5,000-word review: The logic behind Kuaishou’s 3 million followers gain in a month!

On Kuaishou , the number of followers of self-operated accounts increased by more than 3 million in October alone. I have some experience to share with you.

This article is suitable for traffic operators, education company executives and core executives. The full text is quite long, so let me first throw out the core points:

1. In the future, all education companies will become half MCN organizations
2. Kuaishou is currently the most suitable platform for education companies to generate their own traffic

This article is mainly divided into 3 sections:

1. Let’s review our experience in traffic management and the logic behind our decision to land on Kuaishou.
2. What are the core advantages of Kuaishou in education?
3. Practical sharing of growth on Kuaishou

1. Our experience in traffic management

When I was writing the article "Dragon and Fire: Some Misconceptions about Traffic", I wrote a sentence: Sometimes when you go surfing in the sea, it is often the professionals who drown.

Initially, our team was good at generating traffic for public accounts, but later we discovered that the fission had reached its final stage this year. On the one hand, there was the crackdown by the platform, and on the other hand, there was the massive entry of wool parties.

So we started to try short video projects, focusing on Douyin and Xiaohongshu in the early stages. We quickly gained millions of followers on Douyin, but K12’s Douyin fans are worthless and basically cannot be converted. The same is true on Xiaohongshu. After gaining several million fans in one month, it was found that it was more suitable for promoting products and it was impossible to attract fans.

In July, we rethought the entire logic and checked the active lists of all short video apps, and suddenly found a behemoth that we had missed before - Kuaishou. (I did see Kuaishou before, but I didn’t realize how important it was.

We mainly study new low-cost traffic and find a pattern: the emergence of large platforms often goes beyond the vision of the elite for a long period of time. It’s not that people don’t know about it, but they are prevented from exploring by certain inherent impressions. But when this platform really grows, you can no longer keep up.

After several months of in-depth research, we found that Kuaishou meets our core criteria for educational traffic, which can be expressed in three sentences:

• The underlying basis of transactions in the traditional Internet is trust.
• Education itself is one of the best entry points to a strong sense of trust.
• Good content is one of the best ways to gain trust.

In summary, Kuaishou is the short video platform that has gained the best trust through good content.

2. The core logic behind education companies entering Kuaishou

As an online education company, what are the core advantages of joining Kuaishou? I have summarized five points:

1) Low cost

The three core methods of business growth, as Eric Ries said in "The Lean Startup", can be divided into sticky growth, fission growth, and paid growth.

Picture: by Long Gonghuohuo "Advanced Operations"

Currently, mainstream Internet education companies generally rely mainly on investment, supplemented by self-operated and fission traffic, among which self-operated and fission traffic mainly plays the role of reducing costs.

If it is a pure delivery method, there is a famous saying in the traffic industry: "Only today's traffic is the cheapest." Therefore, the price of traffic will only become more and more expensive. In the fragmented education market, the turning point is difficult to come, and the high marketing cost has become the "Achilles heel" of many educational companies.

There are two ways to get rid of the high cost of traffic. One is through fission, but fission has a core constraint, which is the rules and restrictions of the platform itself.

The existence of a ceiling for fission can be explained by a simple logic: if every company can acquire a fan on WeChat for 50 cents, then what is the use of GuangDianTong? Therefore, it is inevitable and irreversible for WeChat to crack down on low-cost screen-swiping methods such as group fission and check-in. But this does not mean that fission cannot be done. It is just that it is more suitable for the early and middle stages of the enterprise and after the Revenue stage in the AARRR model of traffic.

Another logic is through sticky growth, that is, self-operated traffic. The first major way to generate self-operated traffic is through brands. This is also the ultimate dream of education companies, to let the brand occupy minds and greatly reduce customer acquisition costs. There are very few brands on the market that can do this, because unless they spend a lot of money in a short period of time (and spending money may not necessarily be effective), it must be a process of word-of-mouth fermentation and accumulation, which requires time for compounding.

Another way is to operate a large traffic pool by yourself. For example, the early Sanhao.com operated its own WeChat public account matrix; GSX, which went public this year, reversely converted traffic to its own accounts through investment and fission.

However, the era of low-cost self-operated traffic pools based on WeChat has passed, and the opening rate has dropped from 5% a few years ago to 1.5%.

Looking at Kuaishou year-on-year, if an account has 100,000 fans, the number of views of each of its videos will basically be more than 10,000. By this calculation, the opening rate of Kuaishou videos will be more than 10%.

In addition, the core logic of Kuaishou’s self-operated traffic pool is low cost. From the perspective of investment, it can be solved by just a few teachers and operators; from the perspective of results, the traffic pool formed can be reused repeatedly. Moreover, Kuaishou’s traffic pool is different from that of official accounts. Through Kuaishou’s live broadcast, the traffic pool is not being consumed, but is growing in reverse because it has stronger stickiness.

Figure: A live broadcast of a certain account showing an increase in followers

2) High conversion rate

Speaking of reverse enhancement, the second point to be mentioned here is that the traffic conversion rate on Kuaishou is high. The high conversion here is understood from the conversion path.

What does it mean? In education transactions, there are generally three elements: demand, purchasing power and trust. A deal can only be concluded if these three elements are met, but the combination of these three elements is different.

The traditional approach is to first screen the needs and obtain examples from various sources in the information flow. This step is usually completed by marketing colleagues. The next step is to hand it over to the sales staff. If it is a telephone sale, they will generally screen whether the user has a computer or other audio-visual equipment, which is a disguised way of screening purchasing power. Next, through the long-term affection in sales, the step of building trust is completed and finally the deal is made. After the deal is made, the teacher will hand over the item and start the class. This process went through three waves of people in total: marketing, sales, and teachers.

In Kuaishou's system, the first step is to build trust, based on the assumption that only when users trust you will they read your content every day. So in this link, the teacher completed the preliminary customer acquisition.

For video customer acquisition, why is the conversion rate better after the front end comes in? Analogous to e-commerce, video is to some extent an enhanced version of the form page.

After users are acquired through the front end, sales will take over the process in the middle, and everything will go very smoothly. Finally, the teacher starts the class. In this transaction system, if you build trust first, its core conversion rate will definitely be high.

Let’s look at how efficient this is on Kuaishou from two perspectives. One is that the top ten anchors who brought the highest traffic conversion to Taobao this year are basically on Kuaishou. The other is the logic of finding WeChat businessmen to form a group, which is the most popular in the early childhood track this year. Its core essence is to build trust first. Because the WeChat business group already has a sense of trust, you only need to add some firewood instead of starting the fire yourself.

To summarize, high conversion rate means acquiring customers through front-end teaching and research and improving conversion rate.

3) Less damage

The third point is less loss. The core logic is that we first define Kuaishou as a traffic diversion platform. Kuaishou's direct traffic diversion to WeChat has the least loss, and when shared to WeChat, there is also a mini-program page for display.

Moreover, Kuaishou itself is closer to the private domain. Here we can mention the difference between Kuaishou and Douyin. In terms of product form, we will only talk about one point. When you open Douyin, the homepage is "Recommendation", and when you open Kuaishou, the homepage is "Follow". This also determines the completely different creator ecosystems and monetization methods of the two.

Under Tik Tok’s recommendation logic, creators need to continuously iterate on good content, and their fans themselves are not of much value because there is no such thing as an open rate. Under Kuaishou’s attention logic, creators themselves are protected and have their own traffic pool.

4) Large gap

From a certain perspective, Kuaishou today is like the official account in 2014. If you have experienced the complete cycle of public accounts, you will find that 2014 was the starting point of the public account explosion, and the commercialization of account owners also began to sprout.

The same is true for Kuaishou Education. Some people make money, while others feel that they cannot make money on this platform. But sometimes non-consensus often means opportunities, which depends on how you understand long-termism.

First of all, there is a big gap in the creator sector. Although there are more than 990,000 teachers on Kuaishou, it is still far from enough compared to Kuaishou’s nearly 300 million daily active users. Simply put, the demand is huge and the supply is insufficient.

5) More sinking

Many educational companies want to expand into lower-tier cities, and this is undoubtedly the best battlefield. But the large number of users sinking to the lower-tier markets does not mean that all Kuaishou users are sinking to the lower-tier markets. With Kuaishou’s total DAU approaching 300 million, it is meaningless to discuss whether they are sinking users. On the contrary, many of Kuaishou’s new users this year come from first- and second-tier cities, as well as the southern market.

3. How to create an account on Kuaishou and increase followers

Many colleagues and friends would ask how to quickly increase followers on Kuaishou? Although we are running a little faster for the time being, to be honest, Kuaishou is really profound. What I mean here is that when you try to understand Kuaishou in depth, you will find that what you know is just the tip of the iceberg. This is also the greatness of Kuaishou. To some extent, it is like a reflection of real society, where atoms and bits blend together.

We also surveyed a lot of grassroots teachers in the early stage, and finally concluded: "You have to maintain extremely strong patience and spend more time." This is the biggest methodology for creating an account on Kuaishou, and the rest are just skills.

Now I can’t help but talk about some tips on how to increase your followers on Kuaishou.

1) Daily photography to increase followers

When you shoot works every day to increase your followers, what is important is not the form of the work, but the content itself. I divide the process into 5 steps: positioning, topic selection, content shooting, title and cover, and publication. The most important links are positioning and topic selection.

Let’s talk about positioning first. The core logic of positioning is to solve the problem of “who are you?”, which is also the fundamentals of Kuaishou, that is, you need to let Kuaishou’s algorithm and users know you.

The algorithm knows you by the fact that the quality of your work is stable, the sound and image are consistent, and the field is vertical. The level at which users get to know you is what kind of teacher you are, what kind of personality traits you have, and what you mainly teach us.

All the teachers who are good at Kuaishou have one characteristic in common, that is, they have clear labels and their own very unique tags. For example, in "Achaige Mathematics Classroom", through his works you can see his labels: "Mathematics teacher", "Guangdong people", "junior high school", "mathematics", and "funny".

The more labels a teacher has and the more distinct they are, the greater the probability that he will be able to succeed.

The second step is to choose a topic. In fact, the logic of topic selection is not fundamentally different from what we did before with the official account. You can read the "Advanced Operations" I wrote last year for detailed explanations.

The third step is shooting, which is basically the conventional method. Please note that there is a pitfall when shooting: we have been blindly pursuing good equipment. For example, in order to present the effect, we bought a 200-yuan chalk. In fact, we ignored the most core element of shooting on Kuaishou - realism. In other words, the content itself is the most important.

The fourth is the title and cover. What is very different from making Douyin videos is that Kuaishou adopts a double-column display logic. Users see the video cover first and then click on it, so the cover here is very important, similar to the title of a public account. The logic for optimizing the cover is the position, color, and font size of the title. These can be arranged and combined to conduct A/B testing to find the optimal solution in a short period of time.

The last step is to publish. After publishing, statistical data feedback is needed. Don’t think that it’s over after publishing. In fact, publishing is just the beginning.

2) Follow hot spots to increase followers

In addition to some seasonal hotspots, such as festivals, it is more important to follow some teaching or teacher-related hotspots. For example, the “Public Welfare Teaching” which was very popular on Kuaishou in October.

The format is very simple. The teacher holds a piece of paper and keeps making a carousel. One of the teachers we worked with had a single video played over 10 million times and gained over 300,000 followers.

3) Live streaming to increase followers

Live streaming is one of the best ways to increase followers and make transactions on Kuaishou. Regarding increasing followers through live streaming, it can be explained in a simple way: "Live streaming is fun for a while, and it will be fun all the time if you keep live streaming." The fans on Kuaishou have strong stickiness, so when the number of fans exceeds tens of thousands, you can try live streaming.

What are the tips for increasing followers through live streaming? In fact, you can ask everyone to share the link on WeChat in the live broadcast room, or you can improve the efficiency of increasing followers by sending red envelopes, connecting to the microphone, etc.

4) Gain followers by ranking high

The source of increasing followers through ranking is the gameplay of e-commerce and entertainment anchors, a common example being “one sword, one group”. One sword refers to the cloud-piercing arrow, and a group refers to 1,314 watermelons.

It is not common to directly give a sword to a group in education. In the early stage, you can occupy the top few places on the list by giving a small number of gifts. Then talk to the live broadcast teacher in advance and guide users to pay attention to your account.

5) Increase followers through comments

In the early cold start period, there were no fans paying attention. A more pleasing way is to increase followers by commenting. You can go and comment under some teachers who have a large number of fans, but you must be careful about the degree.

6) Invest in increasing followers

If you want to increase your followers as quickly as possible, you can’t do without advertising. There are many types of advertising on Kuaishou. What we are talking about here is advertising for our own accounts.

The Kuaishou account investment is similar to Dou+ investment, and you can operate it on your account yourself. One is to deliver it to users within the site, using the CPM exposure logic; the other is to deliver it to one’s own fans, allowing the work to be pinned to the top, similar to Weibo’s fan channel. About 1,000 exposures cost 8 yuan, and sometimes there are discounts.

The core of advertising is to calculate ROI. Each company has a different ROI algorithm. You can look at several benchmark data, such as exposure-playback and the other is the cost of a single fan.

A very important point when creating an account on Kuaishou is to optimize it through data. Data can help you do three things: see the world, see all living beings, and see yourself.

For example, to see which data of others are good and which are hot spots, you can filter them out through data. This is seeing the world. You can check out your fans’ data, attributes, age groups, etc. This is how you see yourself. However, big data can explain the results themselves, but cannot explain the cause and effect relationship, so if you want to do better, you need to study small data, such as gaining insight into user needs, that is, seeing all living beings.

Data screenshot

If you want to do Kuaishou well, there is one more very important point: reduce the element of luck. A good video work is actually like a company, it needs to meet two conditions: good skill + big luck. But just like Buffett's investment, the baseline is that he has no luck. Therefore, when you do it in the early stage, you must "reset your luck to zero" and create a minimum amount.

When you do this, your mentality will be much better. You will focus more on the work itself and cultivate your skills instead of blindly complaining about luck.

In fact, to some extent, you can regard Kuaishou as a training ground, where you can complete your own self-cultivation through using the false to cultivate the true. So when you start doing it, you have already won to some extent, don't have any psychological burden. This is a screenshot one of our teachers sent me a while ago:

Because there are many students asking questions in the background every day, if there is not enough time, the teacher will speak through voice. Once she replied by voice, and someone asked her to type it out, with the reason shown in the picture below. So later their regular communication became like this every day.

This is why we will always insist on doing Kuaishou education. "The essence of education is one tree shaking another tree, one cloud pushing another cloud, and one soul calling another soul."

I hope that everyone can not only gain sentimentality but also get commercial returns on Kuaishou. We will also continue to explore new possibilities in this regard, and you are welcome to join us.

We are currently the content service provider of Kuaishou Education, and are also working with Kuaishou to better help everyone. We mainly provide several services, including increasing fans, distribution, training and other services.

Author: Long Gong Huo Huo

Source: Dragon Fire