Overseas marketing promotion, recommended rules for platforms such as YouTube and Facebook!

30 months, 6.997 million followers, and 4.5072 million yuan in monthly income.

While the public was exclaiming "OMG" at Li Jiaqi's self-revealed six-figure monthly income, the Chinese internet celebrity "Office Xiaoye" created a miracle of seven-figure monthly income on YouTube. This "traffic monetization list" went viral among content practitioners, arousing the envy and ambition of many creators.

Screenshot of the data platform noxinfluencer

How to make money on social media? Traffic is the trump card. Before we further answer how to grab traffic, we first need to understand how the content recommendation rules of each platform work. Only by understanding the rules of the game itself can you win the game and become a winner in life.

This issue of All Media expands from this series of heart-wrenching numbers, focusing on YouTube with 2 billion monthly active users, Facebook with 2.41 billion monthly active users, and Snapchat with nearly 100 million monthly active users. It dives deep into the ocean of traffic on each platform to find out where the power driving the wave comes from and where it will go.

1. Facebook: Content is more important than gimmicks

Social interactions between people are based on information dissemination. The richer the amount of information, the higher the communication efficiency. For this reason, communication forms with higher amounts of information will gradually become mainstream, evolving from text and pictures to videos, short videos, and live broadcasts .

The importance of video to social media is obvious, and Facebook is no exception. A series of actions, including creating a new Watch section, launching the Stories feature, and changing the information flow algorithm to prioritize video recommendations, reflect Facebook's emphasis on video. And they feel that this is not enough.

David Miller, director of product management at Facebook, revealed that Facebook has updated its video ranking algorithm . The move is intended to help video content creators "find their audience on Facebook and better monetize."

What's Changing About the Facebook Algorithm? The official website summarizes the three factors that affect the ranking, namely stickiness, viewing time and originality .

Stickiness is the key to this change , that is, Facebook attaches importance to video content that promotes repeated viewing, which can increase stickiness. Facebook gives more weight to videos that people search for and watch repeatedly. For example, recipe videos that attract users to watch multiple times will benefit greatly from this algorithm update.

In addition to this, the algorithm also takes viewing time into account, with three minutes and above being the most preferred video length. For the same three-minute video, a video that users watch for more than one minute will have a better position in the ranking. This marks a shift in Facebook's video algorithm focus from the number of views to the viewing time . As mentioned below, YouTube also made the same move in 2012. This is conducive to the monetization of videos and the purification of clickbait titles. After all, simple clicks are difficult to attract advertisers, and long-term attention concentration is the paradise of advertising.

Finally, it is important to note that this update deprioritizes pages that only share videos but do not upload content, in order to highlight Facebook's emphasis on video originality.

Inferring Facebook's purpose from the updated algorithm, valuable and frequently watched videos that users actually need are the focus of recommendations .

For marketers, as video algorithms change, new video promotion strategies should also follow. If your video isn’t posted in line with where Facebook is headed, you run the risk of missing out on potential brands and customers.

Creating valuable videos is not difficult, but what is really difficult is to attract users to watch them repeatedly. Ideally, valuable content will attract users and even encourage them to watch repeatedly. As for unattractive videos, they are simply not worth wasting energy on.

To adapt to new algorithms, or even benefit from them, content creators need to review their work and conceive of future work arrangements.

If creators’ videos have always been short, in order to keep up with the changes in the algorithm, the length of the videos will need to be appropriately extended to three minutes. Of course, in order to make a three-minute video both fascinating and sticky, it takes a lot of thought to produce, and this is when you need some unique creativity.

YouTube: Understand your audience and connect with them

Want to become the new YouTube traffic king? First you need to understand YouTube's algorithm rules. YouTube Chief Product Officer Neal Mohan has revealed that 70% of the time users spend on YouTube is spent watching algorithmically recommended content. Just as users' viewing behavior is influenced by platform algorithms, video creators' content conception, duration determination, title drafting, etc. also need to follow changes in the algorithm .

Like any platform, YouTube's algorithm is not static. Looking back at several changes, they can be roughly divided into the following stages:

• Before 2012: Views
• During this period, video ranking was based on the number of views, but the resulting clickbait problem was not conducive to improving video quality, and the interests of both advertisers and platforms were damaged.
• 2012-2016: Watch Time and Session Time
• Watch time refers to the length of time a user watches a certain video, and session time represents the time a user spends on the entire platform. These two indicators are key. But content creators exploit loopholes in the algorithm and artificially shorten the length of videos to increase video retention rates.
• 2016: Machine Learning
• Affected by this algorithm, YouTube is accustomed to pushing fake news, conspiracy theories and other content that incite panic to users, and has been criticized by technology theorists as an "engine of misinformation."
• 2017: Video Quality
• YouTube claims that it has improved the quality of videos and effectively reduced inflammatory content.
• 2018: Video Monetization
• YouTube changed its monetization policy to reduce the number of content creators the platform monitors. However, advertisers found that their ads were still being shown on channels with extreme content, such as Nazi tendencies, pedophilia, etc.
• 2019: Banning fringe content
• YouTube announced that its algorithm will never recommend borderline content that could harm or mislead viewers

In 2016, YouTube released a white paper to specifically introduce the algorithm it used, stating that its purpose was to help users find the videos they wanted to watch and to maximize user engagement and satisfaction .

Simply put, YouTube's recommendation system can be understood as a multi-level sorting algorithm. The first-level sorting algorithm (candidate generation) is a neural network that roughly selects videos that users may want to continue watching based on their historical records, that is, their preferences, and plays a classification role. The second-level algorithm (rankning) further sorts these videos based on more indicators for final presentation.

YouTube's algorithm can be simply understood as a multi-level sorting algorithm

After understanding the operating rules of the algorithm, it can be found that YouTube's algorithm is not designed to identify high-quality videos, but to pair viewers with videos of their interest , so as to achieve the goal of watching more videos, spending more time, and watching more ads. In other words, the viewing time indicator is very important . In a 2018 survey, the Pew Research Center found that YouTube was directing viewers to increasingly longer and more popular videos.

In summary, the presentation of search results is mainly affected by two factors, namely the video metadata (title, video description, keywords) and user interaction (likes, comments and viewing time) . YouTube lists the specific user behaviors that influence the algorithm: what content users watch or don't watch; how long users watch videos; how quickly a video becomes popular, such as the rate of growth in views; how new the video is; how often a channel uploads videos; how much time users spend on the platform; interactions such as likes, dislikes and shares; and a "not interested" feedback button.

Specifically, how does YouTube's algorithm affect video traffic? It affects where your video appears on YouTube : Search results; Recommended video stream; YouTube homepage; Trending stream; Channel subscriptions; Notifications.

Now that you know how the YouTube algorithm works, how can you use these rules to become a winner on YouTube? Social media management platform HootSuite gives 13 tips:

• Use accurate keywords in your video titles to optimize for search;
• Make full use of the video introduction, especially the first few lines of text that are visible even when the video is folded;
• Use channel traffic reports to understand traffic sources and adjust video keywords in real time;
• Use channel traffic reports to create new types of videos to fill the gaps in keyword videos;
• Since playing videos in silence has become a trend, adding subtitles on your own is a good choice;
• Translate your videos in multiple languages ​​to reach a wider audience;
• Pay attention to video covers. 90% of the best YouTube video covers are customized rather than automatically generated.
• Encourage viewers to finish watching the video, such as giving out some bonus content at the end of the video;
• Lead viewers to watch your other videos.
• Convince users to subscribe to the channel;
• Create a series of videos based on a theme rather than multiple independent videos.
• Multi-platform promotion, such as promoting YouTube channels on Facebook and Instagram;
• Pay attention to channel analysis reports and make timely changes accordingly.

3. Snapchat: Social is social, media is media

"Social is social, media is media" is the strategic direction established by Snapchat. "By separating social from media, we're taking an important step toward strengthening our relationships with friends and our relationships with media," Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in an Axios op-ed.

Guided by this strategy, Snapchat was redesigned into a new interface with the camera button as the boundary. The chat boxes and stories of users and friends are placed on the left, and the stories of content creators including media and Internet celebrities, that is, Discover, are on the right, thus achieving the separation of social and media. The algorithms of the two sections are not entirely consistent. The algorithm of the social friend interface is based on the intimacy of interactions between friends, rather than a time algorithm. The algorithm of the Discover interface borrows from Netflix's algorithm, recommending content based on users' historical behavior, while also using manual editing to control content quality .

Social Pages vs. Media Pages

Social Pages: The More Intimate, the More Important

On social pages, there is no clear boundary between stories and one-on-one private messages. At the top of the message list are stories, snapshots, and text messages sent by the user's closest friends . The criterion for judging intimacy is the user's interaction with others, such as viewing, commenting, and then other friends' turns.

Similar to this is Instagram, which sorts information not in chronological order but by intimacy. Compared with domestic social software, the algorithm of Weibo’s homepage is also based on interaction, while WeChat messages are still sorted by time.

Information is not sorted by time

Another thing to note is that Snapchat has restored the "auto-play next video" feature , which is similar to the short video playback on Weibo and Tik Tok. Snapchat's videos have always been played automatically and continuously, but at the end of 2016, Snapchat canceled this function and changed it to allow users to manually choose the next video to play, similar to the ending of bilibili's videos. This feature shift has led to a decrease in the number of stories played, disrupting the traditional experience for users. Fortunately, Snapchat has finally realized this and is seeking to change.

It’s not quite accurate to say it’s a complete restoration, as the functionality has changed slightly compared to the old version. Now, when a user finishes watching a Story, Snapchat will show a brief interstitial screen that introduces the title and preview of the next Story . Users can choose to swipe down to exit the story watch page or jump to other videos before watching. These actions will be used by the algorithm to improve the next recommendation. This design helps to eliminate the information noise of Snapchat and recommend content that users are actually interested in and stories shared by their really close friends.

The existence of the social page basically means that the influence of KOLs here is zero . After all, KOLs cannot cross the threshold of following each other to enter this page. Taking the domestic social software we are familiar with as an analogy, the social page is a bit like the friend circle of Weibo. Only friends who follow each other can view the content in this circle. However, unlike Snapchat, the friend circle algorithm is based on time, not intimacy.

Media Pages: Explore Interests

With the goal of distinguishing between social and media, Snapchat defines professional creators, including media, Internet celebrities and other groups, as a new section, and names this newly separated section Discover, which is placed on the right side of the camera. All the popular stories from Snap Map, stories based on Snapchat search, and collections of stories about a certain topic are displayed in blocks on this page in the form of large previews.

Social Pages vs Camera vs Discover

On the Discover page, users can explore publishers of their interest and proactively subscribe to their content. Snapchat's algorithm will rank other content according to the user's viewing history and the degree to which the user wants to watch it. In addition to using the "Like" button to inform the algorithm of your preferences, similar to Facebook, users can also click the "Reduce Push" button to train the algorithm to hide similar content in the future.

In addition to algorithms, Snapchat's human editors also play a role. Taking a page from Facebook’s fake news crisis, the review team will look at every piece of content that appears in Discover to make sure it’s high-quality, safe, and not fake news .

It is worth noting that for the first time, Snapchat focused on creating a habitat for internet celebrities, bloggers and product brands, and began to divert traffic to internet celebrities . If a creator has enough followers and the content they post is approved by the review team, then that content may appear as a "trending story" push to users who don't yet follow the creator.

Snapchat promises to provide independent creators with ways to monetize their content to ensure that they continue to invest time and energy on Snapchat and produce more high-quality content.

By separating social and media content, Snapchat has not only adhered to its existing values, but also created new value for users, media, KOLs, and itself, and especially brought new possibilities to the community ecosystem.

Back to the office Ono, was her success an accident? It is undeniable that the success of content requires a bit of luck, such as Li Xueqin’s call out to Kris Wu. It is also undeniable that operational methods can make the "metaphysics" of becoming popular more scientific. What we can do is to be down-to-earth and understand the algorithms of each platform, make operational plans based on them, and increase the possibility of a hit product.

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author: All Media

Source: Quanmeipai