How to break through the bottleneck of new media operations?

In the past few days, many operations partners have talked to me:

The person in charge of the company’s official account loses followers after just one tweet. Especially in 2018 and the beginning of this year, it has become increasingly difficult to operate public accounts. Can you give some ideas?

This is indeed a headache-inducing problem, and even frustrating at times.

I've been through this. The official account I was once responsible for also experienced the same problem.

For a while, almost every push was an indirect reminder to fans to unfollow. As long as I don’t push it, fewer people will unfollow me. Later on, our editor felt like he was being tortured every time he pushed a message, and his heart was filled with boredom, worry and torment.

"It's becoming increasingly difficult to run a public account" - wherever public account operators gather, similar voices can be heard everywhere.

According to the data from Xinbang's "2018 China WeChat Top 500 Annual Report", the average number of readings of public accounts in 2018 was 1,889 times, a decrease of 932 times from 2017, and the average number of readings of public accounts decreased by about 33% year-on-year; the number of readings of the top 500 group has declined for two consecutive years, and the average number of readings has decreased by 13.8% month-on-month.

The decline in the number of public account readers has become a pain point in the industry, and many friends have gradually realized that the situation of their own public accounts is not so optimistic. Everyone hurriedly entered the self-rescue mode, read a lot of theories, and tried various methods, such as placing Guangdiantong ads and recommending each other among public accounts, but with little effect.

In my communication with some operations colleagues, I found that many students fall into a shallow level of thinking when running public accounts. For example, they lack judgment and understanding of the overall situation, and are only limited to hoping to achieve a sharp effect through certain operation tools.

However, if we want to truly solve the problems of official accounts, we must abandon this habit, consider the problem in the long term, and ensure through systematic thinking that our solution does not deviate from the original intention of the problem, quickly find the key points, and not waste time and energy on useless work.

Here I will combine my previous practical experience and some thoughts to talk about the internal and external troubles of public account operators. Perhaps you can try to find answers from these two aspects.

"The current predicament faced by public account operators includes both internal and external troubles."

1. External threats

1. Endless list of competitors

Any product has a life cycle, with four stages: start-up, growth, maturity and decline. For a seven-year-old product, WeChat Official Account has experienced rapid development in the growth stage, but with the market ceiling of the industry itself and changes in the external environment, it has begun to dim since last year.

Today, we are living in an era of big bang, product explosion, and information explosion. An overabundance of products, homogeneity, and ubiquitous substitutes are ready to meet any user need. Take the platforms on the market that provide similar content and information services as official accounts, including Toutiao, Baijiahao, NetEase, Sohu, Qutoutiao, etc. There are countless similar competitors, all of which are trying to grab user time from different dimensions.

At the same time, competition in the Internet field is essentially a competition for user attention, and this competition often does not occur between products with similar functions, but is more likely to occur between products with very different functions.

With the rise of two attention black hole products, live streaming and short videos, in recent years, the situation has changed a lot. In particular, Tik Tok has become another phenomenal super APP after WeChat.

Everyone says that 5 minutes on Tik Tok is like 3 hours in the real world. For some users, as they spend more time on Tik Tok and watching live broadcasts, they have less time to read articles on WeChat.

Judging from the total time users spend on the second half of the Internet, all products are on the same track again, and competition will become increasingly fierce in the future.

But no matter what, we all need to understand one thing: now not only similar public accounts are your competitors, but all products that compete with you for traffic during this period of time are your competitors.

From this point of view, the declining opening rate of public accounts is inevitable.

2. Disappearing bonus

Why it is becoming increasingly difficult to run a public account, that is, why there are no more bonuses. The reason is very simple, it can be summed up in four words - supply and demand.

Five years ago, there were not many things users could do when they opened their phones. They just chatted on WeChat, browsed their Moments, and checked public accounts. At that time, there were not many people running public accounts. When you catch up with that wave of content dividends and create a public account, users will still follow you even if the quality is average.

Now, countless public accounts are waiting for users to kill time, such as "Late Night Fawu, Poisonous Tongue Movies, Luo Zhenyu, Uncle Kai, Shouye..." The top public accounts in various fields have firmly attracted a group of subscribers with specific needs with their high-quality and recognizable content, accelerating the polarization of the public account reading volume.

It is worth mentioning that in this market anxiety of "the traffic dividend disappearing", content is often more important.

In the current development of public accounts and various self-media, high-quality content is actually more like a form of survival of the fittest. If you work hard on creating content, people will see it.

1. Closed WeChat ecosystem

Recently, private domain traffic has gradually become a hot word in the operation circle.

When it comes to "private domain traffic pool", everyone has a different understanding. Some people understand it as a new way of traffic, while others understand it as a user pool.

I looked up a broad definition of "private domain traffic" on the Internet: it refers to traffic that is independently owned by a brand or individual, can be freely controlled, is free, and can be used multiple times. From the early address books to the current WeChat groups, QQ groups and APP users, they are all exclusive traffic for brand owners or individuals, which can be used for repeated marketing and Amway.

However, compared with other platforms, official accounts are a relatively closed environment and lack the support of content distribution channels, which makes it impossible to effectively disseminate content and thus cannot bring in new users at zero cost.

More and more brands have already made preparations and have begun to explore new traffic markets outside of official accounts to tap into customers and continuously develop new private traffic. For example, Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Toutiao, etc. have become standard marketing tools for companies.

1. Changing users

We live in an era of pan-entertainment. The fast-paced life, high-pressure work, and complex interpersonal relationships make the scenarios in which users consume content more fragmented. Various entertainment applications occupy most of our time and attention, and all serious topics and thoughts are treated in an entertaining way.

Among them, short videos and games are still the main representatives, and immersive entertainment is more likely to win the favor of the public.

At the same time, the user group is getting younger and younger, their appreciation ability is also improving, the content they pay attention to is becoming more diversified, and the demand for high-quality content is becoming more urgent.

We who create content must be clearly aware of this: times are changing, user groups are changing, and user tastes are changing, but users' demand for good content remains unchanged. Good content is still the foundation for the long-term operation of a public account.

2. Internal Troubles

The external threats currently faced by public account operators have been mentioned above. Of course, if operators pay too much attention to external factors, they will neglect to focus on and explore their own problems, thus causing more problems.

Faced with the current situation of declining overall data of public accounts, it is definitely incomplete for us to make unilateral attribution; in the long run, it will not be conducive to us learning from experience and promoting our own growth.

Although each public account has its own positioning and tone, and different operators have their own fixed behavioral habits, the most common reasons for poor public account operations are actually quite common.

Now it can be found on various operating websites and communities that the problems that operators complain about the most and are most likely to encounter are the following. You may wish to check your own official account to see which link is insufficient.

Possible problems with public accounts

1. Is the push time the peak reading time for target users?
2. Does the title of the picture arouse the user’s curiosity? Does it hit the user’s pain points?
3. Is the cover image interesting? Is it attractive enough? Is it too complicated or too bland for users to understand?
4. Does the tweet summary encourage users to click on the image and text?
5. Are the topics selected each time what users like to read? And can it bring value to users?
6. Is the layout of the official account conducive to reading? Is there a consistent style for each tweet?
7. Does the picture and text guide new users to pay attention?
8. Does the article end with a prompt to encourage users to read more? Participate in topic discussions and leave messages? Click "Reading" and share the article?
9. Do you often organize activities or interactions that fans love to enhance the favorability between fans and the brand?
10. Are there too many commercial tweets or advertisements in recent push notifications? Does it harm the user experience?

The above problems must have troubled every public account operator. Faced with various changes in public accounts and complex situations, how should we break through this bottleneck?

Next, I will talk about how to break the deadlock and what we should do? How to do it?

3. Breakthrough

1. Return to the content itself

The content of a public account is itself a "product" that needs to be constantly consumed by users. When you run it, you need to think about:

• who I am?
• What is the purpose of my public account?
• Who are my users?
• What are their needs and problems?
• What user needs can I meet and what user problems can I solve?
• Why should users follow us?
• Why continue to follow us?

…

According to the reading characteristics of WeChat, whether an article can be liked by users is 90% determined by the content itself, and the other 10% is some operational skills, which are the icing on the cake.

For example, some new media practitioners often focus on how to come up with an eye-catching title and spend a lot of energy thinking about these things, which is putting the cart before the horse; they don’t realize that the content itself is the top priority. The title attracts people, but whether it can retain their attention and continuously build attention and interaction still depends on the content itself.

The first and most basic step to break the deadlock is to return to the origin of value, return to the content itself, delve into the content, and create greater value for users. This is the fundamental basis for long-term survival in the future.

1. Take advantage of hot spots to increase brand exposure

In addition to content planning in the general direction, we can also take advantage of hot topics based on the positioning of our own official account.

Hot spots usually refer to events that are on the Weibo hot list, Zhihu hot searches, have high WeChat index and Baidu index, and are flooding the friend circle. They have their own traffic and dissemination attributes.

Brands can often attract more attention by selecting topics by riding on hot topics. Of course, not all hot topics can be ridiculed. For example, it is difficult for a corporate public account to ride on celebrity gossip, and if not used properly, it may disgust users.

In addition, hotspots are also divided into regular hotspots and sudden hotspots.

For example, regular hot spots with national relevance, such as the World Cup, Spring Festival, and Valentine's Day, are predictable and require a long preparation period.

However, sudden hot spots have no signs and are effective for a short time. When chasing sudden hot spots, we focus on being "fast", "accurate" and "ruthless". The time is tight and the task is heavy, which tests an operator's planning ability, execution ability, and adaptability.

Chasing hot spots is the most common job for operators. If we can obtain hot spots in a timely manner and make full use of them, we can obtain huge user traffic at a very low creation cost.

1. Try a variety of content forms

In an age of information explosion and rampant routines, people get bored with the old and love the new faster than imagined, and “creating content” is becoming increasingly difficult.

Of course, there are also many opportunities hidden in this process. Some of the industry's heavyweight IPs are trying to innovate the expression methods of various content forms, from text, to pictures, to audio, video and their combinations, to fully mobilize the user's multiple senses, continuously optimize the user's reading experience, and make the content more recognizable.

Here we have to mention the "GQ Lab", which is famous for its big imagination and surprising twists. It mainly uses various forms of content such as long pictures and texts, comics, short videos, etc. While adapting to the reading habits of users in the new era, it makes the content more interesting and more diverse in form. Thanks to a series of popular content, "GQ Lab" also achieved 280 articles with more than 100,000 views, over 200 partner brands, and revenue of nearly 200 million in one year.

1. Grasp the self-media and social groups and distribute content well

As mentioned earlier, the official account is a closed environment that lacks the support of content distribution channels, and content cannot be effectively disseminated.

Self-media platforms and communities are two effective content distribution platforms.

We can explore and utilize self-media/communities for content distribution, and display and disseminate public account articles to platforms that match the content positioning. For example, we can cleverly insert our own public account information (name, ID) on the account homepage and article content. While increasing the brand exposure of the official account, it can also arouse the interest of potential readers who read the article, and ultimately attract users on the platform to become our followers.

1. Create high-engagement fan events

What makes a public account popular is not only the content but also the activities. Because activities are not only a good strategy to increase followers and conversions, but also through activities you can give back to fans, interact with users, cultivate a group of loyal users and form a user community.

We should spend more energy on creating better activities to interact with fans, and regularly hold some online raffles or offline activities as fan benefits.

As for the form of the event, it can be a lottery, a resource forwarding event, a live broadcast event, etc. As long as you can add the QR code communication form through different carriers, you can bring you new fans and increase the distance between you and your fans.

Last year, I used the model of poster fission + free collection of the most comprehensive learning materials in the industry. Just through the forwarding of WeChat Moments and official accounts, tens of thousands of people joined the group to participate in the event. In the end, our own official account gained tens of thousands of fans.

1. Establish a professional operation team

The ultimate goal of each company operating a WeChat public account is different, but basically they all have functions such as increasing followers, brand promotion, and user interaction. Such a huge task is destined not to be accomplished by one person, but requires many people to work together to achieve the goal.

However, as far as the current reality is concerned, for most companies, there may be only one new media operation , and one person is responsible for everything from topic selection to article push, and he or she single-handedly carries the KPI of the entire new media department. Not only that, your boss also hopes that each of your articles will have over 100,000 followers and that your fans will exceed one million in three months.

As time goes by, we will find that occasionally having one or two hit articles is actually meaningless. The key lies in whether we have the ability to continuously produce high-quality content.

At this time, a more professional operation team is often needed to intervene, define the operation framework and process of the official account, and then divide the work among professional operation personnel. This will make it easier to produce popular articles and output high-quality content steadily, and truly solve the problems of official account operation.

IV. Conclusion

In the second half of the mobile Internet, it has become a general consensus that it is becoming increasingly difficult to operate public accounts.

The troubles faced by public account operators are not only the impact of new external content models and platforms, the loss of social dividends, and the multi-directional squeeze on the WeChat ecosystem in the competition for user time; they also lie in the internal operators' own lack of work experience, insufficient professional capabilities, poor coordination within and outside the team, and the helplessness of having no one to turn to.

Obviously, "trouble" is caused by many factors. Although external factors cannot be influenced, we should at least do a good job in internal work:

1. Deeply cultivating content is fundamental, and there is no shortcut on this path;
2. Follow the hot topics according to the positioning of your official account to increase brand exposure;
3. Try to innovate various forms of content expression and continuously optimize the user reading experience;
4. Grasp the self-media and social groups and distribute content well;
5. Create high-engagement fan events;
6. Establish a professional operations team.

Okay, that’s all for this sharing. I hope there will be more opportunities to learn and communicate with you in the future.

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Author: Lu Renjia

Source: I am Lu Renjia