Teach you how to create explosive short videos and easily monetize them

01

Changes in the communication model:

From manual recommendation to algorithm distribution

I just started my business five years ago. At that time, the main video platforms were Youku, iQiyi, Wasu, and LeTV. At that time, if you wanted your work to be seen by others, it was very easy. All you had to do was to get the website editor to do it. At that time, I made a football program that focused on football commentary and tactical analysis. In just two months, it became the number one in the football category of Youku Sports. In an environment where content is distributed by platforms, you only need to deal with the website editor, meet his KPI requirements, and let him push your video to the homepage to become famous.

But now the entire law of communication has changed, and the platform has become an algorithm that has different faces for different people . Even if you know the CEO of the Kuaishou platform, there is nothing you can do, because he can’t make you popular. Therefore, we have developed a large number of crawler tools and algorithm tools based on algorithms to predict the patterns of popular content generation.

Sometimes you will find that the content spread in this era is sometimes incredible. Those sophisticated, high-cost blockbusters have no way to become popular, but suddenly Wenwan comes out and dances, and becomes famous all over the country in an instant. Is she really pretty? It doesn't look that good. But why is it so popular? We later thought that it was a probability problem, and probability itself is a mathematical problem, so under certain conditions you can optimize it as long as you quantify these things. If it can be optimized, it can be scaled.

So we quantified the operation strategies of different videos on different platforms, such as upload time and frequency, saturation of cover image, number of color blocks, font of cover, number of words, and hundreds of other dimensions. Since I can’t determine which decision will affect the probability of becoming popular, I will test it. For example, if I have ten accounts, I find through certain rules that three accounts have grown in volume, while seven accounts have not. At this time, I can regularly and quantitatively analyze what factors have caused them to not become popular.

After running a round, I got the results of the first wave of grayscale tests. Although they are not accurate and very rough, they can really improve the probability. Later, I kept going back and forth, looking for methods that would increase the probability of becoming popular. Gradually, through our continuous iterations and upgrades, we have obtained a set of effective rules for increasing fans and traffic through popular content. At the same time, we will also share this experience with the staff of the Kuaishou platform, and even open a column on its official public account to teach everyone how to increase fans and create content.

Star Station currently has 150 million fans, and fans mean traffic. When traffic is in your hands, it can generate greater value. Our self-operated businesses include e-commerce, live streaming, game operations, and music distribution. What is music distribution? If you open Kuaishou, you will find that a very rustic song has suddenly become popular, then it is possible that we are the ones pushing it behind the scenes. How to push it then? For example, we can use one hundred songs as the background music for videos on our accounts. Gradually you will find that many users will follow suit and use this music. Then I will release another two hundred sets and it will become popular soon.

Secondly, we found that there is a very high probability that Kuaishou will be able to implement knowledge payment. Because Kuaishou is very rustic, and the essence of being rustic is the information gap. When you see that the people on it don’t know how to dress, have no knowledge, or don’t understand something and want to ask for advice, your opportunity has come . Not only can you help him achieve what he wants, but you can also earn a certain income. Making money must be based on the value you create.

The origin of the agency operation business is that today's companies are unwilling to stop at placing information flow advertisements, because after placing the advertisements, the fans will no longer have any relationship with you. They also want to build their own digital assets, turn themselves into internet celebrity accounts, turn users into fans, and then convert them into customers. So we help them find their own fan traffic pool.

02

Analysis of platform traffic algorithm:

How to choose a platform to join?

Next, I will talk about the comparison between the two platforms, Kuaishou and Douyin.

Nowadays, almost all applications such as Kuaishou, Douyin, Moments, Volcano, Xigua, Duoshan, Bilibili, Weishi, Yoo Video, etc. have started to launch short video functions. How do you plan at this time? When a company faces transformation, the chance of creating a new platform is very small, but there is huge room for building an existing platform. What you need to do next is to choose the right track and platform, dig deep and then expand slowly.

As shown in the picture above, I divide all platforms into three categories. To put it bluntly, the first category is those who go there to watch movies, and the middle category is those who go there to watch people, such as the instant videos in the circle of friends. Who has nothing better to do than to check that little blue circle? You will only click on the instant video of someone who pays special attention to you. I define the one on the far right as a plug-in, which is just a function and has not formed a complete ecosystem. Either its traffic is mainly introduced from other platforms, or it has not developed an ecological closed loop that can directly complete growth and monetization.

When choosing these platforms, I have a Peple, Platform, and Prototype model. I use it to judge whether it is necessary to join this platform. All you have to remember is whether it has formed an ecosystem. We can infer this through the survival status of its top Internet celebrities.

For example, when Douyin first started promoting e-commerce, the ecosystem had not yet been fully formed, so it found Xueli to do live streaming to sell goods and also recommended it on the homepage. Where do Xueli’s fans come from? It could be Taobao or Weibo, but not from Douyin. She just completes the monetization on Douyin. So we see that her traffic does not come natively from this platform. But when I saw many internet celebrities on Kuaishou who had already completed monetization and had revenues of tens of millions or even billions, I felt that this ecosystem was already quite mature. So our strategy at that time was to focus on Kuaishou.

What is the essence of short videos? Short videos are content. To some extent, it is actually the same thing as pictures, text and audio. And what is the essence of content? It's traffic. Whether it is an internet celebrity or an official corporate account, no matter what we see, they are actually generating traffic, just using different ways to obtain more valuable traffic.

The changes in the entire traffic environment have gone through two major stages. The first was the PC era, when information was mainly obtained through search. At that time, when I clicked to enter a portal website, as long as there were advertisements on it, I would be forced to watch it. At that time, the content was distributed in the same way to everyone and everyone had to watch the same content.

Later, we entered the mobile era, and the communication model changed greatly, becoming a distributed traffic multi-node communication model. You can imagine that everyone is a communication node and a communication individual, just like stars distributed in the vast space. These massive stars in the center automatically form gravity and form a communication node.

In such a communication environment, let’s take a look at what the reality projection looks like? When you open your phone, you will see various App applications. The difference from before is that before, you could click on the link to jump, and all the data could be effectively recorded. However, you face the dilemma of isolated islands in different APPs. They are not connected to each other. Each APP forms a data island. There is only one thing that can break through such an island, and that is content.

Just like Papi Jiang is very popular on Weibo and her official account is also well-known, she has influence in every ecosystem. So at that time we thought that all To C tracks in the future would be content tracks. Whether you are building an APP platform or selling beauty products, as long as you are facing ordinary consumers, content is an element that you cannot avoid.

Why are we starting to discuss short videos today? Behind this is the advancement of technology. When I first started my business, I was still looking forward to the arrival of 3G, the popularization of Wifi, and wondering what 4G would be like. Now, as 5G is about to be commercialized, looking back, we find that our lives have undergone tremendous changes in the past five years.

What does 5G mean? Everything is connected. We know that 3D, 4K high-definition images, AR, and VR can all be transmitted and monitored, which means that images become part of the infrastructure, just like everyone can speak and write, and become an irreplaceable function. In this technologically driven environment, every young person has a huge opportunity to create enough value at this point in time.

Currently, Kuaishou and Douyin are still in a bonus period. Regarding the comparison between the two platforms, we have done some internal data and analysis ourselves.

The first is that the implementation paths are different. The likes and comments ratio for Douyin short videos is 100, while for Kuaishou it is 20. That is, if you choose a video without distinction, there will be one comment for every 100 likes on Douyin, but there will be 5 comments for every 100 likes on Kuaishou. This is actually a question of interaction rate.

There is also an interesting phenomenon about the nature of these two platforms. In 2018, Douyin placed advertisements on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala. At that time, Douyin’s traffic suddenly increased, but who did it snatch this time from? Toutiao and Weibo. At that time, the DAU of Toutiao's main application dropped by one third. This is non-public data and cannot be verified. At that time, Kuaishou's data didn't fluctuate much, and WeChat was also okay. At this point you will understand that media with the same attributes will compete for each other’s time, and social platforms with the same attributes will also compete for time.

So we came to this conclusion: Douyin is Show and Kuaishou is Live. Douyin is a stage. The people you see on Douyin are all better looking than you in real life. Kuaishou is for living. It is your circle of friends. Douyin is more like Weibo. Every video on Douyin is a work of art, but every video on Kuaishou is a social particle. What is a social particle? Today I went to a place and had a great time. I posted it on my Moments or took a photo. This is not a work at all, and it cannot be considered creation. But I use these contents to interact with my good friends in my circle of friends, and wait for everyone to like and comment, and this is the social particle.

The curve chart on the left above is a time-based chart of the total number of views of an ordinary Kuaishou account. The pink line shows that when the first work was uploaded, there were not many views, and neither did the second one. But the third one suddenly became a big hit, and after the hot period, it slowly declined. This is the process of developing a mature account on Kuaishou. What does that relatively flat green line represent? In the process of creating our own account, we found that when your pink line, that is, the number of views, goes up, the friends who come in will click to follow you. After following you, they will watch all your previous works several times, and then wait to see your future works. At this time, the green playback value has a certain linear relationship with the number of your fans.

You can find a phenomenon like this on the right side of the above picture on TikTok: when the first video is uploaded, it has few views, but when the Nth video becomes popular, the views increase dramatically, and then it drops off a cliff after the popular period. If you want to become popular again, you need better works or spend money, and it is very likely that you will not have such an explosive growth curve in the future.

Secondly, the marketing directions are different. It is normal that an account with one million followers on Douyin does not have as many likes as an account with 100,000 followers, which is determined by the platform rules. Because of the existence of this curve, if you want to monetize and make money from it, you must harvest it quickly when the traffic increases . If you want to say that you want to cultivate one million fans to monetize, I'm sorry that you can't do it. Because you can only realize it by relying on the attention that comes in within a short period of time. Once the node is over, the attention will drop sharply.

In fact, the essence of this issue is public domain traffic and private domain traffic. To put it bluntly, it is about who controls the fans. Why do we discuss public and private domain traffic? Isn't it just about who can make more money? The picture above is one of the top accounts on Kuaishou, "Sanda Brother". He sold 160 million sales through Kuaishou in 4 hours. In a short period of time, 14.92 million independent IPs jumped into Taobao, causing Taobao to crash.

In fact, you can make money on Douyin, and you can make a lot of money, but this only works for some people who are particularly good at it. Take Li Ge from Douyin as an example. She was originally a Kuaishou internet celebrity. In less than a year on Douyin, she has accumulated 40 million fans and nearly 100 million likes. However, she was banned because she sang the national anthem in a joking way on Huya. Guess how she makes her income? It's not an ad but a live broadcast. But why doesn’t she do live streaming on Douyin? The reason is that Douyin can only follow the platform traffic and platform rules. Only by following personal traffic can your live broadcast steadily attract enough fans to pay you to watch. If you want to make money on Kuaishou, just create an account, one hundred or two hundred will do. But on TikTok, you need to monetize quickly and reap the benefits quickly; it does not appear as a traffic pool.

On Kuaishou, one million followers is already a very big account, such as the account in the picture below, which is a farmer in Lijiang, Yunnan selling honey. I have observed this account before, and its activity level, number of fans, and user loyalty are all very good, so I added the farmer's WeChat and asked him how much the account would sell for. The farmer replied that his account could be directed to fifteen WeChat accounts, and that the average customer price of honey sold on each WeChat account could reach 170 yuan, with a stable income of 700,000 to 800,000 yuan per month. With the addition of tips, he could earn one million yuan per month. Then he asked me how much I was willing to pay for it.

I didn't believe it, so the simple farmer sent me screenshots of the background of fifteen WeChat accounts, and I was dumbfounded. So in such an ecosystem, you don’t need to be a person who is particularly good at operations, and you don’t need to graduate from a media college or Tsinghua University. As long as you love your products and convey your value, you can earn a good income.

To sum up, if you want to do brand promotion and gain popularity quickly, you must make arrangements on Douyin; if you want to achieve the conversion of long-tail traffic, you must make arrangements on Kuaishou.

03

Platform algorithm comparison:

Kuaishou vs. Tik Tok

In fact, the algorithm of the Kuaishou platform is very simple. For example, if you see a puppy on the green grass, a visual recognition technology will identify you and then calculate whether this is a cute pet video. If it is, it will be pushed to a small group of users who like cute pets. If many of these people open it and finish reading it, it will be pushed to more people with this tag.

The same applies to becoming popular. When the video's playback completion, likes, comments and other dimensions reach a certain threshold, it can become popular. Algorithms are extremely important for the operation of your account. You must be clear about the label of this account, and you must allow the machine to clearly grasp what content this account is creating before it can be pushed to the corresponding people. If you push to the wrong people at the beginning, forget about becoming popular. If you deceive the machine through packaging and lead to complaints from users, your account will be ruined.

Not long ago, I wanted to do a test. In three months, I operated my own account, gained 300,000 followers, and made 150,000 yuan in one month through monetization. It is not easy to create this account. At the beginning, I gained a lot of followers by making jokes, but later I didn’t want to make jokes anymore. I wanted to create a knowledgeable personality and do paid knowledge. So I started to change direction. The traffic of the first route dropped by one tenth of the original, and the traffic of the second route also dropped by one tenth of the original. Why did this happen? The label is wrong. The platform originally labeled me as funny. After changing the direction, it will continue to push your new video to funny users. But as long as we continued to operate and allowed the platform to capture the new tag (about a week), it quickly became popular and later gained 300,000 followers.

Kuaishou emphasizes the Gini coefficient, in which ordinary users can be allocated traffic, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find traffic for particularly large accounts, but the fan traffic and loyalty are very high. The reason for this situation can be traced back to when Kuaishou was first established. Before it transformed into a short video social networking app at the end of 2011 and 2012, Kuaishou was a tool for sending emoticons. After becoming a short video social networking app, young people in small towns devoted their time and social interaction to this software, so Kuaishou's ecology is undoubtedly its core advantage.

Douyin's algorithm fits a function of user satisfaction with content. This can be seen in Toutiao and Douyin series products. The entire set of algorithms is similar, but each product has been personalized and iterated. On Tik Tok, if you really want to become a big name, you should make your content more sophisticated and turn it into a work of art.

04

Good content manual:

Continuously output 70-minute short videos

What is good content in this era? How to define the concept of content? Is it really well made? Not necessarily. My definition is that good content is content that can adapt to the platform and meet the purpose.

"Adapting to the platform" refers to whether you can adapt to the terminal and software environment you are using now. You must comply with its algorithm recommendation rules and user usage frequency. This is adapting to the platform.

"Satisfying the purpose" means to see why the program producers filmed this thing. Want more people to know you? What's the use of that? It is possible that if you make money and place advertisements in your films and if they are high-end, people will accept you. A good video is one that meets both the platform and purpose.

A few days ago, I saw an account selling tractors on Kuaishou. The account had only 10,000 followers, but he sold 20 tractors during a three-hour live broadcast, at 400,000 yuan per tractor. So , today I have been emphasizing distributed traffic multi-node transmission. What you need to do is to be a node, and behind all the videos is content. The essence of content is traffic. What kind of traffic do you want to obtain to become your node? It must be valuable traffic. Do you want to be a celebrity or a paid knowledge expert after graduation? Or do you want to be a buyer to help sell sweet potatoes in your hometown? If you want to enter the short video industry, you must understand what you want, because the income you get from becoming Papi Jiang may not be that high, and you may not be able to sell tractors.

The above picture is the practical code of conduct for short video content. The most important thing is to tell everyone that all the content is mainly about one point: how to quickly make the machine recognize you. Only by getting to know others first can you have the opportunity to be discovered. With this set of methods, as long as you continue to produce videos with content of no less than 70 points, this account will definitely become popular. Think about all the internet celebrities you see with a long lifespan. They all produce a large number of high-quality videos every day. Not every video has to be 100 points, but you can continuously produce videos with a score of 70 points to meet the platform's conditions and recommendation rules.

Then comes creativity. We have many methods, including training new employees and showing films. There are also templates for short videos. If you want to continuously produce videos with a score of more than 70 points, there are some universal rules for creativity. Here is a formula, which is "who is where and what is doing". This formula can generate unlimited creative ideas.

For example, a little girl reading a book in school is not creative, but an old lady reading a book in school creates a contrast. I applied this to the film I made for Wantong College. We found a young and cute girl to be the protagonist, and took some face-lifting photos in the auto repair college, subverting everyone's preconceived impression of the big and strong boys in the auto repair college. This was shot based on the formula of "who is where and what they are doing". You can use this to draw inferences about other things. But don’t expect to become a big account through this formula. The growth of a big account must be through specific operations and the continuous output of content above 70 points.

I want to emphasize that on social platforms you don’t need to worry about whether the shooting techniques are high-end or advanced enough. You don’t even need to worry about whether the people on the video are good-looking enough, because videos on social platforms are not works of art, but social particles. Sincerity is more important than technique. I would summarize it in one sentence: start with appearance, fall in love with talent, and be loyal to character. You can attract people's attention through visual stimulation. If you need to retain fans, you need to convey values, practical information and talents. Finally, you can gain your loyal fans through the accumulation of values.

Let me tell you an interesting case. We have 10,000 anchors. When we first assigned accounts to them, the prettiest girls had the highest traffic. But in the end, those who were able to stick around were not particularly good-looking. The ones who made the most money were those with average looks among our anchors. The best-looking girls perform best at the beginning, but in the end, the ones who really make money are the ones with average looks. Do you think it’s a matter of appearance? No, it’s persistence.

Being an internet celebrity is hard and physically demanding work, and it requires great perseverance and persistence. So when we see our accounts growing, others will think that our data algorithms and operations are amazing, but I know in my heart that the reason is that our team has formed a system for internet celebrity management and continuous content operations.

Finally, don’t move videos, don’t take shortcuts if you don’t have traffic. The time for posting is during mealtime and after meal. If your account has more than 50,000 followers on Kuaishou, there is a fan activity time in the background, so you should post half an hour in advance. Once you miss the time, the usage habits of this account may be disrupted. You will not see any bad effects in the short term, but you will be posting videos randomly and the number of fans of the account will not increase. Therefore, within our company, if you post a video late, you will be directly fined and punished. This is also the way we manage our entire production line, including requiring that the interval between uploading two videos must be no less than three hours.

Although I am often criticized, I still insist that in this era, content is no longer king, but a combination of content + operation + data . If you still insist on making the best content in the world, you may fail. When a layman sees an account, he will think that your content is good, but you yourself will understand that only the analysis of the entire data and the control of the content can make your content be recommended to everyone.

05

Short video monetization :

Weak social interaction leads to strong conversion

To put it bluntly, which video can make money? Why are some videos highly efficient in commercial monetization? Because of the two logics behind it, when people come to the video platform, they are essentially exchanging their time for good content, and when they come to the e-commerce platform, they are exchanging money for good goods. These two logics are separate in themselves. But if your video is a foreshadowing or a diversion for the product, then your video can make money. First of all, you need to understand this logic.

Secondly, when your content is good, if you want to open up e-commerce or subsequent knowledge payment monetization, you have to add a social aspect in the middle, because you need to build trust. Only through social relationships can you transform content attributes into trust in people and bring about commercial monetization.

If you want to monetize on Kuaishou, there are generally sales attack methods (a complete solution with high customer unit price, slow decision-making, and systematic sales talk), shopping carts and small stores, WeChat business and agent fission, and knowledge payment. Don't lose confidence in yourself, even if you can't express yourself clearly.

For example, the protagonist of the video above is my client, who is the owner of a real estate transaction APP. He wants to make himself an Internet celebrity, but he has a fatal weakness - camera sickness. At that time, I shot a video for him and had to shoot one sentence twenty times. Now he has 200,000 followers on Douyin and owns three houses. Even if you have a small account like this and are not very good at performing, you can still make it a big one as long as you master the right operating methods and means.

The essence of knowledge payment is information asymmetry . The value space we create is that we see that those who need help don’t understand and don’t know where the good methods are. You tell them the good methods, and the value is filled. It can be said that as long as you acquire accurate fans, you can realize monetization.

Finally, what I want to emphasize is that if we ask what we can do now to seize the opportunities of the times, it is to learn how to maintain your account on these platforms. If you are successful in maintaining one account, then continue to try to maintain five or ten accounts. You will completely understand how to create a so-called popular account on this type of platform.

And at this time we will form an understanding that your pursuit is not for a certain hit video, you are pursuing to obtain accurate traffic to achieve your goals. You can become an important link in the supply chain, and you can also become a link in helping others gain fans. Ultimately, the greatest value is not to make yourself popular, but to have a set of ways to make all those who want to get traffic have higher traffic. This is a career with greater imagination.

Author: Zhu Feng

Source: Tencent Media Research Institute