Douyin operation methodology: 500,000 followers increased in 2 months!

Before the Spring Festival, I shared my experience of operating Douyin with a friend. Their number of fans has increased from 50,000 to 200,000, and the number of fans in their matrix has now exceeded 2 million.

Recently, I continue to meet many friends who want to make Tik Tok videos but have no idea where to start. The problems everyone faces are essentially: how to quickly become familiar with a new field and how to start learning a new field? I know nothing about TikTok but I want to operate it, what should I do?

Today I will systematically write about some of my experiences, mainly including the systematic method of operating Douyin from scratch, and a brief introduction to Douyin's recommendation mechanism. I hope this helps you all.

The three accounts created by our own team have gained more than 500,000 followers each month, and all of them are targeted fans in the workplace. It is probably based on this set of things.

Let’s talk about the first part first: the methodology of Douyin operation from 0 to 1.

When we entered the new field of Douyin, what we did could be roughly divided into four steps.

Identify competitive products

Some time ago, I asked a very successful senior sister Fan Qin, why you can do well in any field you enter, how do you quickly familiarize yourself with the new field and do well?

This senior sister received the highest level of all official scholarships from Renmin University during her college years. After graduation, he was initially ranked among the top 1% in sales in the industry (national sales champion of Dell computers); later, he was ranked among the top 1% in product managers in the industry (a star product manager of Baidu, who once saved a product that was on the verge of giving up, and his performance has always been in the top 10%); later, he was one of the 35 experts in the industry team, and the only expert with three 9.9 points in the industry's history.

My senior sister answered me like this: First of all, I don’t touch areas that I am not good at. Secondly, once you enter a new field, the fastest way to learn is to learn the common points of the top competitors in the industry.

I agree with what my senior sister said. In the process of making Douyin, we actually did the same thing.

Our Douyin account is a workplace account. When I took over, it already had 50,000 followers, but the growth was somewhat sluggish. After taking over, I was also at a loss as to what to do and had no idea how to start. Before, I wasn’t even a heavy user of Tik Tok and rarely used it.

Fortunately, there are so many competitors waiting for us to learn from and surpass.

We spent about three days researching who the benchmark accounts were that we should learn from and surpass.

How can you quickly find out who your competitors are?

• First, determine your positioning .

There are so many big accounts on TikTok, many of which have amazing skills/amazing looks/amazingly funny videos. We made it clear from the beginning that the funny part is not our main focus. Because our products are designed to attract people who are concerned about career growth, in the future we want to let this group of people pay to purchase our knowledge products.

After this part is clarified, those dancing ladies and those purely funny office videos are no longer our focus of study. Our competitors are defined as: top accounts for knowledge-based IP.

• Secondly, determine the data indicators of high-quality accounts.

Without indicators, it is impossible to quickly define who the learning targets are. At the beginning, we didn’t have much idea, and we vaguely determined two indicators: one was that the total number of fans exceeded 500,000, and the other was that the number of fans for a single video increased significantly.

The former actually indicates that the account's overall operational capabilities are good, while the latter indicates that the account's operational efficiency is high. Compared to someone who has 300,000 followers after posting 100 videos, we should of course learn more from someone who has 300,000 followers after posting 30 videos.

• Again, find accounts that meet these data indicators by searching on your own and asking others for advice.

1. Asking for advice from people who know the subject is always the most reliable and quickest way.

We asked the operations staff at TikTok which knowledge-based IP accounts are doing well. Among the accounts recommended by classmates for study on Douyin, we think "Zui'e Niang" and "Dingxiang Mama" are very good. Their average number of followers is higher, and their total number of followers is also better.

2. Use third-party platforms such as Xinbang to check which high-quality accounts there are.

Many students may say that you are lucky to be able to connect with classmates on Douyin. But in fact, as long as you are determined, you can still find the target account without the first step.

If you search for keywords such as "TikTok Big V" on Baidu, you will find many important big names. During this process, I paid attention to the fashion blogger "Takehiko Akagi". My teammates also found two small programs that can roughly query the Douyin KOL list, and shared them with everyone (TooBigData, Dou Dada).

3. Search directly on TikTok.

Searching for "workplace" in the "User" column yielded many big names in the workplace; searching for "workplace/salary increase" in the video column also yielded many big names in the workplace.

For example, we have seen accounts such as "Uncle Zhige" that tell stories, as well as accounts such as "Professional Preschool Class Pro" that do small theater + closing statements, and of course, we have also seen many big accounts that started out by making PPT videos.

After these three steps, basically, most of the top accounts in the workplace have entered our field of vision.

It is important to remind you that when we screen competing products, we should search as exhaustively as possible. The reason is very simple. If you find 10 accounts, the account you think you should learn from the most may not be the one you should learn from the most, because the pool is too small.

We ended up looking at more than 100 accounts, and more than 90% of them were found by our teammates. So you see, don’t use the inability to reach Douyin operations staff as an excuse for not doing a good job.

• Finally, after collecting so many competitor accounts, what next? Which one should I learn?

1. Tik Tok, which is already very popular on other platforms, may not be the focus of our study.

If big Vs from WeChat public accounts or Weibo join Douyin, the official may provide resource support, and their Douyin fans will naturally support them. If we focus on them as our main learning objects, we may go astray.

This is like running a WeChat public account. You cannot learn the writing style of Teacher He Caitou. He has accumulated countless fans in the blog era, and now he has moved to WeChat, and people will read whatever he writes. If a newcomer starts his own media, he will most likely go astray by learning the article structure and topic selection from Teacher He Caitou.

On the contrary, those accounts that you have never heard of but have a lot of Douyin fans may be the focus of learning.

2. When there are too many role models, we must pick out the ones that are most suitable for us to learn from.

Taking ourselves as an example, we divide these more than 100 accounts into three categories: PPT, single-person speech by anchors (representative accounts: Dr. Dingxiang, Mama Dingxiang, and Drunk E’s Mother), and live-action theater (representative accounts: Uncle Zhige and Lan Xiaobai).

When I took over, our account was just making PPT-type videos, and the data growth was very slow.

We carefully looked at those PPT-related big accounts with millions of followers. The number of likes has been very low recently, and some of them have not posted anything at all. We believe that PPT-type content is no longer so popular among users, at least in the workplace. The overall average data of videos with real people are good, so we focused our study on the latter two.

Competitive product analysis

Finding competitors is just the first step; the hardest parts are yet to come. Among them, breaking down and learning the advantages of competing products is a very important step . If you don’t know what others do well, how do you know where to start?

How to do competitive product analysis?

The first step is to analyze the commonalities of all videos on the account . The dimensions of video analysis should be clear, including topic selection/script structure/shooting techniques/video editing packaging/video title and message area. None of these sections can be missing.

Many people rely on their personal feelings when analyzing other people's videos, which is lazy. When researching an account, be sure to break down the components of a video and analyze them one by one. Because success is often the result of the accumulation of multiple elements, if too many elements are missed, the analysis results are likely to be wrong.

To give a specific example, one of the accounts we split up early was the account “Uncle Zhige”.

We have never seen this account on other platforms. It should be a native big account of Douyin. The average number of likes on their videos is around 10,000, and their popular videos have over 200,000 likes. They currently have 1.9 million followers.

This is a workplace account consisting of two characters, a boss and an employee. In each episode, the employee will have a conversation with the boss and tell a workplace truth during the conversation.

We broke down the script/shooting format/soundtrack/video packaging into several parts.

Regarding the script, we wrote down the script while watching the video. Then we counted the topic direction, the average word count of the script (related to the length of the video), and the structure of the script (characters/conflicts, etc.). We found that its videos are relatively long, about 50 seconds on average, but they are very watchable and I can always finish watching them with gusto.

Why are his scripts so fascinating?

A few points are particularly important:

First, the whole video is about telling stories, rather than a skit + reasoning. The story usually begins with the boss denying the employee, which can arouse users' curiosity.

Second, the stories are very down-to-earth and the examples are easy to understand, and they are things we all encounter in our work.

Third, the boss himself should be the script writer, and his performance is very real and natural, which does not make people feel that he is acting.

Regarding video packaging, its video packaging is very simple, but it also has highlights. In the last frame of the video, it will subtly guide users to like it. (High likes mean good recommendations. We will talk about the specific principles of Douyin recommendations below.)

The second step is to analyze the differences between the account’s popular topics and its ordinary topics.

In the previous article, “A Douyin Operation Methodology for Gaining 500,000 Followers in 2 Months without Inflating Volumes or Buying Followers (1)”, we analyzed the path to increasing Douyin followers and mentioned that a large part of the increase in followers of an account came from popular videos.

Since hot-selling videos are so powerful, when we have analyzed the common characteristics of an account’s videos, the next thing we need to analyze is: why its hot-selling videos become hot.

Same shooting method, same actors, but the video likes and follower growth data can differ by a hundred times. Some of our own popular videos can attract more than 100,000 fans, but most of them may only attract more than 1,000 or a few thousand fans. Popular videos usually win because of their topic selection, which is also the soul of content creation.

It is important to analyze the topics of these popular videos and remember their commonalities.

For example, we summarized the videos of “Uncle Zhige” ourselves and found that videos that emphasize “employees need to use their brains more” are more likely to go viral. However, videos by “Lan Xiaobai” that depict conflicts between employees and bosses over issues such as “overtime/salary increase” are more likely to go viral.

A large part of the difference comes from the differences in the account personalities. Lan Xiaobai selects topics from the perspective of an employee, while Uncle Zhige selects topics from the perspective of a boss.

The directions of these two types of topics have been verified by the market, and we will focus on them when selecting topics in the future.

When doing competitive product analysis, there are two points that need to be reminded:

First, when you are not sure which type of study is suitable for you, competitive product analysis should be done simultaneously on several types of videos.

At the beginning, we selected 3 styles from 100+ videos that we thought might be more suitable for us. We don’t know which one is more suitable.

So we actually split up Lan Xiaobai/Uncle Zhige/Dr. Dingxiang & Mom. If you eliminate the other three based on subjective judgment and only leave one for analysis, you may actually eliminate the possibility of your own rise. A more appropriate approach would be to analyze simultaneously, test them separately, and choose the one with better data.

Second, regarding competitive product analysis, I recommend that all ideas be documented. A good competitive product analysis should be a detailed and comprehensive review report. Merely verbal analysis is often too superficial and incomplete, and you may forget it after a while.

Verify the competitive product analysis methodology

Once we have broken down the features of competitor videos, the next step is to verify whether our analysis is correct. If the verification is OK, we can create on a large scale quickly; if the verification is not OK, we need to continue looking for new methods.

This stage is essentially a stage of imitation. The process of competitive benchmarking and competitive analysis is similar to the process of learning how others wear clothes.

There was a young lady who dressed very well, so we analyzed how she dressed, how she matched the colors, and how she chose the style. After we finish the analysis, we will try it on ourselves and learn the essence of dressing from her.

After we analyze how our competitors make videos, we should make videos ourselves to see if we can get better data, or even as good as others.

First, in order to reduce variables, it is recommended to first work on similar topics as competitors’ popular videos.

If we choose our own innovative topic from the beginning and the video data is not good, it is difficult for us to judge whether it is a problem with the topic or the video format. You might as well try working on similar topics as your competitors’ popular products first. For example, Lan Xiaobai made a video about "What to do if the boss doesn't pay overtime", so we can rewrite a new script based on Lan Xiaobai's shooting style and script structure to see if users will buy it.

It's like, you think the girl looks good in clothes because she wears a pink coat with a white skirt, and the color and style are very intellectual. So when you are learning, it is best to try the combination of these two colors and styles first. If there are too many variables, for example, you try a pink jacket and white pants, and they don’t look good together, you don’t know if it’s a problem with the style or the color.

In short, the first few videos should be as close as possible to the shooting style, actor status, topic selection and structure of competitors. Generally, after watching about 10 videos, you can tell whether the data is OK.

Second, once the methodology is verified, we should boldly create new topics, and innovate in shooting methods, actor structures, etc.

If the methodology is verified OK, the next step is to completely ignore the topics of competitors and create your own content. The choice of topic is the decisive factor in determining the difference between accounts.

Tik Tok’s recommendations are based on interests. The machine will first recommend your video to a group of users (cold start), and then determine whether to continue to recommend it to more users based on user feedback. There are many dimensions of user feedback data, including like rate/interaction rate/completion rate, etc.

So, how to improve data such as like rate/interaction rate/completion rate? In the next article, we will discuss this in detail. But I would say that the key to determining all these factors is the topic and script.

1. To choose a good topic, you must understand what kind of people the users of Douyin are.

To understand TikTok users, please watch more highly-rated videos in the "Recommended" channel.

Tik Tok users are very different: they are young and don’t like old-fashioned and boring things;

They are used to short videos. If the first 3 seconds of the video fail to impress them, they may leave.

They like beautiful things, not earthy things (except for earthy love words)

Douyin users certainly have many similarities with users of other platforms: they also have the same confusions in life and work, and they also feel lost and entangled.

2. Once you understand what kind of people the Douyin users are, you won’t go too far in choosing a topic.

On the one hand, the popular topics that have been worked on by similar accounts are still our treasure trove.

This type of topic has been tested by data, and it is still worth doing if you can come up with new ideas or angles of explanation. For example, there was a popular video topic before, "Should you ask about your colleagues' salaries?" The creator thought that you shouldn't ask, but we think that this is actually a reflection of being brainwashed by the company. We also tried this topic and it received more than 100,000 likes.

On the other hand, hot topics on public accounts/Zhihu/Weibo in the same field are still the pain points that users are concerned about.

For example, should you work in a big city or a small city? How to ask your boss for a raise? These workplace problems that plague every generation are bound to be the focus of young people at this stage.

Innovation

Once you have learned the first few steps, keep trying and stick to it, usually within a few months, you will already have an account with nearly one million precise followers.

But you may not be satisfied, you want to do better than your competitors. At this time, you must have a certain sense of innovation to truly stand out.

Just imagine, if an account keeps learning from Uncle Zhige, how likely is it that it can do better than Uncle Zhige? It's like there's already "Where Are We Going, Dad?" on the market, and if you make "Super Mom," it's unlikely to surpass the former. You may have to do "The Rap of China" to have a better chance of surpassing the former.

Of course, the innovation of specific accounts may not be as huge as in the above case. Perhaps a small innovation will make Douyin users' eyes light up. For example, many doctors do science popularization on Douyin, and they all read the key points into the teleprompter in front of the camera. But recently a doctor who beats a wooden fish joined, which really opened my eyes.

The premise for innovation is actually the understanding of users. When you know your users well enough and know what they want, you are more likely to hit their pain points.

To understand users, it is definitely not enough to just watch similar videos. Although we operate knowledge-based videos, we check the recommended channels every day to see what forms and topics the most popular entertainment/funny videos of Douyin users are.

Probably, this is the general introduction to the methodology of learning and operating TikTok from scratch.

In fact, the methods to quickly familiarize yourself with a new field are often figured out. Find a benchmark - analyze the advantages of the benchmark - form your own methodology - verify the methodology - innovate and surpass the methodology, that's about it.

In the second part, I will talk about the recommendation mechanism of Douyin, which everyone is very concerned about.

The recommendation mechanism of Toutiao products is quite similar. The machine will first recommend your content to a group of users, and then decide whether to recommend it to more people based on user data feedback. If the data feedback is positive, the machine will recommend it to more people, otherwise it will stop recommending it.

Everyone will definitely ask, what specific dimensions of indicators does data feedback include? When it comes to articles, click-through rate and completion rate are very important.

Machines analyze text data, recommend articles to people who might be interested in your content, and watch readers’ feedback. If an article has no user clicks (poor click-through rate), or if users click on it and find that the quality is poor and immediately exit (high bounce rate), the machine will think that this article is most likely not good content.

The same principle probably applies to the recommendation of short videos. The like rate/completion rate/interaction rate of short videos are all very important data.

If users click on a Tik Tok video and leave before finishing it, it probably means the content is not very attractive or does not contain any valuable information. If you don’t like it after reading it, it probably means the content is not that beyond your expectations.

We have been exploring how to improve recommendations, and here are some valuable points:

How to increase the completion rate and like rate

The completion rate refers to how many users who have played the video have finished watching the video.

To increase the completion rate, the most important thing is of course the topic of the script . If the topic is boring, no one will want to watch it. In addition, the following points are important:

First, don't drag your feet at the beginning, get to the point quickly. Users may only need 3 seconds to decide whether to continue watching. If the beginning is dragged out, most users will leave.

Second, the structure of the script should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Even if it is a one-minute script, even if it is a stand-up script, there should be suspense/negation/question/the expectation that "there is more solid stuff to come" to keep users interested in reading on. (You will gain a lot by splitting up your competitors’ big accounts and your own popular videos.)

Third, pay attention to the music. Use more popular music on Tik Tok, and the data will usually be much better than without any music.

Fourth, the picture quality of the video should be more advanced, not low-level. Douyin users are generally young, and users will be more likely to reject content that is too earthy.

How to increase engagement rate

The so-called interaction rate mainly refers to how high the user's intention to comment is, rather than your reply rate after the user comments.

I personally think there are two effective ways to increase interaction rate.

One is to pre-buried interesting or informative comments in the comment section.

Tik Tok users actually like to read great comments. The comment sections of many videos are very interesting and even more interesting than the videos themselves.

We usually pre-buried about 3 comments in the message area, which could be questions questioning the topic content, or making fun of the topic content, or very sharp questions. In short, they should be able to attract users to stay and read, attract users to pay attention to the comment area and even directly participate in the topic discussion.

There are two benefits to doing this: first, the interaction rate is increased, and second, the completion rate and dwell time are also increased.

The second is to warm up and ask questions in the title of the short video. (conventional)

For example, a previous topic was to discuss the relationship between payday and company success. The video argued that most good companies pay the monthly salary before the 15th. In the video title, we guide users to leave a message about their payday and whether they agree with our little summary. The comment section was very popular, driving up the overall data of the video.

That’s all I can think of for now. Finally, I would like to emphasize a few points:

First, take a long-term view and don’t think that you have failed if you don’t reach 200,000 followers in 2 weeks.

Many training courses on the market like to tell the story of how a video gained 200,000 followers, but they may not have mentioned that the account never had a second hit video and only had over 200,000 followers in its lifetime.

A methodology that cannot be replicated is a methodology that does not have much value. You need to have confidence in yourself and in time. This was also mentioned in the previous article: "The Douyin Operation Methodology for Gaining 500,000 Followers in 2 Months without Inflating Volumes or Buying Followers (1)"

The second is to be diligent. Just by being diligent, you can outperform most people.

You don't have to hold back a big move, it's more reliable to hold back while doing it. When we were working on TikTok, many accounts actually had better average data for a single video than us, but our posting frequency was twice that of theirs, so our account data in the later stages exceeded most of the competitor accounts that we were benchmarking against at the beginning.

Third, you should always pay attention to Douyin’s official actions and reports, and observe Douyin’s operating methods (but use your own judgment).

Many training courses on the market have very shallow content. They can talk about an accidental hit case for months. During the enrollment process of these few months, an outstanding student might occasionally emerge and be able to teach for a few more months. My advice is that you can attend the training courses, but you need to use your brain to determine whether the content can really be reused.

Don’t do anything crooked, no platform will like this kind of account. It would be meaningless to work hard to gain 300,000 followers and then get blocked in one move. It is more important to learn from those accounts that increase their followers through content/formal operations.

I finished writing this article a long time ago, but didn’t publish it later because I felt that gaining 500,000 followers in two months was not a lot, and I felt a little embarrassed to publish it. Last week I met the friends who had asked me to share my operational experience, and they told me that Matrix already has 2 million followers. I feel somewhat excited and decided to post it after thinking about it. Regardless of whether it is complete or not, it is also an experience of my own thinking.

Author: Hu Shoushou

Source: Hu Shoushou loves to learn (huding2)