The four major operating logics of Weibo Super Topic!

There was a "one hundred million" event last weekend, and I believe many of my friends must have participated in it. Yes, it was to vote for Jay Chou.

On Sunday night, Jay Chou successfully achieved a super topic influence of over 100 million with the support of various elderly fans, including aunts and uncles. He is also the first artist to achieve a super topic influence of over 100 million. Using the data that some of the top traffic stars love to talk about, they were slapped in the face.

Later, Jay Chou got married and had children, and began to fade out of the entertainment industry. He also did not release an album for a long time. As fans, we have also grown up from a group of little kids. Some of us have become parents, and some have reached the peak of our lives. What I usually do is either chasing after my children with diapers in my hand, or giving instructions to clients based on the PPT I just made.

Although many people no longer have any connection with Jay Chou, a weekly battle on Weibo's super topic chart has brought them together again.

But as the saying goes, the layman sees the excitement, while the expert sees the details. What kind of operational strategy is behind this earth-shaking super topic PK battle? Some people say that the biggest winner behind this battle is Sina Weibo. So let’s take a look at the mystery behind this unprecedented PK battle in the history of Weibo.

1. The origin of the story

The cause of this incident is very simple. On July 16, a Douban post appeared. Some netizens said that Jay Chou’s super topic was not even on the super topic rankings, questioning "Does he really have so many fans?"

This seemingly brainless question immediately left Jay Chou and the older generation of celebrity fans speechless, but what this netizen said was true. Jay Chou's super topic ranking on Sina Weibo is extremely low, and the number of Weibo reposts for related endorsements and activities has not even exceeded 10,000.

And the most embarrassing thing is that Jay Chou doesn’t even have a Sina Weibo account.

Many young idols’ Weibo posts are frequently retweeted tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of times. Such a huge data difference has caused the new generation of fans to begin to look down on the so-called out-of-date stars. So Jay Chou's fans and netizens started to vote for their own songs.

Since many of Jay Chou's fans were born in the 70s and 80s, and a small number were born in the 90s, they know nothing about the popular Weibo charts and have never tried this kind of thing. So many Jay Chou fans called themselves the Sunset Red Fan Club. A group of middle-aged uncles and aunts began to study the things their children liked to play, and then quietly retrieved their forgotten Weibo accounts and passwords.

What followed was an unprecedented Weibo super topic PK station kicked off.

2. The operating mechanism of Weibo Super Topic

Since many people have only heard of Weibo Super Topic but are not clear about what it is, I will give you a brief introduction here.

Weibo Super Topic is a community product created by Weibo imitating Baidu Tieba, which can provide Weibo users with topic exchanges in various interest areas including celebrities, variety shows, etc. Users can choose topics and initiate super topic management.

In the super topic, the most common things are various voting lists, covering games, variety shows, TV dramas, literature, celebrities, etc., but celebrities are the most popular and professional here.

Many celebrity rankings have very clear ranking rules and detailed requirements for increasing influence. Simply put, the "Super Topic List" only has two key data - influence and number of fans.

In short, the operation mechanism of super topics is very simple, and there are generally four aspects:

(1) Users need to follow their favorite super topics and then keep signing in on a daily basis

(2) Actively perform various daily tasks, including continuous sign-in, super topic sign-in, forwarding comments, posting, and other daily activities

(3) Accumulate various points for yourself through these daily operations

(4) Choose to vote for your favorite star and give away all the points you have earned

Therefore , the operating mechanism of Weibo Super Topic is a gameplay that relies on various daily activities to collect points. Such points are still a product with strong demand for celebrity fans, which naturally leads to a surge in various DAUs of Weibo Super Topic.

3. Four topics on Weibo Super Topic Ranking

We can regard the Weibo super topic ranking as a simple voting activity, so let’s make a simple comparison between the ranking activity and the voting activity.

Regarding voting activities, we all know the rules. Each user can only vote once or three times a day. Some activities allow repeated voting every day, while some activities only allow voting once.

Then let's switch back to the ranking activity. We can see that ranking is also voting, but the votes are replaced with points, and there is no limit on the points you can get by ranking. As long as you have enough points, theoretically you can vote indefinitely.

Now let’s move on to the analysis phase of our ranking PK competition. Let us learn how to design an excellent voting event through this ranking event.

1. Provoke emotions and stimulate seed users to participate

At the beginning, this event was just a spontaneous action of Jay Chou's fans, but with the participation of fan groups such as Jay Chou Chinese website, the influence of the event gradually expanded, and a large number of Jay Chou's fans scattered all over the country supported Jay Chou in the rankings. However, since most of Jay Chou's fans are middle-aged, they don't know how to play the chart-topping activities that young people are good at, so the event was at a disadvantage at the beginning.

Because although these sunset red fans have successful careers and happy families, they don’t know how to do data after all. So I messed around on Weibo and tried everything I could, but in the end it was the fans of Jay who were in the fan circle who taught me how to get on the charts.

With a specific strategy for making the list, Jay Chou's fans from all over the world soon got involved, and the ranking of Jay Chou's super topic continued to rise. Jay Chou went from being embarrassingly unknown on the list to quickly entering the top 20 of the celebrity list within a few hours, and even entered the top ten of the super topic for a time.

But this is far from enough. After all, the amount of data in Jay Chou’s super topic is nearly an order of magnitude lower than that of the first place. Such an overwhelming gap could not stimulate the spirits of both sides. After all, one was sure of victory, while the other was out of reach.

There will only be one result if this continues, that is, Jay Chou's fans will never be able to catch up with the first place's data even if they try their best, and Cai Xukun's fans can just play around and cast a few symbolic votes for their own fan.

So, Weibo's official entertainment account came out, and this time it had a huge mission, which was to stimulate the participation of Jay Chou's fans. So what should we do?

Soon, the official account "Entertainment with Fans" posted several Weibo posts. Inspired by the blogger's 7 million fans, more fans began to participate in this middle-aged star-chasing competition.

With the official release, Jay Chou's super topic list skyrocketed and successfully rose to the second place on Saturday.

2. Exposure at multiple points to expand the spread of activities

If this PK match is just a fight between fans of both sides, then such an activity is meaningless, because any voting activity requires an increase in the overall data, that is, the top five will PK with each other, and the 5th to 10th will PK with the 11th to 15th.

Of course, this premise is based on the fact that the gap between the two sides is not too big. Otherwise, a gap that is too big will make people give up the desire to make progress.

Therefore, the official Weibo and super topic officials began to consciously guide other celebrity fans to participate in supporting their idols in the rankings, but it may be that other celebrity fans are more in a spectator's mindset, worried that they will become cannon fodder, so they have little desire to participate in the rankings.

Therefore, Weibo shifted its focus to the top ranking competition between Jay Chou and Cai Xukun, and began to allocate a large amount of resources to the battle between the two sides. Weibo topic list, Weibo hot list, topic public opinion and other topics have pushed this incident to a climax.

3. Reasonably control the score and maintain a certain user participation desire

When it comes to the weekend, the activities tend to favor Jay Chou, because many Sunset Red fans are resting at home on the weekend and have plenty of time to play the charts. With the efforts of fans, the gap to the first place is only 100,000 points, and breaking the first place is basically within reach. You know, the gap at the beginning was 8 million points.

But a very strange scene occurred. No matter how Jay Chou's fans voted, the two sides always maintained a gap of 100,000 points, and this situation lasted for 12 hours.

It turns out that Cai Xukun’s fans have been participating in the rankings for a long time and have nearly tens of millions of spare points that they can use anytime and anywhere. Jay Chou's fans, however, had no spare points as they were participating in the ranking contest for the first time, so they could only get tired and fall into a stalemate of a war of attrition.

As a result, the battle situation became increasingly intense, and in just 12 hours, the influence of both sides jumped by tens of millions. Such a huge amount of data makes fans of other stars even less motivated to impact the charts, so they just sit back and watch or switch to the two camps to canvass for votes.

This is very common in many voting activities, and you will often see the first and second place votes far ahead of the following ones. Moreover, in order to ensure the good-looking data volume, some activities will quietly increase the number of votes for the contestants without breaking the balance between each other, so that the two PK parties are only a little bit away from surpassing each other.

Using the mentality that one can surpass the other party with just a little effort, both contestants are stimulated to continue to invest various resources to canvass votes for themselves.

4. Off-site rescue, well-known KOLs participate to expand influence

As the battle became a stalemate, Jay Chou ran out of fan points and began to look for external help off the field.

Soon, fan clubs of older generation stars such as Mayday, Stefanie Sun, and Eason Chan began to join the battle. Although these star fans were also participating in a chart-topping event for the first time, they were fresh forces and the situation was reversed for a time.

But compared with Cai Xukun's huge reserve points, these points are still a drop in the bucket.

But given Jay Chou's good connections and status as a big brother in the entertainment industry, soon more and more celebrity fan groups began to participate, even including many celebrities such as Li Xian, Chen He, and JJ Lin who personally called for participation. Finally, it expanded to the legal, literary, advertising, e-sports and other industry bigwigs who all began to call on their fans to vote for Jay Chou.

In the end, more than 50 big Vs participated in the event to support Jay Chou, and the data volume skyrocketed instantly. At this time, Cai Xukun’s side did not care about controlling the points and directly threw out all the points they had.

Jay Chou's side has been constantly having new reinforcements joining, while the data gap with Cai Xukun's side is getting smaller and smaller. Finally, in the early hours of Sunday morning, Jay Chou successfully reached the top, surpassing Cai Xukun to become number one on the super topic list.

There was no suspense on the following Sunday, as Jay Chou's influence continued to rise, and he eventually became the first star in history to have an influence of over 100 million!

4. Subsequent Thoughts on Weibo Super Topic Ranking

Although this super topic ranking event has ended, the operating rules and gameplay design of the entire super topic are worth our consideration and in-depth understanding.

1. The core idea of ​​product improvement DAU

Many operators are anxious to increase DAU, so they design various gameplay rules. If their product has ten functions, they would like to let users use all ten functions without considering whether these functions are necessary for users. As a result, there are already a lot of anti-human operating rules.

Now let’s look back at how to play Weibo Super Topic. In fact, for Weibo Super Topic, all operations have only one core: points. Users are given points through various tasks, and can use these points to participate in the rankings.

Acquiring points is a strong demand for users, especially fans of celebrities. Based on this demand, users will accept any gameplay designed by the product. We can also see that the main ways to obtain points in the super topic are daily check-in, daily login, and forwarding and commenting on posts.

It is not difficult for users to obtain points through these super topic tasks, and the operation coefficient is very low, but it requires maintaining a high frequency of daily active logins. In addition, if users keep logging in continuously, the rate of acquiring points will be kept high, so users will be more addicted to the super topic product and contribute DAU continuously.

2. The logic of activities improving data effects

If you still think that you can just launch an event and let users participate on their own, you are really wrong.

As the initiator behind the event, you must adjust the rhythm of the event at any time and be ready to package the data for the participants at any time.

It is very simple to package data well. For an event, especially a voting event where the competition is for the top few, you must pay attention to users in three stages:

(1) 1st or 2nd place contestants;

(2) 8th to 13th place contestants;

(3) Contestants ranked 16th to 20th.

Because contestants ranked 11th to 15th are direct competitors of contestants ranked 6th to 10th, if they work harder they can advance to the top 10 and become the winners of the prizes.

The competition between the first and second place determines who will win the final grand prize, so the competition between the first and second place has always been the most intense.

We basically don’t need to pay attention to users after the 15th place because they don’t bring much data. What the organizers need to do is to create surprises for the participants at any time according to the rhythm of the event.

For example, a client of Renrenxiu platform once conducted a voting activity. The organizer observed that the top 15 users were slowly increasing their data. So we could make a slight adjustment and make the 12th user suddenly become the 10th. When a user wakes up and finds that he has become tenth, what he needs to do after being surprised is to keep his position. If the person who was originally tenth suddenly finds that he has fallen to eleventh, he needs to get back on track.

Then both sides will start canvassing for votes and competing for positions. Similarly, this operation can be continuously carried out on contestants ranked 8th to 13th, so that they will develop a sense of competition when their rankings fall.

In the end, the entire event achieved nearly 700,000 exposures, with a good overall effect.

V. Conclusion

Any phenomenal operational activity must have its own logic and promotion reasons behind it. As an operator, you must be able to carefully think about the relationship between them.

For example, if we assume that Weibo’s ranking campaign is a marketing event operated by the whole city behind Weibo, its purpose is to promote the activeness of Weibo’s old users. So how did this activity become so popular? Let’s briefly sort it out:

Cause: An unknown Douban account posted a controversial topic involving Jay Chou;

Development: Weibo began to build momentum for these topics and dislike public opinion topics;

Climax: The national chart-topping competition, and further penetrated the life circles of those born in the 80s and 90s through multi-channel dissemination;

Ending: Jay Chou succeeded in getting on the charts as he wished and set a new record;

Epilogue: Everyone remembers Jay Chou and exposes super topic products at a high frequency.

Although the several stages seem simple, each stage has its own logical gameplay, which requires the operator to control the rhythm of each link.

Author: Dabao

Source: Renrenxiu