Zhihu Promotion and Operation: How to become a Zhihu celebrity with millions of likes?

How to become a Zhihu celebrity with millions of likes! You should learn about this knowledge.

How to become a Zhihu celebrity with millions of likes! You should learn about this knowledge.

In the early morning of the 24th, "Avengers 4" was released, and the circle of friends was instantly occupied by "spoiler or not", and the cinema instantly turned into a Spring Festival railway station. You didn’t get the movie tickets, so you opened the Zhihu page and suddenly found: there are already so many questions related to Avengers 4!

Figure 1. The picture comes from Zhihu

Then you secretly make up your mind: I will answer these questions seriously and become a Zhihu celebrity with millions of likes! However, when you click on the answer, you find that the highly-rated answers are sometimes just one sentence, and sometimes look like a thesis. What should you do? Then, you fell into deep thought...

Some time ago, I attended a course on "Zhihu Operation" by Teacher Elephant. Here, I would like to share with you what I have learned and my own feelings, hoping that it will be helpful to you.

1. What is Zhihu?

Different people have different opinions. Due to differences in personal cognition and environment, each group has a different definition and understanding of Zhihu. Here, the attitude and positioning of ordinary people towards Zhihu can be roughly divided into the following four categories:

1. Authoritative platform

Many people place Zhihu at a very authoritative level. It is a gathering place for niche authorities. On such a platform, people are willing to believe what these participants share. Because the content shared is real enough and the scenarios put people in the shoes of others, the public can be convinced. At the same time, because Zhihu controls advertising and marketing posts, it ensures the quality of content answers on the entire platform, and the public is willing to "check Zhihu" to search for their own confusions and various questions about human life.

2. Hidden Dragons and Crouching Tigers

Friends who are familiar with Zhihu should all know that there are many big names in professional fields on Zhihu. They have their own insights in the fields of sports, food, technology, etc., and are familiar with the areas they know. Especially those big names with a blue V logo on Zhihu, they have been focusing on a certain field for a long time, and have accumulated a lot of dry goods that others cannot touch or pursue. These people who are difficult to meet in real life will answer your questions and solve your doubts on Zhihu.

3. Sources

Of course, there are also some people who regard Zhihu as a source of first-hand information. Just enter keywords in the search box to get relevant information. This information not only has relevant extensions in the vertical direction, but also has corresponding expansions in the horizontal dimension system. Many people directly use Zhihu as a high-quality and free material library when organizing documents, writing papers, and looking up information, and look for the information they want from it.

4. View without output

If the pleasure of answering can make the respondent excited, then there must also be an atmosphere that makes the "lurking" masses enjoy it. In many cases, "browsing" and "eating melons" are things that the general public is willing to participate in. They just need to pick up their phones and "swipe" to see what is happening. They can understand the reasons from beginning to end, but they are too lazy to express their opinions and comments. The "melon-eating crowd" is willing to spend time looking for content that interests them on the platform.

At the same time, for an ordinary passerby, in his cognitive thinking, the user experience of each level of users on the Zhihu platform is also very different.

Of course, at the bottom may be "me" - an ordinary user. The "bottom" mentioned here does not mean that there is a real class division, but from the perspective of contributing high-quality answers, an ordinary "I" may find it difficult to produce some valuable and meaningful answers.

The second layer is some witty comedians, elite passers-by, and third-party companies. This group of users has a higher control over the sensitivity of questions and the popularity of topics than ordinary passers-by. They are good at seizing opportunities, chasing hot topics, and cleverly putting forward their own opinions to maximize their compatibility with the questioner's demands.

The third level is professional institutional accounts. This type of account can be regarded as "Internet celebrities" in professional organizations. They have a clear grasp of their own positioning and already have a stable fan base. Some of them are similar to the official accounts of big names on Weibo, and often receive a lot of response. Since professional institutional accounts have their own strong product attributes, the public is more willing to regard them as experts in this field.

The fourth level is industry elite KOLs. If ordinary passers-by are good at expressing their true feelings and cleverness in their answers, then the focus of industry elite KOLs is to take an unconventional approach and surprise the audience. KOLs, industry elites at the top of the chain, are good at discovering “points” that ordinary people overlook. They often cut in from an unexpected angle, allowing the audience to gain unique satisfaction and happiness from his content.

2. Zhihu’s content strategy

Before we start talking about Zhihu’s content strategy, we must first clarify the rules of the Zhihu platform. In summary, there are three points:

• First, the values ​​are correct. There is no need to elaborate on the basic principles of Internet use.
• Second, don’t pretend to popularize science. Popular science requires a certain level of inner strength. When our inner strength is insufficient, we should still stand from the perspective of sharing experience, rather than pretending or forcing popular science.
• Third, confirm multiple times. For professional answers, we should confirm their accuracy multiple times to avoid misleading the audience.

These three points can basically be called the guidelines for use of the Zhihu platform. Those refreshing classic answers are almost all based on these three points. At the content level, Zhihu is also different from other content platforms. Zhihu's content strategy is based on the perspective of "human nature".

• First of all, only content that is read by others is good content. As mentioned at the beginning of the article, "Avengers 4" is extremely popular. The Moments and official accounts are almost entirely dominated by the war between the "spoiler party" and the "non-spoiler party". This indirectly shows that the words "Avengers" are content that everyone pays more attention to. In such a topic, the probability of becoming an excellent answer may be relatively high.
• Second, there are expectations for the content. Answering questions in a rigid and methodical manner only shows that you have sufficient knowledge and experience, but unfortunately, such answers are likely to fall on deaf ears. Zhihu is not Wikipedia. The audience does not want standard answers. What everyone needs is an experience, an experience with expectations.
• Third, finding questions is more important than answering them. Instead of devoting yourself to answering questions, it is better to go back to the source and think about which questions you should focus on.

How many followers does the question have? How many views? How many mirroring problems are there? What kind of tone do the questions with the most likes have? These are all questions we should consider before answering. Moreover, when looking at a topic, it is best to answer it from different dimensions such as macro perspective and micro perspective.

At the same time, due to the issue of weight judgment, the appropriate number of questions to be answered per day is 2-4. Too many replies may be judged by the machine as marketing behavior.

3. High-quality angle

Many students would ask, if I am an unknown person and received a like from 1 stranger, is it considered a success?

Of course it counts. Being able to promote your own content and receive praise from passers-by is certainly considered a success. But it should be noted that we can rank the content in a certain chronological order to determine the quality of the answers.

Because the content structure of Zhihu is different from that of WeChat and Weibo, its fermentation period is relatively long and requires a certain amount of time to spread. Therefore, we will introduce the relationship between time and answers according to the three time dimensions of 3 days, 14 days, and 30 days.

• Day 3: Is my content good enough? Is my content something my audience will enjoy? How widespread is the content I produce? These questions can basically be answered in 3 days.
• 14 days: About 14 days after the content is disseminated, sufficiently high-quality content may have made it to the Zhihu hot list. The content on the hot list has considerable reading volume, likes and views. At the same time, the content on the hot list will be pushed to the App client. All of this is basically based on the traffic accumulation in these 14 days.
• 30 days: About a month after the content is disseminated, sufficiently good content may have been recommended on hot lists many times and even received millions of likes. At the same time, such high-quality content may be included in the platform and widely disseminated again.

Therefore, operators should constantly look for topics with suitable content, and try to match the right angle with the right time, and maybe they will get a hit.

A suitable topic should also meet multiple factors such as universality, information gap, continuous operation, time difference, content angle, etc. These factors will continuously enrich your weight on the Zhihu platform. Here, I will quietly contribute my Zhihu account which is still growing, and apply some operational logic to give examples to everyone.

(1) Select business areas

When I first created this Zhihu account, I basically started from the business areas that I could currently take care of. I hope to contribute my own strength on Zhihu within the scope of user research, using the experience and knowledge I have learned in the fields of product, operation, data analysis, etc. Therefore, the questions I answered are basically concentrated in these areas.

Figure 2. The picture comes from Zhihu

(2) Establish a personality label

I hope that no matter the quality of my answers, I will appear in front of everyone as a vivid character rather than a lifeless answerer. I chose an avatar that I like and filled in the relevant content tags that I like. I hope that the me that everyone sees on the platform is the real me.

Figure 3. The picture comes from Zhihu

(3) Keep in mind the core positioning of the product

When being active on the Zhihu platform, we should keep in mind our core product positioning. Simply put, it means which field our answer style, content, and scope should belong to. Some questions dominate the hot list, but they are beyond my core product positioning. At this time, such questions may not be suitable for us to explore too much.

(4) Ensure the authority of the content

We all know that among the thousands of Zhihu answerers, our Zhihu account is not worth mentioning at all, but from a personal perspective, for questions that we are sure of, we must firmly believe that we can express the authority within the scope of our own cognition.

Figure 4. The picture comes from Zhihu

We can open a Zhihu column, put ourselves in the position of "columnist", regularly produce our observations and thoughts, gradually explore some relevant experiences and tricks, and slowly start our Zhihu journey.

The above is the knowledge and personal experience I gained in my studies. I hope it can be helpful to you who are reading this article. Everyone is welcome to communicate and interact.

Author: Yan Ruyu

Source: SDResearch