How do new media operators choose popular content?

Everyone who works in new media must have thought about what kind of content users are generally interested in! Is that right?

There are 2 directions for sure:

1) Satisfy users’ curiosity.

Curiosity is one of the core intrinsic motivations of human behavior. It is a psychological state of liking to explore things that one does not understand. It is also the most reliable content direction in new media. Human curiosity is endless and is an instinctive desire.

2) Satisfy users’ needs for self-expression, identity recognition, and self-social sharing.

Content that can help users express themselves, speaks out what they want to say, what they want to do, the emotions they want to express, and the feelings they want to vent.

It can reflect the user's identity, consolidate the content of the user's identity label, and help users find their group affiliation.

People are a social community, which helps users to participate in social sharing and social image building.

Content in these two directions always wins the favor of users. It not only satisfies their curiosity, but also enables self-expression and maintains social relationships.

The core is that this type of content is strongly associated with users and is highly relevant to "me".

You have to understand that users don’t care about your product, your business, or your little concerns.

The user only cares about himself.

Isn’t there a saying like this?

If you want users to pay attention to your product, let them pay attention to themselves first. That is to say, they should first be made aware of the problems that are related to themselves, then there will be more chances!

The same principle applies to creating new media content. If you want users to be interested in your content, you must first make the content relevant to them.

Especially in an era where attention is scarce and information is exploding, every user is very busy and cannot finish reading all the information on their phones even if they stare at them from morning to night.

If you can’t capture the user’s interest, you will be passed immediately!

The old thief has said before:

Who are the competitors of operational public accounts?

Is it other operational public accounts? no!

Is it all other public accounts? Not yet!

It’s everything that takes away the user’s attention!

This is an era of seizing users’ interests. Anyone who can divert users’ attention is your opponent!

Therefore, if you want your title or your content to attract users immediately, "Related to me" is definitely a good choice. People will always care about content related to themselves, but this may not be the case with other content you talk about.

Previously, most event pages said “click to participate”, but now I see many pages that say “I want to participate”.

In the past, brand anniversary celebrations were all written in a grand manner, such as “Warmly celebrating the 5th anniversary of XXXX’s establishment”, but now they are all written like “50% off on all items, buy 2 get one free | XXX Anniversary Celebration”.

When Wu Jing's Wolf Warrior 2 was popular, some people wrote articles with titles like "A small step for Wu Jing, a big step for Chinese films", and others wrote articles with titles like "70,000 people gave it a score of 9 on Douban, China finally has its own superhero movie!", which received rave reviews!

…

One glance and you'll know the answer.

Imagine again that you are walking on a noisy street. How can others quickly attract you?

Shouting your name would be a good idea. Even on a noisy street, once your name is called, you will be quickly attracted.

This is more effective than throwing money on the street.

Everyone cares more about information related to themselves, and you are no exception. And this noisy street is a new media platform for information explosion.

Whether it is video, sound, text or picture, when creating content, we can first highlight the relevance to "him", and use more information within the user's circle of concern or familiar scenes.

For example, many new media accounts will deliberately create a character and tell a story about a protagonist who is similar to the target audience, so that readers will think, "Isn't this talking about me?" The result is a high degree of involvement.

Some people will clearly describe the region, age, gender, occupation, social identity, image status and other labels of the corresponding group of people in the topic and content, so that users can know at a glance that this information is related to "me".

A simple operation, but the effect is huge.

If the direction is right, the content will be twice as effective with half the effort.

For example, the illustrated comic strips that have been popular in the past two years are the best representatives of new media and "me"-related content.

These long pictures are designed from the user's perspective, to gain insight into the living conditions of different groups of people, to find common points related to "me", and then to present them to the user using real and relevant scenes. It not only continues to attract interest, but also resonates with people.

Such as the 2019 Urban Anxiety Atlas, the 2019 Spring Festival High-speed Rail Atlas, the Chinese Boss Atlas, the Hebei People's Presence Atlas, the Contemporary Women's Survival Atlas, the Baiziwan Women's Atlas, the Insomniac Youth Atlas, the Women's Toilet Queuing Atlas, etc.

In particular, there are many categories based on region, gender, age, identity tag, and hot topic. Readers are obviously more concerned about the content of the illustrations that are related to themselves.

The more relevant, the more real, the more I like it.

Previously, Xinbang also compiled a ranking of the top 10 recommended and liked original illustrations. You can take a look:

In short, the answer “related to me” should not be that surprising, nor is it a secret to “get 100,000+ views in every article”.

Many people should have thought of it, and even if they haven’t thought of it, they have basically seen or heard of it.

But the old thief also discovered a phenomenon:

More and more people are very excited when they learn a new knowledge point at first. They will not only understand it by themselves, search for information, and look at cases, but also use it immediately and remind themselves every day.

But after ten days or half a month, I gradually lost interest and started looking for the next method.

Over time, the previous knowledge point has long been forgotten. I often do this myself.

The problem is that these knowledge points are actually very useful, but we simply ignore them, don't take them seriously, and don't check ourselves.

Knowing does not mean you have done it, it just means you have heard it. And achieving it is just the beginning of success, not the result.

You need to "get" it eventually, which means internalizing the knowledge into your own, using it every day, all the time, until it becomes an ability of yours.

Just like new media content needs to be related to "me", many people require and remind themselves of this every day at the beginning, but gradually ignore it, thinking it is easy and thus abandon it.

It was not until I looked back that I realized: the ultimate truth is hidden in the simplest things. We are used to pursuing speed and novelty, but have forgotten the essence.

So, you should write this down on your self-checklist or computer note. Always ask yourself:

Is this content relevant to the user?

If you find the above helpful, please share it with your friends, maybe it can help them.

Author: Mumu Old Thief

Source: Mumu Laozei