After Douyin’s fan base exceeded 100 million, I have some thoughts on short videos

As the new media director of Fan Deng Reading, I will share with us Fan Deng Reading's Douyin operating experience, and how it achieved the achievement of over 100 million Douyin matrix fans.

You must have seen "Fan Deng Reading" on Douyin, and more than once.

By 2019, Fan Deng Reading already had hundreds of matrix accounts on Douyin, with more than 100 million fans. How did they do it in just one year?

We contacted Dong Shiyi, the new media director of Fan Deng Reading , who was also happy to share Fan Deng Reading's Douyin operation experience with NetEase H5 fans.

The following is what Teacher Dong shared. Believe me, you will gain a lot after reading this practical experience.

“Fan Deng is so popular on TikTok!”

Ever since Fan Deng’s reading became popular on Douyin in 2019, this voice has never left my ears.

Everyone who came for the interview said that they knew Fan Deng through Douyin, and even when riding the high-speed train, they would encounter people sitting next to them watching Fan Deng’s videos on Douyin.

Then came all kinds of speculations, such as how many teams Fan Deng had dedicated to Douyin operations and how huge his organization was...

My friends on the Internet told me that I should write about how Fan Deng Reading built the Douyin matrix, but I always declined, saying there was nothing much to say.

Until they sent me materials and posters every day from various institutions that provided short video training in the name of Fan Deng.

It just so happened that my colleagues from NetEase H5 asked me to write an article. This was the first time we told the public about Fan Deng’s Douyin operating methodology.

In this article, I will fully restore Fan Deng’s reading Douyin from 0 to 1, and 1 to 59.

• How many of us are there?
• How do we divide the work?
• Why is Fan Deng everywhere?
• And some thoughts on how Douyin creates popular content

01 Skipping the most difficult part of short videos: creating high-quality content

In September 2018, two interns and I created the first Douyin account for Fan Deng Reading.

It’s hard to imagine that on a short video platform, and given that Fan Deng Reading itself has video content, the first video I posted on TikTok was a book list I made by recording the screen of my photo album.

At that time, Douyin book lists were very popular, and book accounts made a lot of money (until now) with crappy books like "The Way of the Wolf" and "Guiguzi". I made three or four of them, and all the books I recommended were good, but the data was very bleak.

This was my first doubt when I started using TikTok: Why are everyone making book lists, using the same format, at about the same time, with almost the same content, but they are popular but I am not?

At that time, I didn't have an answer.

Not long after, we tried audio + text effects . Yes, it was the time when Tik Tok text effects were the most popular.

3 million, 5 million, 10 million. The first viral video was about love. Its content was: Most people’s life partners are within three blocks of you.

The core logic of this video has also become the standard for our popular videos: "new interpretations of common content in life."

Sherlock Holmes can always find connections among ordinary clues, which ordinary people can see but cannot discover. U do see, but u do not deserve.

“Common content in life” solves cognitive problems.

Anyone who writes for a public account knows that hot topics are the easiest topics to write about because they enter the user's brain in advance and are accepted and thought about by the brain. Hot topics solve the problem of cognition.

The "new explanation" produces a sense of "gain" in users. So that's how it is. The feeling of sudden enlightenment stimulates users' various interactive behaviors - likes, comments and reposts.

From book lists to audio and text, as a platform with video as its core, we don’t even have any video content on short videos.

It wasn’t until a live clip from Teacher Fan Deng’s offline course “Replicable Leadership” that tens of millions of views completely told us that video platforms should display video content (how funny).

From then on, our popularity on TikTok was inevitable. The Fan Deng Reading APP itself has a large number of videos, and these are high-quality videos verified by millions of registered users.

For short video producers, there are two necessary conditions that cannot be avoided: producing high-quality content that suits the preferences of short video users and monetizing it.

The first one, we directly avoided it. There were many different opinions at the time. We should make original short videos ourselves, and we should reprocess and re-produce the videos on the APP. I blocked them all.

On short video platforms, high-quality content is the starting point of everything . Which is better, an original account or countless homogenized Fan Deng accounts?

At that time, when I only had 2 interns, homogenous accounts were the better way to go .

Now it seems that a lot of people agree with the "polymath theory", that a person and a company must develop in a balanced way, but balance means mediocrity.

It is not enough to have no weaknesses. You must have real strengths. These strengths determine how fast you can go. They are your natural advantages.

What are natural advantages?

My friend is an internet celebrity, and when photographers take pictures of her, the most common comments they make are "very good" and "one take", and "others would have to shoot a video like this at least five times."

A video needs to be reviewed 5 times, but because of her long-accumulated sense of the camera, it only needs one time.

The working time and manpower saved between one time and five times are not as simple as five minus one. The consumption will accumulate .

The natural advantage is that you can do things in this area with ease.

So if I’m a short video maker, do I have to keep making short videos? I also want to work on the community and do operations?

Look at the previous sentence again: This long board determines how fast you can go. Fast, not far or high. For example, the delivery of dou+.

When we are doing dou+ delivery , there is a basic formula : delivery volume = number of fans / number of views

Once the video playback reaches a certain critical point, the investment in dou+ will be increased. The best time was that 8,000 yuan brought an increase of 500,000 fans. Calculated by ROI, it is a very worthwhile deal.

Therefore, Dou+ only invests in potential hits with good data, which means that the advantage of the video itself being a hit can be expanded.

This will make us move fast, but if you want to go far, you must develop other capabilities based on your natural advantages. Building competitiveness in multiple dimensions will amplify your abilities several times.

The premise is: you have an ability that is good enough to be called a natural advantage.

So, why do I say grow other abilities, why growth?

02 Marginal incubation, matrix creation of popular accounts

Whenever you come across a blogger on TikTok, if you click on his other videos, there is a high probability that they look the same. The saying that TikTok is essentially a parody machine is so popular.

So what about our account? We have a large amount of video content, but IP is a video blogger who cannot customize the content.

Wouldn’t it be better if one account could post different content? Why do you need to create hundreds of accounts?

Because TikTok’s traffic pool is large enough, because we have enough content, and more importantly, we have thousands of independently operated authorized points.

From the very beginning, I designed our Douyin matrix operation model. By copying accounts in large quantities, I turned content copying into account copying, thereby obtaining Douyin traffic dividends and achieving the desired goals.

The above paragraph is all nonsense. From the very beginning, I never imagined doing the matrix this way; it just grew out of it. And this growth is based on our independent authorized points across the country.

Up to now, I am in charge of three full-time short video operations, one of whom only joined the team in November. With such a configuration, it is impossible to operate hundreds of Tik Tok accounts.

Among the 100 million fans on the entire network, many accounts come from our authorized points, or the B-end.

These authorized points are our operation centers, located all over the country, responsible for the promotion of Fan Deng Reading. Short videos are just an additional traffic platform added to the original promotional business.

To me, both the B-end and the C-end have a general term: users . What I want to do is to let this group of B-side users participate in the creation of short video accounts. How to do it? ——Appeal to reason + emotion.

Humans are rational and emotional animals, with different emphases on each. We can either appeal to rationality or emotion, or both. The most important thing is that what you give to others can be truly felt by them.

User thinking is so important that we have heard it so many times that our ears are callused, but many people on the Internet actually lack user thinking.

Many people know the AARRR theory, the most basic growth model, but from my observation, very few people can use it.

Taking the first A, Acquisition, as an example, everyone knows that various operational means should be used to acquire users, but few people will ask, when your operational means appear in front of users, what is the user's behavior?

When users see a fission poster, will they notice it at first glance? Will you participate after noticing it? Is the process smooth enough after participation?

I spent a long time communicating this concept with my design colleagues, because design is particularly prone to aesthetic cleanliness. A poster must be good-looking enough and highlight the brand.

No, a poster only needs to achieve its purpose. Fission is fission, and brand promotion is brand promotion. Just like many short video shooting courses nowadays are teaching everyone how to shoot beautifully, open Xin Douyin and take a look at the short video KOLs in various fields. How many of them have beautiful videos?

To explain this in a long paragraph, we need to go back to the operation of our TikTok matrix.

How do we operate with hundreds of accounts?

The answer is: no operation. What we do is to use a set of emotional + rational logic to allow the B-side to participate in the short video traffic.

And because they are the operators within the Fan Deng Reading System, if they have enough emotional intelligence, they will give them rationality, that is, benefits.

How to make them feel the benefits?

We have developed a complete traffic + monetization closed loop on Douyin, and after trying it on the B-side, we have created several good accounts. The rest will be a natural progression.

The role of role models is better than anything else. If other people around you are doing the same thing and getting good rewards, there is a high probability that you will take action.

Standing from the user's perspective to solve his problems is the same for both the B-end and the C-end. So simple? Is this how Fan Deng got his fan matrix of over 100 million fans on Reading?

The underlying logic in one sentence: add necessary conditions.

In our business model, there is only one necessary condition for creating a Douyin matrix of popular accounts: achieving a complete monetization closed loop on Douyin.

As long as this is in place, there will be no need for too many processes to promote matrix building, and the B-side will participate spontaneously.

This is another very simple truth. The success of a thing often only requires 2-3 necessary elements. I firmly believe in this truth and use it to promote the creation of the Douyin matrix.

Up to now, the operating personnel and operational capabilities of many authorized points are far better than ours. They have produced a lot of hot-selling products. In addition to fans and monetization, the most important thing that hot-selling products bring is data accumulation. When enough data is accumulated, it becomes a data model.

The inspiration for the above picture came from a guest’s sharing of a course on how to create an SOP.

When used in short videos, I divided them into four sections: practical/interesting/new knowledge/emotional. I gave each section a score, modified the table based on the performance of the video, and then guessed the data based on the data in the table.

And all of this is to pursue the algorithm of Tik Tok.

Remember the question that bothered me? Why are everyone making book lists, using the same format, similar time, and almost the same content, but they are popular but I am not?

This has to do with the algorithm mechanism of Toutiao: y=F(Xi, Xu, Xc), which represent content, users, and environment respectively. Content recommendation essentially solves the problem of matching people, content and environment.

This is an incredibly complex system.

Compared with the Douyin traffic pool algorithm circulating in the market: a piece of content enters 100 users, and decides whether to enter 1,000 users based on the performance of the 100 users, and then decides whether to enter the next traffic pool based on the performance.

This system is even more complex, and because of its complexity, Tik Tok’s algorithm is constantly evolving.

The same content, when sent by different people at different times and in different scenarios, will naturally have different effects.

03 The future of short videos

When I share in many places recently, I especially encourage everyone to make short videos. because:

1. There are still a large number of new mobile Internet users in rural China that have not been reached.
2. The first medium for post-00s to access the Internet has shifted from pictures and texts to short videos
3. Of the nearly 380 million people aged 60 and over in China, only 40 million are mobile internet users.
4. The rise of live streaming

Douyin's 400 million DAU and Kuaishou's 300 million DAU (even if most of them came from red envelope activities at the end of the year) are a ray of light after the sharp drop in new mobile Internet users in 2019, so if you are interested in the short video industry, then come and get it.

As for whether it is too late to enter now? In 2019, there are still a large number of people who are doing very well with public accounts!

Although everyone says that public accounts are difficult now, words will never die and can reach people's hearts better than videos.

Let me end with a quote I really like recently: listen to the majority, refer to the opinions of the minority, and make your own decisions.

Author: Dong Shiyi

Source: Dong Shiyi