Zhihu product operation analysis

From a vertical knowledge community loved by professionals to a general knowledge platform with 200 million users today, Zhihu has given up a lot. In order to attract more users, Zhihu has been criticized for becoming watered down. Its slogan was once spoofed by netizens as "Share the story you just made up with the world."

In April this year, Zhihu released a new brand film and changed its slogan from "Share your knowledge, experience and insights with the world" to "We are all people with problems."

Immediately afterwards, the newly upgraded Zhihu New Knowledge Youth Conference was held to discuss the new development direction of Zhihu.

What does Zhihu’s new slogan indicate?

With content information giants like Weibo and Toutiao in front and knowledge-based paid products like Duoduo in the back, how can Zhihu snatch food from the tiger's mouth, grab users, increase user stickiness, and further explore commercialization?

Article structure:

• Product function structure
• Market Analysis
• User Analysis
• Demand Research
• Functional analysis
• Summarize

1. Zhihu functional structure

1.1 Product Architecture

1.2 User Usage Path

Open Zhihu and browse the questions and answers:

Use Search to find solutions to specific problems:

Using Zhihu University:

2. Market Analysis

2.1 Mobile Internet Market Situation

According to the mobile Internet analysis data of QuestMobile Research Institute, the scale of China's mobile Internet users has reached 1.138 billion, and the year-on-year growth rate has fallen below 4% for the first time.

The 2019 Mobile Internet Report released by iResearch Consulting shows:

From March 2017 to March 2019, both the average daily Internet usage time and number of Internet accesses per person as well as the total monthly Internet usage time and number of Internet accesses have been increasing, and the Internet usage time bonus has not disappeared.

However, the growth rate of users' Internet access times has slowed down, indicating that their usage time is more focused due to factors such as usage habits. The daily Internet usage time reached 3.5 hours, an increase of 24% year-on-year.

Judging from the geographical distribution of mobile users, the user dividend in first-tier cities has disappeared, the number of users in new first-tier cities and second-tier cities has increased significantly, and the number of users sinking to third-tier cities and below has not yet been seen.

Summarize:

It can be seen that the overall market situation of mobile Internet is becoming increasingly severe, the bonus period is about to pass, and the cost of acquiring new users has become very high.

And as Internet giants have already seized the high ground of mobile Internet, the breakthrough opportunities left for enterprises are getting smaller and smaller. But it does not mean that there are no other opportunities except BTA products.

User needs are endless. We must deeply understand and explore user pain points and always provide better products to users.

Based on product positioning, precise marketing and traffic diversion are carried out, users are attracted by high-quality content, user time allocation is seized, user retention rate is improved, and user sinking is the key to future growth.

2.2 Mobile Social Market Situation

According to Aurora Big Data, the user scale of social networks has remained stable from February 2018 to February 2019. Overall, the user dividend period has passed.

However, there is still a lot of room for development in the sub-industries under social networks, especially community forums and content social categories, which still maintain their growth rate while the penetration rate of other sub-industries declines.

This reflects the shift in user attention, and the inevitable trend of exploring new social areas and new ways of playing, refining operations, and focusing on fields.

2.3 The speed and slowness of Zhihu

2.3.1 From UGC Community to Inclusive Platform

Basic situation:

Zhihu released a new brand promotional video a few months ago: We are all people with problems. This marks the completion of the transformation from a vertical community to a universal knowledge platform.

From the promotional video, I think Zhihu has generalized the content of the platform. Zhihu has always been criticized for asking questions that are becoming more and more entertaining. This is the first time that the official has rectified its reputation. As long as the questions are asked out of curiosity about the world, each question has its own value.

Zhihu has been determined to expand its user base despite opposition from its early users. By the end of 2018, the number of users had exceeded 200 million. Since Zhihu started commercialization in 2016, users have never stopped discussing the issue of watered-down content.

In its early days, Zhihu provided a relatively closed and high-threshold platform that accumulated high-quality content in the community through high-quality user participation, thus forming a good and strong community atmosphere.

Zhihu was very good at these things in its early days, and users came to the community because of its reputation, so the community has a sentimental value in the hearts of early high-quality users, making its current watered-down nature even more unacceptable.

Problems caused by explosive user growth:

From the content point of view, the quality of community answers has declined, and the homepage recommendations are increasingly dominated by emotional and entertainment topics.

There are fewer and fewer in-depth topics that were discussed seriously, and more and more meaningless or lacking depth in questions. Zhihu's previous high-quality community image has suffered a great blow.

From the perspective of community participants, watering has led to the influx of a large number of low-quality users, which has also had a significant impact on the overall community atmosphere.

The reason why everyone liked Zhihu in the beginning, besides the high-quality questions and answers, was the harmonious and friendly discussion atmosphere. Nowadays, the comment section is flooded with "argumentative people" and "witty people", and the right to like is abused, which not only affects the creation of content producers, but also makes the atmosphere of serious discussion weak.

From the perspective of content creators, Zhihu prohibits big Vs from commercializing themselves, and is suspected of limiting the flow of big Vs. The harm caused by low-quality users to creators has exacerbated the conflict between the platform and big Vs.

From these three perspectives, the conflict between big Vs and low-quality users, the conflict between old users and new users, and the conflict between platforms and users, these three conflicts have been tearing apart the entire community.

This is also the inevitable result of Zhihu's rapid user growth, the inability of operations to keep up, and the imperfect platform mechanism.

My analysis:

The Salt Value and Creator Center launched in 2018 are Zhihu's answers to these contradictions and doubts. The Haiyan Project also marks that Zhihu has initially completed the construction of a complete ecosystem for the entire community, and a basis for resolving conflicts among the platform, big Vs, and users has been provided.

Zhihu's salt value system has certain value in maintaining the community atmosphere and creating a good usage environment, and can restrain users' uncivilized behavior.

I think it’s a good idea to measure users’ contributions to Zhihu and convert them into users’ rights on Zhihu.

Who says that products have to satisfy users in every way? Just like passing a game, you must put in a certain amount of effort to pass the level, which is also a fresh challenge for users.

The crowd-arbitration function was launched in Zhihu version 6.0. As part of the Haiyan Project, Zhihu, as a big city in the process of being improved, is already exploring the ultimate form of the community.

Content communities such as Tieba and Tianya have declined, but what is the future of Zhihu? Will the concept of "co-construction, co-governance and win-win" work in the community? We will have to wait and see.

2.3.2 How can inclusive platforms maintain their professionalism?

(1) Current status and problems of inclusive platforms

Knowledge is scarce, and there are always only a few people who master advanced knowledge, so the early elite communities were daunting for ordinary users.

Although Zhihu has been generalizing the definition of knowledge in order to dilute it, replacing "knowledge" with "viewpoint", thereby encouraging more people to participate in creation and output their views.

Zhihu claims to be a platform for universal knowledge, but the quality of the answers it provides is getting lower and lower. The fact that anyone can create content means an overall decline in content quality.

Although this does not mean that useful Q&A does not exist, valuable content is more difficult to see in massive data, and the subjectivity of the like function cannot fully represent the quality of the Q&A content.

Secondly, we often see some highly praised answers on Zhihu not because they have a certain depth or professionalism, but because they capture the psychology of the onlookers and become an outlet for emotional release, or they are simply witty jokes or pure complaints.

Such answers can get high praise, but it also causes great harm to those professional answers. In the long run, no one will insist on giving professional answers.

(2) Zhihu’s solution

First, by continuously optimizing the answer ranking algorithm, valuable answers can be ranked at the front to be seen by users first, thereby achieving positive incentives for creators.

The second is to award “professional badges” to answers by assessing the professionalism of the content. Answers that receive the "Professional Badge" will be affixed with a special gold logo and included in the algorithm for sorting and distributing answers.

(3) My analysis

First of all, it is believed that both measures can effectively screen answers. The "professional badges" gave me a new idea: Is it possible to identify the content nature of different answers and promote user content consumption by labeling the answers?

For example, adding label ratings such as "witty", "tricky angle", and "best science" to identify answers can reduce the subjectivity of likes and can also serve as a supplement to the distribution algorithm.

(4) Another potential problem

Another problem with inclusive platforms is that as the overall quality of platform users declines, questions become more homogeneous and less valuable, making it increasingly difficult to have professional, serious, and well-required topics and questions.

According to the long tail effect, the demand for discussion on professional issues has accumulated to form a huge gap. Zhihu used to be able to meet such needs, but now all the platform resources have been eroded by low-threshold topics about outlook on life, and it is difficult to find a quiet corner.

(5) My solution

Zhihu can add niche or professional topics, motivate a group of professional answerers, provide them with platform resources, improve platform content, and increase professionalism.

After all, users, like platforms, are constantly evolving, the overall quality of users is improving, and the content and interests they focus on will also be different at different stages of development.

This can also attract users from different fields and expand the user market. Platform-based products should build a moat based on the completeness of the content.

2.3.3 “Slow-paced” commercialization

(1) Current status and problems of commercialization

Currently, Zhihu’s commercialization indicators are mainly driven by advertising. Although Zhihu Live was launched to catch up with the trend of knowledge payment, it was later upgraded and launched Zhihu University in June 2018, and the sale of Zhihu super membership began.

However, Zhihu University’s conversion rate has always been unsatisfactory and has not performed well.

Zhihu focuses on its own commercialization, but does not pay attention to the commercial demands of platform creators.

In order to ensure a good community atmosphere, the site has always prohibited big Vs from accepting advertisements privately, which has also caused two phenomenal incidents of big Vs leaving the site. Although the creator platform has been launched, no outstanding results have been seen so far. We have created an institutional account and opened up brand questions, which is a disguised form of writing soft articles.

The official monetization channel provided by Zhihu (Zhihu University) has very high requirements for creators. For various reasons, Zhihu University mostly invites scholars and professionals from outside the site to hold Live broadcasts on Zhihu, and does not fully utilize the resources within the site.

(2) Analysis

It is difficult to commercialize a pure UGC community, and Zhihu always treats top users and ordinary users equally. Top users are responsible for KPIs, and their positions are different from those of ordinary users, but Zhihu still forces them to be on the same baseline.

I believe that there is a symbiotic relationship between UGC platforms and top users, where users and platforms trust each other and achieve success together.

Zhihu has the best content creators on the entire Internet and has huge traffic, but its monetization ideas are not broad. Zhihu needs to explore diversified business profit models and figure out where big Vs should be placed.

Another idea for big Vs to monetize through the platform is discussed in the functional analysis.

2.4 Competitive Product Analysis

Today's Zhihu is no longer just a pure UGC platform. It has expanded its knowledge payment business and established Zhihu University. It involves more and more roles and the system is becoming increasingly larger.

Therefore, we cannot conduct competitive product analysis from a single industry. Here, we divide competitive product analysis into community and knowledge payment categories, and choose the community as the analysis angle.

Apple App Store Social Rankings-2019/06/03

(1) Weibo data analysis

Weibo, which also belongs to the community platform category, is in the first tier of the industry, with its user base and activity rate far exceeding Zhihu.

The MAU reached 300 million, with an average usage time of 34 minutes per person and an average daily startup frequency of 5.2 times. User stickiness is very strong, and Weibo firmly dominates user time with hot topic push, entertainment gossip, and interaction between fans and KOLs.

At the same time, short content formats can easily expand user scenarios, allowing users to discover new things anytime and anywhere.

(2) Zhihu data analysis

As of the end of August 2018, Zhihu's registered user base exceeded 200 million, and as of December 2018, its monthly active users were just over 30 million, a huge gap compared to Weibo.

(3) Causes of the differences

One is the difference in product tone. Compared with the knowledge community that pursues a rigorous and serious atmosphere and professional answering, Weibo's entertainment tendency and lower threshold make it easier to attract traffic and sink users.

Second, driven by the overall environment, Weibo appeared in the web2.0 stage, and traditional media transformed and began to emphasize the personal media value.

In 2015, the fan economy emerged, ushering in an era where traffic is king. Weibo seized the opportunity twice and achieved its current success.

(4) Analyze Zhihu’s breakthrough

But this does not mean that Weibo will firmly occupy the throne of the number one community social network.

From February 2018 to February 2019, Weibo's MAU and DAU showed a clear downward trend, and user growth reached a bottleneck.

Weibo’s sluggish growth was also expected. The reason is that Weibo’s commercialization has seriously damaged the community ecology and user experience: Weibo’s three “specialties” are marketing accounts, internet trolls, and argumentative people.

This gave Zhihu an opportunity. The platform has high-quality content, a good community atmosphere, and strictly regulated commercial marketing. Users are rarely involved in conflicts of interest, making them more easily controlled by the authorities.

All of these show that it is currently the most promising seed player to break through.

Comparing the download volume estimates of Zhihu and Weibo between January 1, 2017 and June 4, 2019, we can also find that the download volume trend of Weibo is downward, while the trend of Zhihu is stable, with an overall upward trend.

2.5 Product iteration

Changes in business iteration focus

The 3.X version lasted for two years, from June 2015 to August 2017.

2015 was a turbulent year for the Internet, with major companies scrambling to seize the high ground and capital beginning to concentrate: on one side, the "red envelope war" between WeChat and Alipay, and the fierce battle between JD.com, Tmall and Suning; on the other side, Kuaidi and Didi merged, and Youku Tudou merged and was acquired by Alibaba.

While the competition was heating up outside, Zhihu was concentrating on improving its own platform. The focus of its updates was on the basic functions of the Q&A community, and it continuously optimized the user experience when asking questions, answering questions and consuming content in order to gain a good reputation.

Use high-quality UGC content and good product experience to attract new and convert users.

Since May 2016, Zhihu has frequently iterated its bookstore and Live, trying to expand new businesses and start focusing on the field of knowledge payment. It is said that 2016 is the first year of knowledge payment, and Zhihu has also entered a new iterative cycle.

Starting from version 4.X, Zhihu started to make big moves:

The first is the idea of ​​going online, which serves as a supplement to the question-and-answer format and a new social channel, opening up more usage scenarios for users.

The second is to start deeply optimizing the display and filtering algorithm for question and answer content. As users move down the platform, the mixed quality of content poses new challenges to Zhihu, and the official has begun to increase its efforts to guide, integrate and screen content.

At the same time, a salt value system is launched to increase user participation. Users and officials are jointly responsible for the quality and atmosphere of the knowledge community.

Third, when there is a sufficient amount of users and the knowledge community transforms into a platform, the knowledge market will be upgraded to Zhihu University, and systematic knowledge payment will be deeply cultivated. There is also an online creator center to meet the commercialization demands of creators.

With the development of the platform and the changes in the industry and users, Zhihu's iterative focus has been changing. Daring to embrace change is a basic requirement for Internet companies to survive.

Version 6.0 update: microblogging and headlines

(1) Update content

Zhihu skipped version 5.X and launched version 6.0 on June 11, 2019. A major change is adding ideas to the homepage timeline and adding a publish button to the bottom banner to encourage user creation to a greater extent.

(2) Thinking about “ideas”

From the perspective of this business alone, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. I think there are two main benefits:

First, the user image is more complete. When there are no ideas, the creator's output is based on questions and answers, but the objectivity of questions and answers prevents the creator from establishing his or her own "personality".

The output of creators' ideas from their own perspective supplements their image among fans. It is a means of maintaining social relationships between creators and users, a deepening of Zhihu's social attributes, and can increase user stickiness.

Second, short content has its own value, otherwise Weibo would not have achieved its current success. The idea has expanded Zhihu's usage scenarios and enriched its product form.

The drawbacks of the idea were also revealed during the actual launch: the biggest embarrassment was that no one used it.

Judging from the data performance of ideas, the overall user participation is not high. Content creators who have accumulated enough fans in the Q&A section have little influence in the ideas section.

This result is determined by users and product forms. Most users on Zhihu pay more attention to high-quality and professional opinions and content in questions and answers than to social interaction, and they do not care about the personal situation of the respondent.

For example, some users follow certain answerers because they want to continue to receive answers from them in their professional fields, rather than wanting to see which questions they liked, which questions they followed, or what opinions they posted.

But on the other hand, the merging of ideas into the follow-up stream has caused dissatisfaction among some users of the original ideas. This shows that some users have a great demand for Zhihu's strong social attributes, and even gradually their demand for such social interaction is stronger than that for Q&A, so they are dissatisfied with this behavior that weakens their ideas.

(3) Analysis of changes to "Ideas"

Advantages: Integrating user dynamics together makes more sense from a product architecture perspective.

Merging ideas and focusing on them, combining originally scattered content together, will bring in more traffic. Users who often follow answers can take a look at the ideas, and users in the ideas section can also learn more about the answers of the users they follow.

Zhihu officials also said that they will add filters to the follow-up pages in the future, and users can choose to view the ideas and answers of the people they follow.

Giving users the right to choose is a reflection of our emphasis on user experience, and it makes it easier for users to access content that they really care about.

Therefore, I think Zhihu’s move is to stratify users, which can capture clearer user portraits, optimize user experience, make products more reasonable, and bring more traffic. It is a choice with more advantages than disadvantages.

(4) Analysis of the three pillars of “Follow”, “Recommendation” and “Hot List” on Zhihu’s homepage:

Another change is the addition of subcategories for the hot lists.

Nowadays, Zhihu’s homepage is divided into three major sections: Follow + Recommendation + Hot List.

Focus on the present or the timeline mode; recommendations are distributed using algorithms; hot lists push real-time hot content with certain information attributes.

Whenever there is a hot event, there will be users on Zhihu who will provide their interpretations of the hot event. News and information have always been the basic needs of Internet users, and hot events can bring a lot of traffic to Zhihu.

But I think Zhihu can explore more optimized solutions. The current homepage content sections are too diverse, and users will lose sight of one thing while focusing on another. The three major sections distract users' attention too much, and users will get used to focusing on one section.

For example, a key issue mentioned by a Zhihu user: Zhihu’s traffic limit, which has been criticized for a long time, may not be intentional by the official. It may be that a large number of users are accustomed to using the recommended section and rarely switch to the follow section.

Zhihu's vacillation between algorithmic recommendation and social distribution exposes its unclear product positioning.

The analysis and optimization of this part are shown in the functional analysis section below.

3. User Analysis

3.1 Age distribution

Data description:

The age distribution of Zhihu is quite diverse, with the largest number of users being between the ages of 26 and 35, accounting for around 40%, followed by Generation Z, which accounts for 20%.

Zhihu has attracted a lot of new generation blood who have certain requirements for content by virtue of its diluted content level.

analyze:

Users aged 26 to 35 are in the career development stage and have a desire to learn more about the industry. They have already found their areas of interest and hobbies and are willing to participate in discussions and express their opinions in a friendly manner.

I am curious about different industries and fields and have a strong thirst for knowledge.

The pursuit of high-quality and in-depth communication, high-quality content and the desire to reach out to more like-minded people drive them to use Zhihu.

It can be seen that although Zhihu has become watered down, there are not a large number of shoddy questions and answers, and brainless funny content for entertainment purposes rarely appears. Zhihu has done a good job in maintaining the overall atmosphere of the community and has not blindly broadened the content limit for the sake of traffic. Users can follow industry experts to understand industry trends.

As the youngest generation that grew up with the Internet, Generation Z is more willing to express itself and show its individuality compared to the asset-light generation.

College students also have a strong presence on Zhihu. You can often see them asking questions and being watched:

As a group born after 1995, college students are in a stage where they are separated from their parents but have not yet officially entered the society. This stage is the stage where the three basic views are established. With the awakening of self-awareness, many conceptual confusions will arise.

So Zhihu, as a question-and-answer website, became a breakthrough. In addition, some of the nascent answerers on Zhihu are also students. They rely on their writing skills to accumulate fans and gain recognition by expressing their own opinions.

What does Generation Z love? They love live streaming, playing games, socializing, taking photos, and have a clear tendency towards pan-entertainment.

But Generation Z is not keen on mindless entertainment. They are full of curiosity and thirst for knowledge, but the areas they focus on are more diverse and niche. Just as Bilibili has become a learning base for young people, Zhihu has become their encyclopedia.

3.2 Gender distribution

Data description:

From the perspective of gender, there is not much difference between male and female Zhihu users, and there is no obvious difference in their demand for content social interaction. With the rise of her economy and the improvement of women's education level, the thirst for knowledge is more prominent and the spending power is enhanced.

From the perspective of content creators, female influencers are at a disadvantage in terms of numbers, accounting for only 28%. (The data comes from Zhihu user Erpang, published in the Zhihu column Big Data Frontier).

Analyze the reasons for this phenomenon:

(1) This is related to Zhihu’s early community positioning. In the early days, Zhihu started from the Internet and discussed technical issues, with low participation of women.

(2) In terms of communication style, men’s communication style is “reporting”, which is mainly based on stating facts, with the intention of attracting others’ attention and obtaining more information; while women’s main communication style is “relational”, which is mainly based on expressing emotions, with the intention of getting closer to others and establishing and maintaining a close relationship by sharing private emotions.

From this we can see that on a platform like Zhihu that focuses on facts, men's communication style is more likely to be accepted.

(3) According to a survey conducted by Aurora Big Data, in terms of the communication habits of social users, men are more likely to express their opinions and participate in discussions than women. Men also have a deep-rooted motivation to seek recognition of their status and identity, and they want to have influence by expressing their opinions.

(4) Considering the different areas of interest between men and women, Zhihu’s background has led to its current community style being more masculine.

It was not until Zhihu became watered down and its user base began to sink that it added topics that tended to be more female and attracted a large number of female users.

3.3 Occupational distribution

Data description and illustrative questions:

According to Zhihu's private survey data, the majority of Zhihu users are engaged in Internet IT. The main reason is that Zhihu's initial community positioning was aimed at the Internet industry, so it attracted more users from the same industry.

Except for the Internet, the remaining industries account for a very small proportion.

This shows that Zhihu has not done enough exploration in other vertical professional fields (the small proportion of female influencers is also a reflection of the lack of in-depth exploration in other fields).

Solution suggestions:

Zhihu needs to discover more creators from different industries and niche fields and encourage them to be active on Zhihu. Add professional vertical topics and questions in segmented fields to enrich the platform content and attract users from more fields.

3.4 Consumption Capacity and Willingness

From the analysis provided by iResearch Consulting, it can be seen that in 2017, the proportion of users who paid in social applications was 10.8% higher than that of users who did not pay. Compared with 2017, today's users have a stronger awareness of payment.

And obtaining membership privileges in social applications has become mainstream, but there is still room for improvement in the payment amount.

For light-asset users between the ages of 26 and 35, they have the capital to pay but have high requirements for paid content, and they pay attention to cost-effectiveness and quality. Generation Z has a strong desire to consume online, is more likely to pay for their spiritual needs, and is willing to try new things.

3.5 Geographical Distribution

By comparing the data of Weibo and Zhihu on Baidu Index, we can see that Zhihu users are mainly concentrated in first-tier coastal cities and economically developed areas in South China, and there is no obvious decline in second-tier cities. This shows that Zhihu still has a lot of room for increasing its user base.

However, Zhihu's 200 million users have already been exchanged for a certain quality of community content. Zhihu needs to strike a balance between attracting more users and ensuring content quality.

Solution suggestions:

Improve the algorithm distribution capabilities, make recommendations based on user interest areas, do a good job of user stratification, and implement in-depth user-customized information recommendations, so that users from different circles do not interfere with each other.

3.6 User Profile

Xiao Lizi, male, 21 years old, from Chengdu, a sophomore at a second-tier university in Chengdu

Born after 1995, sophomore in the School of Computer Science.

Leo has always had a great interest in programming. He downloaded Zhihu because he heard that there were many programming experts on the website.

As soon as I downloaded it, I immediately followed many industry leaders, watching them explain different positions in the Internet and discuss various programming languages. Through Zhihu, Leo determined to become a front-end developer.

So I searched for various front-end learning paths on Zhihu and found a learning method that suits me.

Sometimes when he encounters problems in learning front-end, Leo will ask questions on Zhihu, and many netizens will answer his questions. Leo thinks Zhihu is a great place to gain knowledge and the people there are very friendly.

Now, Leo uses his spare time after class to browse Zhihu every day. He has also tried to answer other people's questions, but he rarely gets likes because of his low level.

Holland, male, 26 years old, Shanghai, product manager of an Internet company

As an old user of Zhihu, he often communicates with partners in the same industry on Zhihu.

I follow four to five hundred users, and open Zhihu every day to check their timeline to see what they think. I occasionally applaud and comment, but rarely read recommendations.

When I see questions that interest me, I will write answers. Currently, one of my answers has received more than 2K likes. By continuously answering questions, I have accumulated nearly 3,000 followers. Every time Zhihu is updated, I will write a few sentences of my own opinions.

He would occasionally visit Zhihu University. Although he felt that the quality of the content there was uneven, he still became a member and would listen to the live broadcasts of people he was interested in or followed.

He feels that the reason why he likes Zhihu so much is that Zhihu provides a channel to contact industry experts. He can see what these experts are paying attention to recently, understand their ideas, and thus motivate himself.

But with the development of Zhihu in recent years, he has also felt the changes in Zhihu. He knows that this is the only way for a product to seek development, so he hopes that Zhihu can resolve user conflicts within the platform.

Ms. Niu, female, 25 years old, from Shenzhen, an account operator of an Internet education institution

Sister Niu is an operations staff member of a company. Since the company is small, it did not engage in large-scale marketing to save costs. However, since the attributes of Zhihu users are highly consistent with the company's target customer positioning, it decided to open an institutional account.

Sister Niu’s daily job is to search and answer questions related to Internet industry skills on Zhihu, and direct users to the company’s WeChat platform.

For Sister Niu, Zhihu is her work platform. Every day she pays attention to the likes, comments, conversion rates and other data of Zhihu users to complete KPI assessment.

In addition to the operating organization account, Sister Niu also has her own personal Zhihu account. She usually pays attention to the bigwigs in operations. The one she uses most frequently is Zhihu University. She has opened a Zhihu membership to learn about operations knowledge.

Brother Bao, male, 35 years old, from Shanghai, writer, Zhihu celebrity

Brother Bao is a writer of some fame. He has published several novels, which are niche but sold well. Later, he started answering questions on Zhihu at the invitation of a friend. Brother Bao's writing is humorous and full of insights into life, and he quickly accumulated a group of followers.

Later, he began to serialize columns and cultivated a group of reader fans.

Zhihu started to charge for content, and Brother Bao was invited to host a live show. The profits were very good at the beginning, but gradually they became lower and lower, and the fan repurchase rate became lower.

Maybe it’s because my live broadcasts are all about my own experiences, which don’t have strong reference value and practicality, so users are less and less interested in watching them.

Nowadays, users like to watch content that is highly targeted and can quickly bring value. His "slow" sharing is not popular among fans.

Brother Bao thought, he has so many fans on Zhihu, but these fans cannot bring any value to him. They can only be mentioned when bragging. What’s the use?

So Brother Bao stopped updating his column and his activity level also dropped. He usually just read other people’s answers and occasionally wrote about questions he was interested in. He began to fall in love with ideas and chatted with fans in the idea section every day.

Jiumei, female, 24, Wuhan, employee of a state-owned enterprise

Jiu Mei downloaded Zhihu a while ago. A friend introduced it to her. He said that this app is useful and the people on it are very capable and speak very clearly.

Jiu Mei just downloaded it and tried it out and found it boring. The users above were all talking about useless things that she was not interested in.

Until one day she found a column called "Goddess Evolution" which was dedicated to teaching girls how to dress. She thought the tips were very practical, so she tried to match a few pieces of clothing according to the instructions, and the results were good.

Later, I found people sharing makeup tips and weight loss methods on Zhihu. I felt that what they said was much more professional than those on Baidu and Weibo, so I started to browse Zhihu.

She sometimes searches for her idol’s name on Zhihu to see what other people think of him or see gossip about him. She also writes long answers to questions about her idol. She feels very happy when she sees people who like the same idol as her like her and comment on her posts.

After using Zhihu, she dislikes Weibo less and less. Now, except for reading her idol’s super topic on Weibo, she spends most of her time on Zhihu. She recently saw a topic about "part-time job" on Zhihu, which made her very excited and she plans to try it herself.

4. User Research

This survey adopts the method of questionnaire survey, mainly investigating the usage of Zhihu among college students. A total of 40 people filled out the questionnaire, all of whom were college students in Chengdu. Here is the questionnaire:

analyze:

Among the forty people, only 7.5% have never used Zhihu, and 59.46% of users have been using Zhihu for more than half a year, which shows that Zhihu does have a high penetration rate among college students.

However, only 18.92% of users have used Zhihu today, and the proportion of those who have used it within three days is 16.22%, which shows that Zhihu has very poor stickiness among college students. Most of them will use it when needed and leave after use.

The three aspects of Zhihu that are most attractive to college students are:

1. Look at your area of ​​interest
2. A lot of dry goods, check the information and use it
3. Understand different perspectives of friends

Following industry leaders and current affairs are the two things college students are least interested in. This shows that college students are most focused on their own areas of interest and are less concerned about current affairs. Since they have not yet started working, their awareness of the industry is relatively low.

At the same time, Zhihu is indeed a place for college students to recharge, search for information and learn.

The three most frequently browsed columns are the recommendation column, hot list, and follow column, but compared to the timeline, college students prefer to watch the recommendation flow - 62.13% of college students follow creators they are interested in, and among college students who follow creators, only 13.04% will frequently read the updates released by the creators.

In half a year, only 18.92% of college students asked questions on Zhihu; the proportion of answering questions was higher, accounting for 29.73%; the proportion of writing down ideas was 27.03%; and the proportion of using collection/like was 64.86%.

It can be seen that college students consume more content than produce content on Zhihu, and their participation level is not high.

81.08% of users have never used Zhihu University, 21.62% of users said they would use it if the content on Zhihu University is what they need, and 32.43% of users were more conservative and would consider whether to purchase based on the content.

This shows that most college students are willing to try paying for knowledge and have a friendly attitude towards paying for knowledge. However, for some reason, I have not been able to use Zhihu University, which shows that Zhihu's paid content has a low reach for college students and has not discovered their real needs.

Regarding the evaluation of Zhihu, 59.46% of people think that the overall quality is good, and 35.14% think that the quality is average. This shows that after being diluted, Zhihu is no longer out of reach for college students and has become more down-to-earth.

Problems exposed:

The questionnaire analysis revealed two problems:

First, it lacks stickiness for college students, and they are in a use-it-and-leave-it state, which is consistent with the problem I analyzed in the previous article.

Zhihu is wavering between algorithmic recommendation and social distribution, but users' current usage habits are more inclined towards algorithmic distribution, and they rarely look at the follow-up column. Without social stickiness, users will use Zhihu less and less frequently.

Second, college students are clearly very friendly towards paying for Zhihu, and student users account for a large proportion of Zhihu, but the proportion of those using Zhihu University is extremely low. This shows that Zhihu University does not attach importance to the college student market, has not deeply explored their needs, and has a very low reach.

Solutions to these two problems will be proposed in the next chapter.

V. Functional Analysis

5.1 Problem

I pointed out a problem with Zhihu in the previous article: it is unclear how content connects users. The main manifestation is the division between algorithm distribution and social distribution.

Specific analysis:

The success of Toutiao products has led many apps to follow suit. Everyone is using algorithms to distribute big data, but they have ignored the key factor of content products - content production.

In the early days, Toutiao's content was crawled by machines, and the platform did not produce any content. In pursuit of long-term development, Toutiao has increasingly focused on incentivizing high-quality creators and has incentivized creators by spending money.

It can be said that Toutiao does not have the ability to attract creators to participate in creation spontaneously like Zhihu. Therefore, Toutiao does not care whether the creators’ enthusiasm for creation is suppressed, nor does it care whether the creators can better accumulate their own influence.

Therefore, it uses powerful algorithm distribution capabilities without having to consider whether the lack of incentives from content consumers will dampen creators' enthusiasm for creation and affect output. Technology has become Toutiao’s moat.

Obviously, Zhihu’s advantages are exactly the opposite of Toutiao. If the content distribution model continues to lean towards algorithmic distribution, the connection between creators and content consumers will become increasingly thin.

When the function of ideas is weakened, columns are not taken seriously, and comments under answers become increasingly irrelevant, it does great harm to creators.

And although Zhihu has over 200 million users, the daily and monthly active users are not ideal, so the current goal is to establish shallow social connections between creators and content consumers to activate users and increase user stickiness.

So I think the improvement in this area should be mainly social distribution, supplemented by algorithm distribution.

5.2 Optimization ideas

first step:

Change the way the page is presented. When you launch Zhihu through the startup page, always switch the homepage to the follow page.

I checked the presentation mode of Zhihu when opened on Xiaomi and Huawei phones. The current status of Zhihu is that it will present the page that was maintained when last exited.

For example, if you exit a page while it is still being recommended, the next time you launch it through the startup page, the first page displayed will be the recommended page.

Step 2:

Add the classification of followers, users can classify followers according to different fields. Through user-defined classification, you can find the areas you want to see more quickly, and by optimizing the use of follow-up, you can increase the frequency of use.

Step 3:

Increase the weight of the column on the follow page and add a paid column.

Zhihu’s current community business is mainly focused on questions and answers, the idea data is not good, and the columns are in a free-range state.

As mentioned earlier, the user data image established only by answers is incomplete, which is not conducive to maintaining the relationship between creators and users. Zhihu also has a great demand for professional knowledge in vertical fields, and the column just fills this demand. So I think we can increase the weight of the column, which has the following benefits:

• Compared with Q&A, it deepens the social relationship between creators and users and improves user stickiness;
• The usage scenarios have been expanded. The community can be connected with Zhihu University through traffic diversion, so that users can naturally move from the community to Zhihu University.
• Creators can build their own private traffic with the help of Zhihu, operate on their own, and increase their enthusiasm for creation;
• Creators can monetize their traffic under official supervision, for example, by adding advertisements under articles, writing paid columns, etc.

Regarding the traffic monetization in the fourth article, my idea is that creators can choose whether to pay based on the content of the column.

If you choose to pay, you will be responsible for the payment conversion rate of the content.

Paid products will be added to membership benefits. Users who have opened Zhihu membership can directly view paid content, and users who have not opened membership can purchase it directly. The profits will be shared by the platform and the creators.

Of course, the disadvantages are also easy to think of: first, writing a column may reduce the creator's enthusiasm for writing answers; second, it puts forward better requirements for creation, requiring not only good content but also good operation.

The platform can provide training on operational issues. Although writing columns will reduce output in the answer area, early creators will still insist on writing answers in order to attract traffic.

Here is the prototype design:

Step 4:

Increase the recommendation ratio for columns in the recommendation column. The column recommendations are distributed using an algorithm, and the reference factors include: columns published by creators you have followed, topics that users are interested in, recently viewed content, and current hot topics.

Step 5:

Add a column operation position in the hot list column and separate the column from the Q&A.

Search bar experience optimization:

Even when there is a hot list, the frequency of hot searches is very low. And when a user clicks on the search box, it means that there is content that he wants to search for, which is very purposeful. He will not click on the search bar just to take a look.

Therefore, apart from the hot searches, subsequent categories are rarely clicked on, and the conversion rate is very low.

So I think we can increase the number of hot searches, reduce the number of categories under the search box, and add a button to hide hot searches to avoid boring users with too much information in the search box.

When you click on the film and television column, you can see that Zhihu has added movie recommendations under the search bar in order to promote user content consumption. In order to increase user clicks, you can put it in the hot list sub-category film and television column.

Zhihu University Optimization:

From the above survey, it can be concluded that Zhihu University cannot reach college students well. Zhihu University advertisements can be pushed on the recommendation page to users who have not used Zhihu University: Zhihu Live one-yuan trial listening event, so as to increase the paying activity rate of college students.

First, we need to analyze the background data, identify the college student group, and then promote advertising in a targeted manner. I think it can be identified from the following perspectives:

College students use the app infrequently and use it immediately. We focus on screening users who last used the app within three days to a week and whose opening frequency is intermittent.

College students are pure browsers and content consumers. We screen out users who use the favorite and like functions the most, but rarely answer questions, ask questions, or post ideas.

Filter out users who frequently use the app at certain time points, such as June and December, which are the time periods for CET-4 and CET-6 exams;

Filter out users with low opening rates in certain time nodes, such as July and August, January and February, because these periods are winter and summer vacations;

Here is the prototype design:

After clicking the link to go to "Membership", a modal box will pop up when entering the membership for the first time, allowing users to select areas of interest to increase the accuracy of recommendations.

A "Not Interested" option is added to the "Guess You Like" column to improve user experience, help the platform optimize algorithms, and increase paid conversion rates.

VI. Conclusion

Zhihu has evolved from an initially closed community to a large-scale platform today, taking a path that many people may not like, and the "Zhihu Pill" has also been talked about from 2016 to 2019.

Zhihu has given up a lot and gained a lot to get to where it is today.

The founder of Zhihu likes to compare making products to building a city.

If Zhihu is compared to a city, then Zhihu used to be a small corner where people lived a laissez-faire manner. Now, Zhihu has transformed from a small place into a small city.

As the population increases and the properties become more complex, governance becomes more difficult, so cities have police and committees. Gradually, the rules are improved and the city will move towards a better direction.

Rome was not built in a day, nor was it built by one person. Similarly, Zhihu will become better and better only when users create value and contribute content to the platform. I hope everyone will continue to love Zhihu, maintain Zhihu together, and make Zhihu better.

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Author: Bye Bye

Source: Bye Bye