

1. User relationship: The relationship between users and up-masters on Bilibili is like that of spiritual confidants, seeking resonance or a sense of imparting knowledge; the relationship between users and creators on Douyin is more like the relationship between idols and fans, which includes not only celebrities but also internet celebrities; the relationship between users on Kuaishou includes both idol relationships (head) and old iron relationships (middle and long tail).
2. User usage: Bilibili has the longest usage time, with an average daily usage time of about 82 minutes, and users watch about 21 videos every day; Douyin is second with an average daily usage time of 66 minutes, and users play more than 100 short videos every day; while Kuaishou has an average daily usage time of only 50 minutes (there are monthly fluctuations, and the average is slightly lower than Douyin), and the daily short video playback volume is estimated to be similar to that of Douyin.
3. User stickiness: Kuaishou's user stickiness ranks second in the entire market, second only to WeChat, with DAU/MAU reaching 58% (WeChat ranked first with 82%, QQ ranked third with 54%), and 7-day active retention rate of 92% (WeChat ranked first with 96%, QQ ranked third with 87%), slightly higher than Douyin (DAU/MAU 49% and 7-day active retention rate of 84%), and significantly higher than Bilibili (DAU/MAU 25%% and 7-day active retention rate of 67%), which is mainly due to the contribution of the creator ecosystem. The community ecology that has accumulated "hard work", memories and fan relationships is more stable, and "national creation" means high stickiness and high user retention. Perhaps everyone thinks that high stickiness simply means deep barriers. In fact, high stickiness (DAU/MAU and retention rate) is a necessary but not sufficient condition for high MAU. Kuaishou’s level may be higher than QQ.
4. Interaction situation: Kuaishou’s annual likes reached 140 billion (yoy+100%), the average daily likes per person was as high as 2.3, and the interaction rate was above 3% (you can compare it with your personal experience of liking posts on WeChat Moments), which is at a relatively high level.

(Comparison of user interactions among Kuaishou, Douyin, and Bilibili)

The differences in the content tones of Douyin, Bilibili, and Kuaishou can be seen from their slogans (although their content may not completely match the positioning of the slogan):

• Tik Tok means “discover a better life”, with the main theme being “trendy”, and it represents “the person you want to be, the life you want to live”. Since it is "better", there must be differences in quality, so the tendency of Tik Tok content to be concentrated is very serious, and 3-5% of the videos can account for about 80% of the click-through rate.
• Bilibili is "bullet screen animation live broadcast HD video", "bullet screen" emphasizes interactivity, "anime" emphasizes the second dimension, and "live broadcast" is a rapidly growing business. This reflects Bilibili's ambition to expand its user base and achieve "out-of-circle" while maintaining its stronghold of Generation Z.
• Kuaishou’s motto is “see every kind of life”, which is a bit intriguing. “Every kind of life”, of course, includes beautiful and trendy ones, as well as real and original ones, and also vertical and grassroots ones. You can use Kuaishou as Douyin or Bilibili, but the opposite is not true.

(There are so many types of UP hosts on Kuaishou that you can’t guess)

E-commerce sales: Kuaishou is more like Pinduoduo, while Douyin is more like Tmall

Some products are better sold through short videos and live broadcasts, while some products are more suitable for text presentation; although Kuaishou’s e-commerce business started relatively late (in 2018), in fact, the sales ability and GMV of the "old iron economy" have long been very mature. According to Nielsen research, 84% of merchants obtain commercial transactions on Kuaishou, of which 42% have annual revenue of more than 100,000 yuan, and Kuaishou accounts for the vast majority of their transaction volume (more than 56%), with each video bringing in an average revenue of more than 1,068 yuan.

In 2018, more than 16 million users earned income on the Kuaishou platform (3.4 million of them came from national-level poverty-stricken counties), and the number of people selling goods on Kuaishou in poverty-stricken counties across the country exceeded 1.15 million, with an annual sales total of more than 19 billion yuan, achieving "fairness and inclusiveness" in terms of bringing goods.

Currently, live streaming is still Kuaishou’s main form of selling products, and Kuaishou’s live streaming selling capabilities rank among the top on the entire Internet. The wedding was held at the National Sports Center "Bird's Nest", and stars such as Jackie Chan, Cecilia Cheung, and G.E.M. were invited to support. This "Mary Sue" story also came with an interesting result: the live broadcast of the wedding brought in 100 million yuan in sales.

This is "Ximba" (Xin Youzhi), Taobao's number one e-commerce influencer of the year, who has nearly 30 million Kuaishou fans, with the highest single-live broadcast sales of 1.36 million pieces (average order value of 66 yuan) and the highest single-live broadcast sales of over 100 million yuan (83% of which are beauty and personal care products). He is a true "traffic star." From the 2018 Taobao e-commerce expert annual sales list, we can find that Kuaishou accounts for 25% and they are all ranked high. The ability of its anchors to bring goods is even higher than that of Li Jiaqi, the "No. 1 Lipstick King on Douyin" (ranked 16th), which shows the strong ability of Kuaishou anchors to bring goods.

Here I would like to mention a very important fact. Kuaishou anchors sell many own-brand products. In addition, for "big anchors" selling brand products, the selling price is even lower than the brand's lowest price on the entire network (this is similar to Douyin). In fact, "live streaming with goods" not only brings real discounts to fans, but is also more efficient.

(Among Taobao e-commerce experts in 2018, five are from Kuaishou)

Kuaishou is more like Pinduoduo, while Douyin is more like Tmall, mainly in terms of categories, brands and prices:

What kind of products sell best on Kuaishou? People prefer to buy food and beverages (44%), facial care (25%), household items (10%), oral care (5%) and cosmetics (4%) in live streaming. In comparison, Douyin has very obvious differences in women's clothing (18%) and 3C digital products (10%), and is also higher than Kuaishou in household daily necessities (26%) and cosmetics (8%). (Although users on Douyin like to browse cosmetics the most, views ≠ sales) In addition, short video sales are slightly different from live broadcasts. The top three categories are books, household daily necessities and cosmetics.

(The GMV structure of Kuaishou is shown on the right, and the GMV structure of Douyin is shown on the right)

Let’s take cosmetics as an example to look at the differences in brands between Kuaishou and Douyin’s live streaming sales. The best-selling beauty brands on Douyin are mainly domestic brands, including "Perfect Diary" and "PROYA", etc., with makeup and facial care products accounting for the largest proportion; there are many white-label/own-brand products with the highest sales on Kuaishou, among which Xin Youzhi's 6 products are the best-selling, with sales of 50,000 units in a single live broadcast (brand names: Xin Youzhi and zuzu). In terms of price, low-priced products (0-30 yuan) are popular among users of various short video platforms, and users on Douyin are more accepting of prices, and products priced between 50-200 yuan are also quite popular; Kuaishou users prefer high-quality, low-priced products, and 80% of the products have a unit price of no more than 50 yuan.

(What is the best-selling product per customer?)

It is conceivable that the competition between Kuaishou and Douyin will continue for a long time. Kuaishou is neither a lower-tier city version of Douyin (it has a much longer history than Douyin), nor is it Tencent’s little brother (Tencent has not even increased its stake further or provided many resources), nor is it even a “short video platform” (it already encompasses everything).

After the rise of ByteDance, the Internet industry was divided into four major ecosystems - Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance; perhaps in 2-3 years, we will see the fifth ecosystem, namely the Kuaishou ecosystem. Although it is impossible to predict the future, our group of thieves has a strong intuition that Kuaishou’s future may far exceed the expectations of most investors and outsiders. However, the road needs to be paved step by step, and how to exceed expectations is still an unknown.

Author: Pei Pei, leader of the Phantom Thieves

Source: Internet and Entertainment Phantom Thieves (TMTphantom)