Ten thousand words long article: take you to see through the ecological layout of TikTok!

I started paying attention to and studying Tik Tok in April last year, and wrote down a lot of my thoughts and experiences over time, but I never organized them in full. It just so happened that Qun Xiang invited me to make an internal sharing session some time ago. I took this opportunity to force myself to sort out my research, observation and practice over the past 20 months.

Before we begin, let’s talk about the macro: “Why TikTok?”

Everyone should have deeply felt the popularity of TikTok in the past two years: from the addiction of C-end users, to the pursuit of B-end brands, to the desperate efforts of e-commerce group leaders. Why has TikTok become a national phenomenon?

From a macro perspective, it is based on ByteDance's independence. Since it is not "dependent" on any giant, it can cooperate with any giant, which enables it to be connected to all efficient economies, such as Taobao Alliance and JD Alliance.

In addition, the uniqueness of Douyin’s product characteristics and operating strategies are important reasons why it has been able to grow to its current size. Today we will sort out the uniqueness of Douyin one by one to help everyone find their own business niche on the Douyin platform.

Siyi specifically reminded me many times that the users of Qunxiang are all high-level players, and asked me not to talk about trivial details or introductory knowledge; nor should I talk about overly abstract and unrealistic gameplay. This is quite difficult. After all, I am not the kind of big boss who retires after achieving success and sees through everything. I am also one of the players who are digging for gold during the bonus period. I can only try my best to tell you what I have seen, understood and tried, and I hope that you can gain something.

1. Let’s start with TikTok

Short videos were not invented by TikTok, but TikTok promoted it. We cannot determine whether "the times create heroes" or "heroes create the times", but what we see is that Douyin stands in this position. Then we must understand it, go deep into it, and even penetrate and integrate it.

In this part, I sorted out three key points: ideas, gameplay and algorithms.

1.1 The idea of ​​TikTok

ByteDance, as a company, has defined how current Internet traffic is distributed. Searched ten years ago, subscribed five years ago, and distributed now.

Under the new traffic distribution method, all business is worth doing again. Some can be copied directly, such as Toutiao; some require timing, such as Douyin.

1.1.1 Video is the new era

If we rank the user preference of known media, I think it should be: brain sensing>VR>video>sound>image>text.

Since entering the mobile Internet era, pictures and texts have always been the mainstream media. WeChat public accounts, Weibo and other picture-based platforms have dominated as the mainstream channels for netizens to obtain information for a full five years. When you read the news, you see pictures and texts; when you watch entertainment stars, you also see pictures and texts. No matter how good the content is, anyone would get tired of it if they "play" like this for five years.

However, this cannot be achieved simply because users like it. Transformation requires the right time, place and people.

First of all, users have to be able to afford it. When China Mobile reduced its fees for the first time in 2015, the 4G data package it provided was 10 yuan per GB, and it could only be used at night. If you want to use it during the day, it costs 30 yuan for 500M. If you calculate that each 15S video is 5M, it will be used up after 25 minutes of watching Douyin. Videos can only be watched in a Wi-Fi environment, which means that videos cannot become a mainstream communication medium that can be enjoyed anytime and anywhere.

But by 2016, this situation changed with the emergence of data packages like Dawang Card and 20G/month. Looking at the changing trend of mobile Internet access traffic in the CNNIC statistical report, it started to grow rapidly in 2016.

This is a perfect time for the development of the Internet: video has a chance to rise.

1.1.2 Young people are the new era

After talking about the trend of videos, let’s look at a macro trend: the change of young people’s “toys”.

In 2005, young college students used QQ+Renren; in 2010, college students used QQ+Weibo; but by 2015, you will find that college students are still using QQ+Weibo. It is only a social software, but there is no "new community" to express themselves and distinguish themselves from the "old ladies" of other generations.

So TikTok came out in 2016. In addition to the coincidence in timeline, Douyin also coincides with another advanced dimension of Internet development: PC-mobile graphics and text-mobile video.

For the Internet, whoever gets the attention of young people gets the entire Internet. (Here is a guess as to why it is 5 years: in my opinion, this has something to do with the 4-year school system for college students. So if you ask me how long the bonus period of TikTok will last, let me guess that August 2020 will be its peak.)

1.1.3 E-commerce in every new era

The reason why Douyin was able to quickly transform from an app for young people into a national-level app is that it quickly integrated into e-commerce monetization and provided official-level monetization assistance. Content producers will work harder to produce content only when they can make money. This is a virtuous cycle.

The urge to buy things is driven by both material and spiritual needs of human beings, so it will never decline. Almost all business activities are based on transactions, and the survival of any company is ultimately related to buying. Douyin is one of the smartest traffic platforms, and it integrated e-commerce when the traffic body was just taking shape.

Let’s look at some data. The growth rate of e-commerce transaction scale has been above 10% in the past five years. With the popularization of the Internet in third-tier and lower cities, the transaction scale of e-commerce will continue to grow.

If you look at the development history of Internet traffic in recent years, most of the traffic in every traffic depression eventually went to e-commerce: in the PC era, the monetization model of webmasters was Baidu Alliance and Taobao Alliance; in the picture and text era, there was content e-commerce, in the social ecology of WeChat, there was mini-program e-commerce, and in the short video era, there was short video e-commerce - the two words Taobao and distribution have accompanied generation after generation of Internet monetization players.

User attention is traffic.

People's attention can be divided into two parts: external and internal. External is social interaction, on WeChat; internal is entertainment, on Weibo, Xiaohongshu and short video platforms.

Because it is impossible to link to Taobao, WeChat forcibly gave rise to Pinduoduo. But platforms like Weibo and Xiaohongshu are not that powerful. Weibo only sells traffic and not goods; and Xiaohongshu is not popular enough.

So, Tik Tok came out. We can regard this as the "harmony among people" factor, although it is not because of the harmony among people, but because of the disharmony among people.

1.2 How to play Tik Tok

ByteDance is definitely not the only company that saw the trends I analyzed above at the same time as TikTok. Why has TikTok become the traffic leader? The official account product overview's "In-depth Analysis┃Douyin, which has been online for only 500 days, has defeated Kuaishou and Meipai. What did this team do?" sorted out the reasons for Douyin's success 500 days after Douyin was online. Based on this article, we will sort out Douyin from three dimensions: brand promotion, product operation and core.

1.2.1 Brand promotion

Douyin’s earliest product was called A.me. It was renamed Douyin three months later, and then received a million-dollar seed round investment from ByteDance 20 days later.

This product first came into the public eye in March 2017, but people didn't remember it. Everyone should still remember the incident where Yue Yunpeng posted a video on Weibo looking for someone who looked particularly like him. That video had the TikTok watermark.

Douyin’s PR activities in the following six months were clearly targeted at young people: Wu Yifan shot the promotional video for China’s Hip-Hop x Douyin, appeared on Happy Camp, and landed on Day Day Up. Then there is the sponsorship of the New Year’s Eve concerts of Jiangsu Satellite TV, Zhejiang Satellite TV and Hunan Satellite TV, which are aimed at mass entertainment.

In this combined PR strategy, you will find that the team focused on three words: youth, music and joy. And these three words all revolve around two words: young.

1.2.2 Product Operation Side

PR is a means of attracting traffic, but the key to keeping a product alive is to keep users on the platform. If TikTok is like the reservoir in elementary school math problems that fills and drains water at the same time, it will not become a traffic vortex, but can only be regarded as a traffic pipeline.

To become a traffic black hole, you must first become a traffic depression and be able to retain all the traffic it attracts. This tests Douyin's products and operating methods.

On the operational side, Douyin has hired a large number of professional music and dance talents to shoot and upload content, and they are all said to be students from the Communication University. Exquisite makeup, cool dance, rhythmic music, and beautiful boys and girls, who can resist it!

The purpose of professionals' participation is not just to fill the content. They are divided into multiple groups and participate in multiple topics and challenges planned by the authorities at the same time. Imagine if in ten videos you saw five different pretty girls/boys dancing the same dance to the same music. As a young person, would you also dance along?

The task on the operational side has been completed, and the product will take over next.

If users have the urge to follow but find that they cannot shoot good-looking videos, their enthusiasm will be greatly reduced. When they opened TikTok, they found that they looked better than in Meitu XiuXiu, with editing and music also done in one go, which was a completely different scene.

In Tik Tok, no matter how good or bad you are, what is recorded is definitely the beautiful self.

1.2.3 Data-driven

There is a very good sentence in "Zhang Yiming's APP Factory", I excerpted it:

"At the end of 2017, Douyin was too small to be taken seriously by the giants and was just one step in Toutiao's short video strategy. But the team in charge of the project declared that as long as weighted promotion was given, it would not be a problem to surpass Kuaishou." At that time, Douyin's DAU was less than 30 million, while Kuaishou had already exceeded 100 million. The internal feedback was questioning: "You are so young, yet you dare to brag so much." The confidence comes from the data in the background. Tik Tok’s retention rate is already quite impressive, indicating that user stickiness is high enough. Retention determines whether a new product can obtain traffic allocation. Only in this way can it be verified. ”
Zhai Wenting, public account: Blue Hole Business Zhang Yiming's APP Factory

Data-driven is prevalent in the entire process of Douyin, from growth to operation to commercialization. Because TikTok’s distribution is algorithm-driven, data is their life.

On Weibo, buying vermicelli is called "paying protection fees", but on Douyin, investing in dou+ is called "leverage". Although both Weibo and TikTok spend money to buy traffic, they have completely opposite reputations. This is the advantage of data-driven algorithm distribution.

So what is the algorithm of Tik Tok?

1.3 Tik Tok’s Algorithm

Toutiao can be considered the first in China to use algorithms to distribute content, or it can be said to be the best application case. The entire ByteDance is algorithm-driven, and TikTok is no exception.

ByteDance once used a 30-page PPT to publicly disclose the principles of their algorithm. Yan Zehua, senior product manager of Toutiao, also wrote a book titled "Content Algorithm: An Efficient System for Turning Content into Value", both of which clearly explained the distribution logic of Toutiao. I will summarize their content here for you. I highly recommend everyone to read these two materials. The logic of the algorithm distribution era is completely different from the previous search era and subscription era, and algorithm distribution is the future.

1.3.1 How the algorithm makes recommendations

The premise of algorithm recommendation can be summed up in one word: judging people by things.

Only when the algorithm knows the attributes of the content and people’s preferences can it make a match. In the era of pictures and texts, the content of a picture or text can be identified through text analysis and image recognition. Combined with the attributes of the author of the article, a rough judgment can be made about the article. For the user, it can be judged by his basic information and his reading habits.

Once the content semantics are identified and user interests are determined, the content can be recommended to designated users. In order to judge the value of content and optimize the accuracy of recommendations, Toutiao will make recommendations at different levels, which is what we often call the 500 or 1000 traffic pool concept.

This is the basic logic of recommendation. To achieve accurate and efficient distribution, more algorithmic principles need to be combined. For Toutiao products, collaborative filtering is a very important recommendation principle.

Collaborative filtering is divided into two types: people-based collaborative filtering and object-based collaborative filtering. For Tik Tok, since video content is not as easy to identify as pictures and texts, people-based collaborative filtering accounts for a larger proportion. Next, let’s talk about Douyin’s “people-oriented” approach.

1.3.2 People-oriented

Let’s take an example: A and B have the same preferences. The system will recommend the videos that A likes to B, because from the perspective of “birds of a feather flock together”, B should also like them. This is the basic principle of collaborative filtering.

In Douyin's recommendation logic, human-based collaborative filtering accounts for a large proportion, so the more videos are liked, the more exposure they will get, and the less liked videos are, the less recommended they will be by the system.

Similarly, account tags are very important in the entire short video marketing, which is why there is a widespread saying that one needs to “maintain an account” to do Douyin. I am not sure whether there is such a thing as maintaining an account, but I strongly agree with the importance of account tags. When your account has tags, the system will know to whom your content should be recommended. Only when the video is recommended correctly can it get effective feedback and the system will increase its recommendation of your video. This is another virtuous cycle.

2. Commercialization of Tik Tok

After talking about the rise of TikTok, let’s get back to the point: the commercialization of TikTok. This section was originally intended to review the commercialization process of Tik Tok, but considering that everyone is a high-level player, I will not go into detail. In this section, we will talk about the players in TikTok’s commercial ecosystem.

2.1 The commercialization process of Douyin

2.1.1 Becoming a traffic vortex

At the end of 2017, Douyin's DAU was only 30 million. After a period of new user growth during the Spring Festival, by June 2018, the DAU reached 150 million; in January 2019, the DAU reached 250 million. According to the official data released by TikTok in July this year, the global DAU has reached 320 million. If you draw a graph with these data, you will find that it is almost a straight line! I just drew a picture for you to see:

This is not the most critical point. If you compare the daily and monthly active users of Douyin in each period, you will find that one out of every two people who opened Douyin in that month watches Douyin every day. If you look at the daily and monthly active data on the major APP charts, only WeChat, QQ and Alipay have such stickiness. The monthly active users of other entertainment apps are about 4 times the daily active users (that is, only one person who opens the app once a day for every four months).

If this isn't a traffic vortex, what is this?

2.1.2 Transformed into Weibo

What’s the first thing to do to get traffic? Will you restrain yourself in serving users like WeChat does? No. As an entertainment app, Douyin understands the level of user minds it will occupy. It is not a highly-bundled social app that users will not abandon, so Douyin started commercialization as soon as it became the vortex, targeting Weibo.

In September 2018, Douyin launched the Star Map platform, which is comparable to Weibo's micro-tasks. Like Weibo, if influencers do not accept advertisements through the Star Map platform, they will be demoted. But Douyin is more ruthless: any company can directly screen influencers through the Star Map platform, and agents do not receive any rebates or advantages. This makes those unofficial subsidiaries that don't care about payment terms extremely happy. As far as I know, when Pinduoduo found out that it could also invest in influencers, it directly recharged 5 million...

Compared with the closed data of official accounts, customers can view the account data of all influencers on the Star Map platform, and even the completion rate and interaction data of the task videos accepted by the influencers will be provided.

Obviously, all of this is the traffic monetization method that Douyin has already prepared for players.

2.1.3 The Ultimate Solution of One-Step Connection and Monetization

It is actually very difficult to monetize traffic through brand advertising. On the one hand, only companies with high brand premiums can afford to hire influencers to shoot a short video that cannot quickly generate conversions. On the other hand, it is difficult for ordinary players to accumulate fans or personal influence to a level that can bring a premium to the brand. In other words, this is how the top players play, just like WeChat official accounts and Xiaohongshu.

Douyin was not satisfied with this, and directly connected to the terminal of monetization - e-commerce. If you look at the time when Douyin launched its window display, it was in May 2018, which is earlier than the Star Map platform. At that time, the threshold was 30,000 fans, but now it only requires 10 videos + personal certification (real-name authentication is only required when writing articles).

The Taobao Affiliate model has been used in the Taobao ecosystem for more than ten years. Many people have achieved financial freedom through Taobao Affiliate. Some time ago, Lao Hu wrote "10,800 Words In-depth Analysis of Taobao Affiliate, the Mysterious Money-Making Industry" and reviewed the first three golden histories of Taobao Affiliate. In my opinion, selling products through short videos on Douyin will become the fourth golden age of Taobao.

2.2 Players in the Douyin Commercialization Ecosystem

As a product that makes profits by attracting users' attention, Douyin has three main forms of commercialization: brand advertising, information flow advertising, and diverting traffic to e-commerce platforms. This provides three money-making models for entrepreneurs in the ecological niche: increase their own traffic value by producing high-quality content, bring premium to the brand and gain profits; gain profits by optimizing the conversion effect of Douyin information flow ads; and earn commissions and gain profits by guiding viewers to designated stores to purchase goods through content.

Let’s talk about it below.

2.2.1 IP Players

IP-based content is an important way to accumulate fans and a means to obtain high brand premiums. This type of players are at the top of the food chain in every ecological niche. The first batch of famous IPs on Douyin include Talking Liu Erdou, Daigula K, Fei Qiming, and Yichan Little Monk. Their main way of taking orders is Star Map. By applying for a Star Map account as a customer, one can directly view IP quotations, advertising video data, fan portraits, etc., which is about 100 times more convenient than advertising on a public account.

This type of IP comes from MCN agencies that entered Douyin earlier, such as Cantou Video and Erka. While we envy the big IPs who are overwhelmed with orders, MCNs also have their own anxieties.

On the one hand, it is because Tik Tok is mainly based on algorithm recommendations, and the number of fans in this model is not as important as it was in the subscription era. Although high-fan accounts will have a higher basic recommendation weight, it is still lower than the number of fans, which is equivalent to Weibo. The recommended traffic of Douyin is guided by the official direction.

We have talked about Douyin's operating strategy before, which is to maintain traffic flow through official promotions such as topic challenges. When the official adjusted the content orientation, for example, from dancing to animation, the traffic that originally went to Daigula K will flow to Yichan Little Monk. And this is something that IP cannot control.

In addition to the IPs produced by regular MCNs, there is another type of IP, which is the stars on the AiDOU list. I personally think that Tik Tok has the potential to become a platform for celebrity promotion in the future. We will not go into details about this. Bosses with resources can make the plans themselves.

2.2.2 Information Stream Advertising Players

There are two types of entrepreneurs in this ecological niche. One type is advertising agents who help clients optimize their advertising based on their experience in advertising on WeChat Guangdiantong. This is also their only advantage. Unlike Guangdiantong, the preferential policies that ByteDance provides to agents are not as great as those of Tencent. In other words, as long as you can optimize the delivery, you can also invest on your own.

The second type of player is Luban E-commerce, which is what everyone calls the second-tier e-commerce. I don’t know how effective it is now, but earlier on, Luban E-commerce made tens of millions a year by relying on headline information flow advertising, which was said to be easy.

I am not familiar with how to play in this ecological niche, so I can only touch upon it briefly. If you want to know the details, you will have to dig deeper. Let’s focus on the third wave: the army of short video sales

2.2.3 Short video sales force

We said before that e-commerce always follows traffic. Wherever there is traffic, there is e-commerce. As a whirlpool of current traffic, Tik Tok is neither as restrained nor as timid as WeChat. In May 2018, we invited an internal audience to launch a large number of display windows, and then we could insert products into the video to directly sell the products.

If you have heard of Taobao Affiliate, seeing this set of gameplay should be equivalent to seeing money. Taobao Affiliate has been diverting traffic from the earliest PC site to Weitao and then to WeChat communities. It is a tortuous but also very profitable process, and Douyin will definitely not miss it.

A recent example is the case of a friend of mine who earned 950,000 yuan in commission from 3C products in 4 days. Another distant example is the leader of a Vitamin E milk group who earned 4.5 million yuan a month. It’s so exciting that it’s no exaggeration to say that Douyin is the fourth golden age of Taobao.

Let’s take a look at who is making money by selling products through short videos?

1) Taobao shop owners

Of course, it’s not just Taobao shop owners, there are also shop owners from JD.com, NetEase Kaola and Vipshop. Why is it “shop owner” instead of “brand”? There is a logic of "standard products" and "non-standard products" here, which is an important factor in whether you can make money under the general trend of short videos.

Let’s briefly explain the concepts of standard products and non-standard products: Standard products are products with unified market standards. Such products often have clear unified specifications, models or product styles in the market, and homogeneity is very serious. Users are already relatively clear about the functions of this type of product, and those with strong functionality are in the standard product category. Many times, users have sufficient understanding and knowledge of the product, so you don’t need to introduce too many functions. Customers already have a certain understanding of the product before they come to search, such as mobile phones, cameras, etc. Unlike standard products, non-standard products have no unified market standards, nor unified specifications or models. There are many choices of non-standard products, such as clothing, shoes, bags, household items, etc. We need to provide more product introductions and product descriptions because customers do not have a clear goal when they think of purchasing non-standard products, and their purpose is not strong.

Do you feel it? Non-standard products have two characteristics: there is no uniform specification and therefore no uniform price; and there is a need to promote products of different specifications, which means that they need to be driven through multiple channels.

Everyone knows about the vitamin E milk that was a hot seller some time ago. The sales team really made money. According to the data visible from Taobao Alliance, the Xiehe flagship store spent 9.94 million in commissions in the past 30 days, and the sales volume visible on the Taobao front end was 1.5 million+. Not to mention making money, the store traffic alone is at least over 100 million.

In addition to these big-name store owners, small C store owners are also welcoming spring this year. In the past, every Double Eleven and Double Twelve, C store owners would take a holiday because all the traffic went to the big-name flagship stores that were holding promotions. But this year, due to the introduction of TikTok traffic, C store owners who mainly sold non-standard products entered a 7X24 overtime state. Here are a few pictures for you to see:

Those who sell mobile phone cases and tempered films have a monthly commission of 1.45 million yuan;

For fruit sellers, the monthly commission is 4.76 million

Selling garbage bags and household items, monthly commission expenditure is 1.17 million

Guess how much commission Job's Tears Health Tea spends in a month?

2) Grass-planting team

Who earned the commissions paid by the store owners in the screenshot just now? About half of the money was earned by short video influencers (the other half was earned through other distribution channels such as social group buying and e-commerce). The sales of goods through short videos are also clearly divided into different levels. Lao Hu has talked about the evolution history of Taobao Affiliates in the previous Night Talk, so we will not repeat it here. You can read Lao Hu’s ten thousand-word article.

The influencers who sell goods are not like the IP accounts mentioned above, where multiple people maintain a small number of accounts; the profitable influencer team is “a small number of people maintaining a large number of accounts”. How large is it? It could be a table, a shelf, or even a floor or a warehouse. You can recall the reports about blockchain mining machines or group control in previous years to get a feel for it.

This is the business that is closest to money, and each routine can generate hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in revenue. So in this circle, you can only see two ways of playing, one is to barely keep up and drink some soup, and the other is to find out later that there is no soup at all.

In order to prevent being copied by their peers, they don’t even want their products to be included in the sales list, so they operate the products in the form of store groups. It is not convenient to disclose the specific routines. After all, I still want to stay in the circle. I will send you two screenshots of the earnings to cheer you up:

3) Expert

The experts here are different from the "grass-planting teams" and IP players mentioned above. They are real experts who use high-quality content to gain traffic and bring goods. There is no doubt that high-quality content is always valuable.

In order to allow those who work hard to produce content to earn money, the GD+ advertising type was launched. When you are watching videos, you will see an advertisement with a blue diamond. The style is extremely similar to a shopping cart, but when you click on it, you will see a landing page.

The settlement model for this type of advertising is not based on commission, but rather on exposure as the evaluation criterion. Grass-growing products with plots or stories are more popular with advertisers and also more popular with Douyin. After all, selling products is not the core purpose of Douyin. Only high-quality content can retain users, and only by retaining users can better commercialization be achieved.

2.2.4 Attracting players

Three months ago, when I was still at Xinbang, I wrote a semi-annual report on the content industry. At that time, the report devoted a lot of space to talking about private domain traffic, which shows the importance of private domain traffic. The reason it's important is simple: it makes money. Xinbang has a public account called Private Domain Operation Guide, which contains many articles on examples of using TikTok to direct traffic to WeChat’s private domain traffic pool for monetization. The most recent one is called "A course attracts 2 million customers. How does Snail Insurance play with private domain traffic?" 》 talks about how insurance institutions use Douyin to divert traffic to WeChat.

Compared to using WeChat official accounts to write content to increase followers and then pouring it into the private domain traffic pool, Douyin is really too fast. High-quality content can be weighted by the algorithm and then quickly obtain traffic. In June last year, a friend of mine used an extremely crude method to upload videos of young Japanese and Korean actors. He was able to attract about 3,000 fans to his personal WeChat account every day, and then post lipstick raffles on his Moments to cash in. For two consecutive months, his turnover reached over 2 million, with a very high profit margin.

2.2.4 Content Producers

The content producers mentioned here are not creators, but teams that generate revenue by producing content for others. The TikTok ecosystem has now formed a highly assembly-line operation, where creators only need to provide scripts and ideas, and the production team can implement them in an assembly-line manner. As far as I know, there is already such a professional team operating in Hengdian. You only need to give them a short script of a few hundred words, and they can organize the actors and start working in minutes. 5000 pieces can produce dozens of pieces every day.

Douyin officials have even built a platform to match these transactions. You can see a platform called Jihe on the Star Map platform, which provides a "package" model.

The so-called arbitrage using information gaps is nothing more than this. For example, you operate on behalf of a company and charge a monthly fee of 50,000 yuan. You shoot a video every week. The cost of content production per month according to the most expensive package is only 10,000 yuan. You use another 10,000 yuan to hire someone to be responsible for the operation, and the gross profit per month is 30,000 yuan. Make money without doing anything.

By the way, a professional voice actor, like a radio or TV host, gets 60 yuan per minute, or 40 yuan for 100 words.

2.2.5 Knowledge-paying players

There are "teachers" in every industry, and this is more obvious in the Douyin ecosystem. The reason is that acquiring traffic in TikTok is too risky, and the probability of winning is quite high. Since I first started studying TikTok in May last year, it has mushroomed like mushrooms after rain. Now it has derived more models, which can be roughly sorted out here:

Make money series: It’s very simple, just package a set of courses and add the most conventional distribution model, and you can gather thousands of people in minutes.

"Part-time" series: a set of courses is packaged for only 9 yuan, and the whole course focuses on practical skills without bragging. However, after completing the course, the account will belong to the instructor, and you have to complete a series of sales tasks according to the instructions. Is your idea clear now? Yes, a closed loop has been formed with the above grass-planting team. In addition to supplying accounts, the team can also use training accounts to test products and gameplay.

3. Entering the Douyin ecosystem

After talking about so many bonuses, you may wonder if it is too late to join the game now? It’s actually not too late!

3.1 It’s not too late!

From the user's perspective, TikTok has the potential to become a national app because it is now "national" enough. Currently, the daily active users of Douyin in July are 320 million, and the daily active users of the national APP WeChat are 1 billion. Assuming that half of the people really don’t seek entertainment, Douyin still has an incremental 180 million users, so the user growth dividend is still there and it is not too late to enter the market.

From a commercial perspective, if we compare it with WeChat, based on my current perception of Douyin, it should be in a period of wild growth, that is, marketing accounts are dominant, and it can grab a lot of traffic, but it is not detailed or precise enough. WeChat public accounts reached their peak in the 4th and 5th years. As the more advanced the technology, the shorter the historical cycle, we assume that Douyin reached its peak in the 4th year, which should be 2020. You still have a chance to get on board, and perhaps your peak will coincide with the peak of TikTok.

From the gameplay perspective, to be honest, the current gameplay is not much different from five or ten years ago. There should be new gameplay under the new media, but Douyin has not been sufficiently developed in terms of marketing or commercialization. An obvious example is that my friends who are producers of TV series and online movies have just started to invite me to dinner to talk about Douyin...

3.2 Change your mindset

Now that you are on board, there are several ways of thinking that must be changed: from picture and text thinking to video thinking, from fan thinking to algorithm thinking, from "soft article" thinking to "buy it" thinking.

3.2.1 From text and picture thinking to video thinking

I made a comparison and found that the overlap between the top 500 public accounts on Xinbang and the top 500 influential accounts on Douyin is less than 30%! One reason for this is that it is difficult to turn around when the team is so powerful, but the more important reason is that pictures, texts and videos do not reflect the same way of thinking. Pictures and texts, especially texts, are in a careful reading mode. Fans can think while reading. Fans can control their own progress, and there will be no sense of lag even if it is temporarily paused. However, the progress of the video is not controlled by the audience. It will automatically advance over time. In-depth content or content that is not clear at a glance is difficult to gain user recognition.

The quality of text is mainly measured by depth, which can be considered a single dimension; but the quality of video must consider both the depth of the content and whether the user can accept it on the timeline. You need to remind yourself of this all the time when you are creating. This is the reason why many graphic and text creators have not seen any improvement after entering the short video track.

It's very simple. If you compare the novel and the script, you will find that the script contains time. Here is a demo of a script made by my friend.

3.2.2 From Subscription Thinking to Recommendation Thinking

In the era of public accounts, the number of fans is an important indicator to measure the value of an account, and this thinking has been brought to Douyin. Fans are indeed a standard to prove an account's ability to produce continuous output, but a high number of fans does not necessarily mean high traffic.

This is not the concept of open rate, but whether it is recommended by the system. A high number of fans will have a high basic recommendation weight, but this weight is not completely equivalent to the number of fans. Even if you have 10 million fans, your initial recommendation traffic pool may be the same as an account with 5 million fans, both of which are 100,000 people.

You will see that in the popular videos of Tik Tok, there are often amateur players with less than 10,000 fans. They can get high exposure just because their videos hit the recommendation logic of Tik Tok's algorithm. The probability of such an event occurring is much higher than the probability of a WeChat public account publishing a viral post.

Another wave of players in the Douyin ecosystem are promoting products, and they start by selling them with a few fans. Many businesses offer free samples or targeted commissions with a minimum of 2,000 followers.

For some categories of accounts that are not suitable for large-scale recommendations, such as medical accounts, even if the number of fans is large enough, the number of views and likes for each video will always remain below a certain level.

In the subscription model, fans are your real private traffic; in the recommendation model, fans are just a reflection of how popular your content is and are not completely equal to traffic.

3.2.3 From “soft copywriting” thinking to “buy it” thinking

In the video age, don’t be shy about advertising. Users have long been accustomed to being recommended products. Compared with the awkward soft-text implantation, it is better to directly tell the audience the selling points and value of the product.

This can be understood through two logics:

1) When users watch Tik Tok, they are in a “stream” from one video to another. This stream contains information flow ads implanted by Tik Tok, as well as “advertising” videos with product showcases from accounts that promote products. When your video is recommended, it is only part of this "stream". The difference from official accounts is that users are immersed in the "flow" rather than your unique content, so you have to keep to yourself, which is actually quite awkward.

2) If you don’t directly state the selling point or discount, and use soft implantation or unexpected twists like the official account, the cost will increase significantly, which is not appropriate from the perspective of input-output ratio.

3.3 Become a part

Next, let’s talk about some issues related to account registration. I won’t go into details as we are all high-level bosses. Talk about some possible doubts.

3.3.1 Why do we need one card, one number, and one device?

We talked about the labeling problem of Douyin accounts before. The algorithm will recommend it to the account based on the account’s labels or recommend its content to people who are similar to it. If your company's account is linked to the Wi-Fi, and the personal accounts of the employees responsible for operating these accounts are also linked to the company's Wi-Fi, then the Douyin system will think that these two accounts are family members or have the same attributes, and will recommend videos that employees like to the company account.

If it is a marketing account or a brand’s Blue V account, we must ensure the independence of the account. The above situation cannot guarantee this.

In addition, when you are using Douyin, Douyin will obtain a variety of information such as your geographic location, mobile phone model, device number, and network standard. If your account frequently changes mobile phones or networks, or stays in one place for a long time and your geographic location has never changed, the system will discover this, and there is a high probability that you will be demoted.

It may not matter if the company's brand Blue V account, because Blue V is originally an account that needs to spend money to buy traffic. However, if the company wants to try to create an IP account or planting account for special groups, this condition is very important.

3.3.2 Team configuration requires understanding the story, understand the light and rhythm

The story mentioned earlier is the combination of content and time, which tests the team's ability to attract users within 6s.

Another point is that for a professional video team, the importance of light is equivalent to the layout in the pictures and texts. There are big bosses in the group, so you don’t need to talk about these skills, just recruit someone who understands it.

3.3.3 New Opportunities

For example, every Double Eleven, when consumers were having fun every year, the owners who opened C stores on Taobao basically took vacations because the traffic on Taobao and Tmall basically went to big-name flagship stores. But this year, they are all ready to go. Because of why?

Tik Tok.

Douyin has become an important source of traffic for their stores. Most stores even now have the main source of traffic to Douyin, which is the previous grass planting account.

This is an opportunity for small brands to turn things around.

The second opportunity is for ordinary users. Since Pinduoduo, I have been paying attention to this trend. Dear bosses’ companies should have sales, and you need to pay social security and pay basic salary, even if they can’t sell the products. But do you see that the current Pinduoduo and Taobao store owners will pay social security and pay basic salary to Duoduoke and Taobao customers? No, but Taobao customers are still very motivated because they can make money.

The threshold for users to become Taobao customers is getting lower and lower. The era of national sales has actually come. Everyone is your distribution channel. For Taobao stores, the cost of traffic diversion is getting lower and lower.

Opportunity is an "interdisciplinary subject". The more you know, the more opportunities you will see, so bosses can combine their own business and intersect with Douyin.

3.4 Data Driver and MVP

This part was originally used to sort out the tools that might be involved in operating a Douyin account, but such content is too introductory, so I adjusted it to think about data-driven.

TikTok is a data-driven company, so if you want to integrate into this ecosystem, you must maintain data-driven and algorithmic thinking.

In my opinion, data drivers are divided into two types: one is indicatorization and the other is MVP.

Indicatorization means to metric or digitize all problems that can be encountered during the operation or commercialization of an account as much as possible, rather than based on feelings and experience. For example, all factors such as scenes, scripts, shots, models, products, etc. that can affect the video propagation effect are indexed. The method here is multi-dimensional testing and ensuring as comprehensive recording as possible.

I have contacted many players who have a level of commission of hundreds of thousands of yuan per month. Whenever they talk about the recent performance of a product, they will send me Excel screenshots of the product in seconds. They will be so meticulous that they publish dozens of videos every day to test what kind of scenarios produce the best conversion of goods.

The second MVP is actually the concept of product manager career, which means "minimum feasibility product" in Chinese. The method is to release the simplest and executable product that can meet user needs for users to use, and then wait for user feedback to continuously optimize and enrich product functions. This is a must-have skill to quickly gain dividends on the current Internet, because the pace of the Internet world is too fast and no one will wait for you to be perfect.

Taking planting grass and selling goods as an example, the team only needs an hour from looking at a product to publishing video observation data and target audience feedback. In order to speed up the process and controllability of MVP, they even built the shooting scenes themselves, because mixed clipping is too slow for them.

Quick trial and error, quick feedback, quick adjustments, and quick money making.

4. There are also some "black technology" that are not very popular

4.1 About account targeting

I mentioned the importance of account tags earlier. Here are some ways to quickly complete or correct account tags.

We all know that dou+ can be delivered in a directional manner, so here is a logic: if your content is delivered in front of a certain type of people and then liked by them, will the system naturally classify you and them as the same type of people?

This is what I want to talk about the dou+ tag correction method, which is what people often say that the traffic is not good enough. There is a prerequisite here. If your content itself cannot be liked by targeted people, no matter how much dou+ you vote, it will be invalid.

4.2 About distribution commissions

In fact, this is the content on Taobao customer side. You can read the previous article about Taobao customer. Let’s talk about a way to play that is easy to be cheated by veteran drivers, which is to withdraw commissions or change commissions.

The commission part is actually the profit sold by Taobao store owners, so when the traffic is too high, they will adjust the commission ratio to you. At this time, as a "working" boy, you have no choice, so this part requires you to determine the direction with the boss before selling goods.

It is also a matter of commission. Many brothers do not have the ability to select products themselves, so they sell them according to Feigua's list and follow the popular products. You may not be able to drink soup after following orders, which involves the targeted commission just mentioned. Because Taobao store owners can set different commissions to different people, the reason why the players you see who have money and keep burning dou+ is because they have a higher commission ratio, and the ROI they calculate is not at the same level as you.

4.3 About "Is Taobao stupid?"

I think this question can be explained. There may be brothers in the group who do not understand the way of playing e-commerce. E-commerce is a business that can only make money by performing refined operations on traffic.

A store is open on the Taobao platform and requires traffic to come in to form a transformation. Therefore, traffic diversion is the most important link in the entire e-commerce ecosystem. Direct trains are one kind of traffic diversion, Double Eleven is another kind, and Taobao customers are the third kind. Douyin is a form of Taobao customer, and before it there were QQ groups, WeChat groups, websites, and soft articles on public accounts. The purpose of Taobao stores to the store through outside the site is obviously not to let consumers celebrate Double Eleven every day, but to introduce users from outside the site to their Taobao stores through the underlying products, and then to guide these traffic to purchase profitable products to make money.

This is the most common way to play in the e-commerce ecosystem. It’s just a change of carrier, and Taobao will always make money in the end.

4.4 About traffic tilt and official support

In the initial part, we talked about the official operating strategy of Douyin, which is a model of official thinking, official organization, official support, and the people's follow-up. Therefore, before each advanced gameplay is widely promoted, the official will invite test users to support the topic and see the data and feedback.

For example, the knowledge paid account in June this year invited tests, which gave traffic support, 15-minute long video permissions and collection function privileges; for example, the seaweed plan started in July this year, which is to do targeted product planting and provide traffic support to official organizations.

In addition, Douyin has CSR responsibilities, so support for poverty alleviation, traditional culture, intangible cultural heritage and other contents is also an important task for Douyin, and this can also be used as a source for everyone to obtain traffic.

5. Several tools and communities

5.1 Data Platform

Everyone already knows Feigua data, and I have helped you to join the group several times. Feigua is really unspeakable in terms of feature richness, but it is still just a C-end tool. For those professional enterprises or team users, these ordinary data pages and data query tools cannot meet their personalized query needs, such as when I need to dig deep into the matrix gameplay of a certain grass-planting team.

Here we recommend a low-key data platform TooBigData. The reason for recommending it is that it can provide data interfaces for enterprises. After the enterprise obtains the data interface provided by TooBigData, it is equivalent to obtaining its full data, and it can realize the development of various personalized needs functions according to its own needs.

5.2 dou+ delivery monitoring tool

The most popular tool in the past month is the dou+ launch monitoring tool. First, it is Yuyouhui, an internal community tool developed by the Leek Alliance, then Dou Boss, and then Dou Jia Assistant. Recently, Dou Dada has also started to test such a pod monitoring tool internally.

The audience of this type of tool is obviously the batch grass planting team mentioned above, with at least dozens or hundreds of accounts selling goods. It is difficult to monitor and record the ROIs delivered by one number, but this is a necessity.

The implementation logic of this type of tool is very simple. One party calls commission conversion data through the API interface of Taobao Alliance, and the other party obtains Douyin's dou+ delivery data through collection or Douyin authorization.

Similarly, such tools also have one disadvantage. As mentioned earlier, the way to play e-commerce is the core, and most teams do not want others to know that they are making money. However, once you use this type of delivery tool, you will inevitably get your sales data and gameplay by third-party teams.

Everyone can judge how to weigh the pros and cons.

5.3 Community

The gameplay of short videos, especially Douyin, changes too quickly. If you are out of the Internet for a day, you may miss a gameplay of tens of millions of traffic.

The community is a good place to "gather the strengths of everyone".

Every short video practitioner has at least 10 communities, but how many group members are really willing to share their useful information? I am a very obvious example: at least 100 people in short video-related communities have been added, including skills, information, style, dou+, MCN, and even celebrity monetization, but I have to watch all group chat records no matter how late I am every day, and there are only three or four.

You can share it. Whether you can enter depends on your luck:

5.3.1 TooBigData's "Data Youth Paid Group"

Because the boss wenttao is low-key and abides by the law, the group talks basically all serious content. For example, the content related to K12 and education may have traffic tilts, such as a script of a certain matrix, which performs mass production IP at the same time.

Because of the seriousness, there are many bigwigs in the group who do serious business, such as Afu Essential Oil, Xueersi, Silver Earth and some official operating classmates from Douyin.

For specific prices and purchase methods, you can go to TooBigData to check it out, and search on Baidu to find it. By the way, after searching on Baidu, you will find that many large short video data platforms are buying its keywords, which shows its influence.

5.3.2 Chen Liuye’s short video nuggets

I met Liu Ye in 2017. At that time, he was still engaged in knowledge payment-related business. In 2018, I studied Douyin and found that he also started to do it. Recently, I have done a mysterious project, and it is said that the team has grown to more than 20 people.

At the beginning of last year, Liu Ye called on all the friends in the community to Douyin. At that time, he heard that the friends in his ears now have either a million fans of IP or a monthly income of more than 100,000 yuan.

There are all kinds of players in the community. Because Liu Ye’s early followers were classmates who liked to share, the community atmosphere is still good today. Every day, players will synchronize the gameplay they have seen or tested in the group.

The knowledge paid internal test mentioned above was initially through Liu Ye’s invitation of a member in the group, and the students who participated in the internal test received a considerable traffic tilt.

5.2.3 My short videos and goods excavator

I started out in data and black technology. Most of the "followers" were learned from the 260,000 Douyin data analysis I wrote last year. In the early stage, various nonsense algorithm recommendations and wild ways were not popular. Later, after the community transformed into the business of goods, there were more and more people.

The group is mainly composed of players who sell goods. Before each popular product appears, players in the group can't help but reveal some news, such as the 11th acne removal, the later vitamin E milk, the just-in-the-past health tea, and several high-quality products that are coming.

Author: Zhang Jia

Source: Zhang Jia