Content operation: 3 major driving forces of high-quality UGC!

There are three major driving forces for high-quality UGC: tools, incentives, and atmosphere. This article will discuss how to create UGC from these three aspects, as well as how some current products are creating UGC content.

To talk about high-quality UGC, we must first define what high-quality UGC is?

We usually think that high-quality UGC should have exquisite videos, beautiful pictures, and professional and in-depth text, but in different contexts, high-quality UGC should have different meanings.

Typical platforms include Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, Momo, Bilibili, etc. Since users all have relatively intentional content consumption goals, the requirements for high-quality content are high information density, and at least one of the following must be beautiful, useful, and interesting. There are also high requirements for the appearance, creativity, and professionalism of content producers. This is "high-quality content" in a universal sense.

When people first got to know Kuaishou, they might not have thought that today, these live video content from "people outside the Fifth Ring Road" can support a product with nearly 200 million DAU and an average daily usage time of 1 hour per person, and that its commercialization path is very smooth.

Just as the title of "earthy videos" suggests, most of the content on Kuaishou lacks "refinement" and connotation, and seems to have no consumption value. However, when facing the corresponding target groups, by using decentralized traffic ideas and distribution strategies based on user feedback, it is possible to dig out relatively "high-value" content suitable for consumption by various groups from the massive content.

However, in social scenarios among acquaintances, such as WeChat Moments, the original driving force behind people's content consumption is social relationships, and the value obtained from the dynamics of acquaintances is "feedback on other people's life status." Since content is consumed by people, even if the content does not contain any useful information, it still has value for consumption. And due to the rigidity of content consumption demand, users' tolerance for junk content will also increase.

Therefore, the recognition of high-quality UGC should depend on consumer value. When the platform makes specific measurements, it generally defines quality through some data standards based on the platform situation.

Next, let’s talk about the three major driving forces of high-quality UGC in my eyes: tools, incentives, and atmosphere.

tool

At the beginning of QQ, Ma Huateng was annoyed that there was no one to chat with, so sometimes he would change his avatar to pretend to be a girl to chat with people in order to make the community seem lively. The difficulty Momo faces when building a community is how to ensure that a sufficient number of good-looking female users are active in the community? Today's "Meitu XiuXiu" are powerful enough to make all female users become goddesses. "Under the filter, everyone is a fairy" is definitely not a lie.

Although the content produced by most people has little consumer value, we can start with tools to make the content at least acceptable on the surface. If we follow the three major structures of UGC content costs mentioned by Professor Jin in "Five Laws of UGC Community": "physical cost, technical cost, and intellectual cost", then with the help of production tools, the technical cost of user content production and part of the intellectual cost are essentially reduced (of course, the upper limit of intellectual cost is extremely high, which will be mentioned later). Whether it is photo editing software or short video editing software, it can help ordinary users to moderately improve the quality of content produced.

The earliest photo-editing software focused on selfies, and all of them revolved around beauty and filters. Later, photography software with different styles and corresponding to different scenes were derived, such as NOMO, which focuses on Polaroid film effects, and Foodie, which specializes in food photography scenes. Qingyan Camera is the first photography software that has been able to make full use of "photo postures", and it can be said to have upgraded from "taking beautiful photos" to "teaching you how to take photos".

Left: Meitu Xiuxiu; Right: Qingyan

Drawing on the experience of how to photograph people, guiding tools on how to photograph objects have also appeared on many corresponding content platforms, helping users to take better photos of objects or scenery, thereby improving the quality of UGC within the platform.

Taobao reviews

With the rise of VLOG, short video tools have also flourished. Typical examples include VUE and Yishan (Feizhu is really an expert in UGC tools), and VLOG communities have been naturally built based on the tools.

Left: Yishan; Right: VUE Community

The advantage of the tool is that it can relatively raise the lower limit of content quality. Since there is a natural content publishing process and a matching user base, starting with tools to build a UGC community is a good idea. Then the tool-based UGC community can naturally use the tools to improve the content quality threshold of the UGC community.

However, the shortcoming of the tool is that, on the one hand, it can only assist users in content production through limited solutions, and cannot completely solve the problems of physical and intellectual costs of content. On the other hand, as time goes by, the global content quality threshold will continue to increase, and the threshold for users to consume content will also increase accordingly. Therefore, the tool effect is time-sensitive, and continuous innovation is needed to stimulate users' desire to consume this "templated" content.

excitation

If a platform only provides high-quality content production tools and consumption experience, but does not protect content producers, it will be difficult to support an orderly and self-growing content ecosystem. At this time, incentives are needed to subsidize the "physical costs" of ordinary users and the "technical costs and intellectual costs" of high-level users. Everyone understands motivation, including material motivation and spiritual motivation.

Material incentives for UGC are commonly seen in e-commerce reviews (JD.com and Suning) and community cold start or operational activities.

E-commerce platforms often use material incentives to encourage content production, because content can directly help the platform sell goods and generate profits. However, as long as users know that their content can obtain a fixed material return, it will be difficult for them to produce content below this material standard.

The result is that the cost of a single piece of content is relatively fixed, and the advantage of low UGC acquisition cost is lost. Therefore, the application scenarios for stable material incentives for UGC are relatively narrow, and community social products with UGC as their main business will basically not adopt it.

Community cold starts or operational activities are attempts to achieve low operating costs and high content returns through the uncertainty of incentives, such as xx prizes for the top n likes. Currently in the Internet environment, users will spontaneously produce content because they do not expect stable material returns for the content they produce. Once the incentives are determined and user expectations are determined, the community will no longer be able to obtain UGC content at a low cost.

Left: JD.com reviews; Right: CHAO

Spiritual motivation can also be divided into deterministic spiritual motivation and uncertain spiritual motivation.

Most common user growth systems are deterministic spiritual incentives, where users can accumulate values ​​and unlock certain badges or privileges through basic content interaction behaviors. The advantage of this incentive method, which originated in the forum era, is that it is accessible to everyone and can be quantified. It can solve the problems of user base activity and content production quantity. The difficulty lies in the numerical design to avoid ensuring the rarity of levels or symbols (similar to the numerical design of games, finding a balance between numerical over-issuance and inflation). It is more effective in maintaining an active user base. However, as many platforms currently have no shortage of content but only lack high-quality content, deterministic spiritual incentives are relatively limited.

The basis of the spiritual motivation of uncertainty is that the community already has a basic ecological atmosphere, the user circle is relatively stable, and the incentives are rare and timely. Examples include: Jike will select outstanding content producers under the circle (formerly called topic) and award them the "Weekly Expert" label (such as "Investment Observer of the Week"); Mafengwo will select high-quality travel notes every day and put them at the top of the homepage, called "Fengshou Travel Notes".

Left: Jiji; Right: Mafengwo

Atmosphere

Metaphysical link. The difference between atmosphere and spiritual motivation is that "spiritual motivation" is a user-driven means dominated by the platform and based on rules, while "atmosphere" is a user-driven direction under the influence of the platform ecology and mechanism.

When talking about the experience in the short video track, Chunyin once said:

There is no way to improve the editing skills of the average user. No matter how easy the tool is to use, how demonstrative the template is, or how driven by quality works, none of them can effectively improve editing skills. Cultivating users to learn the language of the lens is only possible with passion and talent. It's like there is no way to improve one's writing skills. Compared to photos, the nature of video editing is closer to writing articles.

Although ordinary users make up the majority of users on the platform, in theory, ordinary users can grow into high-quality content producers driven by the platform atmosphere. Therefore, whether the "enthusiasm and talent" of users can be mobilized is the key to whether the platform can grow on its own, and represents the ceiling of a UGC platform. At this point, the best UGC communities in the world include Youtube and Reddit. If code is also considered UGC, then Github is also a typical example (funny). At present, it seems that Bilibili and Jike are moving in this direction in China.

Both Bilibili and Xigua Video want to become China's "Youtube". At present, Bilibili seems to be closer, and the reason lies in the "atmosphere".

Xigua Video is deeply influenced by Toutiao's genes. From its cold start to now, it has relied on OGC to maintain the quantity and quality of content. The advantage of this is that it can quickly grow in volume, but the content consumption users and content production users will be relatively separated (there is no specific data, but the overlap of Xigua's production/consumption users must be smaller than that of Bilibili). Bilibili started with the barrage culture, and the atmosphere of community interaction is ingrained into the product. If you are a user of Bilibili, you can clearly feel that there is a good interactive atmosphere among users from different circles guided by their interests.

Number and distribution of B-station submissions (as of March 2018), source see watermark

Why is Bilibili better than Xigua Video? My friends on Xigua Video have also asked me this question. I think the fundamental reason is that due to different user groups, young people in contemporary China are more "interesting" than before, have a stronger desire to express themselves and share, and have clear "interest circles", which are precisely the main driving force for UGC content production.

If people make videos just for income, many people will be unwilling to take risks. However, if they do it out of interest, they can "generate electricity with love". Many UP hosts on Bilibili will spontaneously share video production tutorials, their thoughts on becoming UP hosts, and content creation skills and ideas. To a certain extent, a culture of "old people leading newcomers" has been formed, achieving self-growth of content at low cost.

Content distribution of the game area of ​​​​Bilibili, source see watermark

Finally, let’s talk about community pressure. When the “atmosphere” is not good, high-quality content will become a pressure on users. A typical example is that many users are reluctant to post updates on Keep, and only share their exercise results or gym selfies on WeChat Moments. The reason is that the "high standards and strict requirements" of the top content in the Keep community put pressure on ordinary content producers. Everyone will think that "the big Vs in the community are in such good shape, I am embarrassed to post them", and thus form the perception that "you can't post on Keep if you are not in good shape". Therefore, when cultivating an "atmosphere" through distribution strategies and user guidance, platform designers must take into account the "growth potential" of ordinary users, otherwise the benefits may outweigh the disadvantages.

Final Thoughts

I always believe that sharing is something that benefits both oneself and others. Today’s Internet environment has provided most people with channels to express themselves and easy-to-use tools to produce content. We hope that we can remain “interesting” and willing to “share”. Thank you, readers!

Author:superDarry

Source: superDarry