Douyin operation: Enterprises, you must not do Douyin!

Companies must not do TikTok! In 2019, ByteDance’s revenue target is at least 100 billion. As we all know, ByteDance's profit model has always been to acquire traffic with the left hand and sell advertisements with the right hand, and there has been no major change to date. As a pillar product, Douyin naturally has to support many of the 100 billion KPIs.

To be honest, I think Douyin has a good chance of achieving its goal. After all, as of January 2019, Douyin’s daily active users in China have exceeded 250 million, and its monthly active users have reached 500 million.

At the same time, Douyin has also made a series of products popular, such as "Answer Milk Tea", "Rabbit Ear Hat", Haidilao, skateboard, COCO Milk Tea, Peppa Pig, etc. These products have made many companies jealous, and they feel that they must make Douyin and not let this fat sheep get away.

Products that became popular on TikTok

But I want to say that companies should never use TikTok to monetize.

Ps: If you think I am talking nonsense, you can continue to read the reasons why I said so, and then decide whether to refute it.

1. Why I say that companies should not use TikTok for monetization

First, let’s talk about why many companies want to use Douyin for monetization.

The starting point for most companies is that Douyin has a large amount of traffic and the algorithm recommendations seem to be "fair". Even if they don't have a large number of fans, they may still become popular, and they want to use this platform to create a hit product.

Some companies may think that they don’t want to create a hit product, but they think that the traffic is wasted and having one more channel is never a bad thing.

Some companies may want to use Douyin to accumulate their user pool. After the number of fans increases to hundreds of thousands or millions, the number of video views will naturally increase. At this time, I will convert these users.

But in reality, the goals of the above companies are difficult to achieve on Douyin. Here are several reasons.

1) The difficulty of creating a hit product has not decreased

We often see videos on Douyin that get tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of likes, which make people feel “I can do that, too”, giving us the illusion that it’s easy to become popular on Douyin.

But in fact, the accidental popularity we see are individual phenomena (from the perspective of the proportion of popularity). The difficulty of creating a hit on Douyin is no less than the sudden popularity on Weibo, or the sudden production of an article with 10w+ views on a public account.

When you suddenly see a video with a lot of likes, you can click on his homepage and you will find that the other party may have posted hundreds of videos before one became popular, and then quickly returned to obscurity. This kind of "having a good time and then dying" is the truth behind being popular.

The most classic example is "Lu Chao", who received more than 1 million likes with a "really good" video and even became a "small internet celebrity", but in fact he has posted more than 7,000 videos, and most of them have less than 10 likes.

Therefore, if a company does not have perseverance or determination (even if it does, it still needs luck), it is better to wake up as soon as possible if it is thinking about "winning the lottery".

2) The recommendation mechanism makes fans “useless”

Whether it is a public account or Weibo, users are swiping their own followers and subscriptions. Although companies cannot guarantee that users will open their content, they can at least ensure that the content is delivered to users.

On TikTok, although users can also follow accounts, what they swipe for is not the follows, but the recommendations. The attention on Douyin is more like adding a basis for the system to judge user behavior and interests.

But on Douyin, even if you don’t follow anyone, you can still watch endless amounts of content. This is user-friendly, but bad for businesses.

On TikTok, attention is just one of the bases for algorithm recommendations. For example, user A followed a bunch of learning accounts on TikTok in order to "force" himself to study, but in fact he could not resist the temptation of entertainment while scrolling. In this case, the smart algorithm will know what A's real interests are, so the learning content will be pushed down to less and less...

Therefore, for many accounts, even if they have a large number of fans, if the Douyin algorithm does not recommend the content, the fans are useless. In other words, the role of the user pool has been greatly weakened.

3) Unfriendly monetization

There are several ways for companies to monetize on Douyin: keep WeChat to do e-commerce, divert traffic to Weibo to do e-commerce, or use Douyin's shopping cart (showcase) function.

Douyin's "shopping cart" function

The first two are at risk of being restricted. If there are obvious brands in the video (watermarks, subtitles, commercial elements, voice-overs, etc.), it will not pass the recommendation review.

As for monetization through shopping carts, there are also two problems:

① It is difficult for corporate accounts to meet the requirements for opening a showcase

Only accounts that have published more than 10 videos on the platform and have more than 8,000 followers can apply for the shopping cart function. The former is easy, but 8,000 followers will become a problem for many companies.

According to data released by Kas Data as of August 17, 2018, among the Blue V accounts certified by Douyin, corporate accounts with less than 10,000 followers accounted for more than 60%.

② The shopping cart must be directed to Taobao

Secondly, Douyin’s shopping cart can currently only be directed to Taobao (it is said that JD.com will also be connected during the 618 shopping event this year), which means that many companies that do not have Taobao e-commerce must open up a new business, and human resources investment in all aspects will increase.

Finally, even without these restrictions, it is difficult to use Douyin for short video e-commerce, and the conversion rate is generally poor. For example, I have a friend’s account (I’m not going to disclose his name) with millions of followers, and generally tens of thousands of likes, but his monthly income is not as much as an article on a public account with a few thousand views.

The reason is that the videos on Douyin are too short, and users watch Douyin for entertainment. In this case, if you want to make users want to buy and place an order, the content requirements of the video are extremely high.

In other words, although Douyin can bring profits to companies, the rate of return is too low because it requires too many resources.

4) Conflict with Douyin’s own commercial interests

The above facts only increase the difficulty at the operational level. For corporate monetization, the cruelest thing is: there is a conflict of interest between the company’s own advertising and Douyin’s advertising.

As mentioned at the beginning, Douyin's business model is to sell advertisements, and there is a limited amount of user traffic. If the company can succeed in monetizing itself, how can Douyin make tens of billions from advertising?

To sum up, I think that if companies really value Douyin's users and want to promote on Douyin, they can choose to spend money on advertising on Douyin. The benefits will be higher than doing it themselves. In other words, professional matters should be left to professional teams.

Although Douyin is very strict in reviewing marketing videos, it will take measures such as limiting the flow of traffic. However, Douyin, which has a KPI of tens of billions in revenue, does not have such strict advertising requirements.

Tik Tok promotion ads

And because TikTok is proficient in algorithms, it is said that it has 9 dimensions to lock in the target audience and may understand users better than the users themselves, plus it has a professional video creative matching platform. The conversion rate of Tik Tok ads is likely to be higher than that of your own ads.

2. Under what circumstances can companies use TikTok?

Should companies do TikTok? In fact, it depends on the purpose of the enterprise. If you want to achieve commercial monetization through TikTok, I actually don’t recommend it.

Regarding this issue, I specially interviewed @田太医, the person in charge of Dingxiang Doctor’s Douyin account, and combined with my own observations, I summarized several situations that are currently more suitable.

1) Using Douyin to build Taobao-style e-commerce

If the company itself is engaged in Taobao-related e-commerce, or intends to invest its energy in Taobao-related e-commerce, it can consider doing it on Douyin. For these companies, we believe that the most important thing is to consider the cost-effectiveness, especially for companies that plan to "expand their territory".

Because developing new e-commerce businesses requires reinvesting some human resources and operating costs, companies need to consider the return on investment to determine whether it is worthwhile.

For example, Dingxiang Doctor, they were already doing mini program e-commerce. If they had to operate a Taobao store in order to monetize e-commerce on Douyin, they gave up this model after weighing the pros and cons. To use the words of @田太医, don't force yourself to buy a house just for a clothes hanger.

2) Exposure on Tik Tok

If a company wants to be exposed among Douyin users, it can also consider doing Douyin. After all, it is a huge traffic pool with more than 200 million users.

Of course, as mentioned earlier, the prerequisite for gaining exposure on Douyin is high-quality content and a large amount of content accumulation, which is closely related to the company's content productivity and shooting level.

I have seen many companies that were full of enthusiasm when they first started using TikTok, but eventually stopped because they couldn't keep up with the content production. There are also some companies that maintain a high update frequency, but the comments are full of "the worst official Douyin" comments...

On the other hand, if a company wants to interact with users through new media and narrow the brand distance, Weibo may be a more appropriate choice. This can be seen from Alipay.

It has been observed that the current Tik Tok video playback and interaction volume on Alipay is very unstable, and the relevant reasons are explained in detail in the previous section.

Although a "Tik Tok Koi" event was held during this year's Spring Festival, the communication and interaction effects were far less good than those of "Weibo Koi". Judging from the subsequent operations of Alipay Douyin, the relevant data has not been significantly improved.

On the other hand, on Alipay Weibo, just posting a “…” or “Good night” can still get thousands of comments and likes. Just ask Alipay Douyin if it is sour...

While most companies are racking their brains for ways to monetize, some people have discovered that monetizing through TikTok is not as quick as using it to provide training! They have targeted the needs of enterprises for traffic conversion and commercial monetization, and have been making a fortune in silence.

They are the so-called Douyin business training institutions. Companies are thinking about how to “fleece” TikTok, while they are thinking about how to “fleece” companies.

But are these companies really qualified to train enterprises? not necessarily. This type of training institutions will either directly teach you how to change your nickname and move videos; those that seem to contain useful information are just some "I understand the principles" content.

Some institutions have accounts with only tens of thousands of followers, which are not even small Vs, but they come out to reap profits; what's worse, they directly buy other people's big accounts with tens of millions of followers to endorse their own training.

Here I would also like to remind everyone that if companies want to do well in Douyin, "paying tuition" will not solve the problem at all. The most important thing is to think clearly about the following two questions:

• ① What is your purpose in creating Tik Tok? If it is for commercial monetization, you should be cautious.
• ② Do you really have the conditions and resources to create Tik Tok? If not, leave professional matters to professionals.

Related reading:

1.2019 Kuaishou and Douyin user research report!

2. Tik Tok promotion: 40 popular Tik Tok title templates, it’s hard not to be popular!

3. 2019 Douyin short video marketing promotion plan!

4.2019 Tik Tok promotion and operation strategy!

5. Analysis of Douyin short video APP products

6. Tik Tok promotion skills: 3 steps and 7 key points

7. Analysis of Douyin app operation and promotion plan!

8. Tik Tok operation and promotion: 3 steps to create a hit product!

Author: Chen Weixian

Source: Operation Research Society