Content operation: 3 nodes of content distribution!

Nodes attract users to aggregate and become the gathering point of various information. Users gather together because of nodes and can get more information through nodes. So, what are the nodes for content distribution?

The word node comes from "The Elements of User Experience", which says:

The basic unit of information architecture is the node. A node may correspond to any piece or combination of information - it can be as small as a number (such as the price of a product) or as large as an entire library. We are dealing with nodes, not pages, documents or components.

Nodes attract users to aggregate and become the gathering point of various information. Users gather together because of nodes and can get more information through nodes.

What is the content? Content is the flesh and blood of Internet products. In the content community, it mainly refers to user UGC, including traces of all behaviors such as original creation, speech, and comment.

Content is the vehicle for communication among users of social community products. The essence of content distribution is to enable users to obtain the content they want to watch more efficiently, that is, the matching degree of content.

There are several ways to obtain content:

• The first is recommendation, such as editorial recommendation, personalized recommendation, popularity recommendation, etc. Users passively accept the algorithm's guess about user preferences;
• The second is search. Users have clear or relatively clear content acquisition goals and are very purposeful.
• The third type is active exploration by users, where users actively use and explore the product through various methods, obtain content that interests them, and establish relationships with the content through behaviors such as likes, comments, favorites, and follows.

The third method, since it is an active behavior of the user, often ensures high efficiency in content acquisition.

Under the network effect, nodes play the role of linking information. I think that under the third content acquisition method, there are three nodes for content acquisition: users, content itself, and topics.

user

As the foundation of the community, users are not only content producers, but also effective content distribution nodes. According to the different relationships between users, they can be divided into two types: one-way relationships and two-way relationships.

(1) One-way attention, and the status of both users in information distribution is not equal, which is a one-way relationship. Through the "Follow" function, you can accumulate all the content produced by the followed users. This type of users mainly consists of well-known public figures, KOLs in various segments, and high-quality content creators.

Weibo is an example of a platform that gathers a large number of big Vs and small and medium-sized Vs. Ordinary users follow them and use them as information sources, that is, content distribution nodes, to obtain content.

For ordinary users, using core users as nodes for content acquisition can often allow them to acquire content more efficiently and accurately. I like playing basketball. When I accidentally find a video of a style I like on Bilibili, I will click on the up-host's homepage to watch past videos. If it's good, I will follow him. This will guarantee that the up-host's videos in the future will have the content and style I like. Efficiency and precision are what ordinary users need.

For content producers, ensuring stable, continuous and high-quality content output can help them gain a certain fan base, commercialization and a certain degree of public opinion influence.

(2) Bidirectional relationships are mainly social, and users have equal status in content distribution.

Take WeChat as an example: the relationship between all friends is equal. You can post to Moments and I can post to Moments. Under normal permissions, we can both view and interact with each other’s Moments. Similarly, "good-looking" is also a typical operation of distributing content with users as nodes. I can obtain content pushed by my friends.

If we think more broadly, we can think of users as nodes, and the relationships between users connect all users together. This is the network effect. Information is distributed and disseminated through users and the relationships between users.

Of course, there are different understandings of user relationships. Let’s compare WeChat and Zhihu.

WeChat, a typical example of “friends of friends are not my friends”. WeChat’s acquaintance relationship chain and social relationships are relatively closed. All the relationship networks of WeChat users are friends added in the address book, and friends of friends are not in my relationship chain (excluding mutual friends).

This is reflected in multiple functions, such as: Moments, where we can only interact with our friends, and cannot see the interactions and content generated by friends who are not in our relationship chain; another example: Subscription Accounts, where we can only see the content we have subscribed to, and can only interact with the publisher of the content, and we can only interact with other netizens in the comment area.

As for Zhihu, it should be “friends of friends may be my friends” (friends are not real friends). Of course this is because of the open community environment. We can check the updates of our friends and the friends they follow, so that we can get more high-quality users and content in vertical fields. This open community environment can maximize the role of users' nodes.

In summary, using users as nodes for content distribution has the following advantages:

• Content acquisition is timely, efficient and high-quality;
• By following, users form relationships with each other, which is conducive to the sedimentation of relationship chains, which have infinite possibilities.
• The content will reflect the producer's level and attitude, and remind users to manage and update the relationship chain in a timely manner.

content

Content is not only a carrier of information exchange, but also a node for content distribution.

Let us recall what we did when we saw a good article in our circle of friends. When I click to read, I am so impressed by its good writing that I cannot help but click "Reading". If I feel touched, I will write a message to participate in the interaction and share it with my friends. If I am amazed by the author's content, I will find the author's homepage and read all the historical articles. Mr. Qian said that eggs are delicious and there is no need to look for hens. But in the Internet age, we have so many ways to find egg-laying hens and eat more delicious eggs.

The above is the node function of the content itself. Through high-quality content, people will spontaneously share and produce related content, and obtain more relevant content.

Looking at bilibili again, the generation of barrage is not only the interaction of users themselves, but also the recognition and secondary production of content. More information is gathered here for high-quality content.

We place content as nodes in the big network of the Internet. Each content is linked to various other content, such as interactive comments, content on the same topic, and other content by the same author. The difference is that high-quality content will link to more and better content, and greatly stimulate users to consume and share.

Therefore, most content creators still believe that content is king. This adheres to a basic truth: people like to see good content, although the definition of good varies.

There are many basic ways to play on the Internet that use content as a node to spread information, such as: diversion, large accounts distribute content traffic, so that small accounts’ information can get a lot of exposure and gain traffic. The so-called fission is that copywriting and various added values ​​enhance the attractiveness of content, allowing it to be forwarded multiple times.

The advantages are obvious. High-quality content can break through circles, gain a lot of exposure and more traffic support, and grow rapidly. The difficulty lies in how to define good and continuous stable output.

topic

What is the topic? Let’s not talk about the topic for now, let’s talk about another noun - circle.

Represented by Baidu Tieba and Douban groups, they attract people with similar interests to gather together through a theme. Students who have used Tieba know that there is not much connection between the various Tieba bars, and each bar is independent. They have different bar rules, different ways of communication, and different memes. Therefore, there are barriers between the forums, and information is difficult to flow. This is a circle, and each circle is a relatively stable community with a certain social form.

So what about the topic?

It seems that people gather around certain themes. The difference is that topics usually have a high degree of freedom and can be hot topics, trivial matters, or personal thoughts. This ensures a high level of information circulation and user activity, and is often used to break the information blockade between circles. Through each topic, we can efficiently obtain a large amount of similar content.

To put it simply, apart from the product form, circles and topics probably only differ in granularity and freedom. Content distribution is a question of how to ensure content matching. The smaller the granularity, the more accurately we can grasp which group of people to target for precise content production and delivery. High matching brings high interaction and enthusiasm for content production, which is a positive cycle.

What if we use circles or topics as nodes to form a network? You will find that there are no good connection points between them, but a person will belong to multiple circles, with users as the underlying connection. Most circles are relatively independent and gather a certain group.

Content circulation is not a problem. Efficient content aggregation can ensure that circles and topics will be important content distribution nodes.

The circle + topic model is common in major content communities today. For example, products such as bilibili and Weibo have huge and complex amounts of content. In order to enable users to obtain content more efficiently and accurately, existing content is classified, resulting in various circles and Tieba-like models. Such as B station partitions, Weibo super topics and other products. At the same time, in order to break the blockage of content between circles, in addition to personalized recommendations, topics play an extremely good role.

Topics have a similar function to content tags. Adding a topic tag when sending a microblog means participating in the discussion of the topic, and the sent microblog can be retrieved under the topic. Bilibili not only adds topics to user updates, but also allows you to add tags to videos. Each topic and tag is a new content aggregation.

Summarize

To sum up, "circle + topic" has the following advantages:

• Precise content delivery: users with higher community similarity will have more efficient content acquisition;
• Break the closedness of the circle and promote the circulation of content;
• The efficiency and quality of topic aggregation, such as the generation of hot topics.

Above, we have summarized the three nodes of content distribution, namely users, content, and topics.

Author: An

Source: An