New media operations: How to create popular articles?

I still remember when the new media industry was just beginning to develop, the first batch of entrants entered the market. Everyone was constantly producing content in batches and gaining a large number of readers. Then they grew wildly through various means, gained more readers, and gradually became top accounts.

At that time, the number of readers was a good thing, and the rapid increase in followers was a good phenomenon.

In recent years, the new media industry has developed rapidly, with so many changes that it is hard to keep up. Sometimes you don’t even know that you are still in the industry, or that you are already outside the industry.

At this time, although the popularity of content consumption and the average time spent per person are still increasing, users' demand for content is far from saturated. However, the top market has basically stabilized, and it is difficult to find a breakthrough entry. What people talk about more are "fine-grained operations", "organized group operations", "quality of fans", "user life cycle value", etc.

But there is always a distance between reality and dreams, and everyone wants to achieve refined operations as soon as possible. For the vast majority of operators, it is a more realistic issue to quickly increase the number of readers of public account articles, and making some articles a small hit is more worth looking forward to.

The hot-selling here does not mean 100,000+. If your average reading volume is 1,500, and after optimization, an article reaches 3,000, it is also a hot-selling, and a small hot-selling that should be paid more attention to.

Before there was milk, bread was still needed.

So what are the ways to increase the reading volume of articles in public accounts?

To think about this problem, you should first think about these formulas:

Total article readings = number of readings by followed users + number of readings by unfollowed users;

Reading volume of followed users = total number of fans x conversation title opening rate;

Reading volume of unfollowed users = total number of covered Moments users x opening rate of Moments titles;

(For users who have not followed us, we mainly consider the Moments channel, and ignore other small traffic channels here)

Total number of users in Moments = total article sharing x average number of friends in the user’s Moments;

In summary:

Total article readings = total number of fans x session title opening rate + total article sharing x average number of friends in the user’s circle of friends x circle of friends title opening rate.

Of course, this is not a completely accurate mathematical formula, but it can largely reflect the important components of the total reading volume of a popular article, and it is completely fine as a thinking model. If you calm down and think carefully, you can get a lot of inspiration on the direction of operations.

Here, Lao Zei is still mainly extending around the point of "quickly increasing the number of readings of public account articles".

From the formula, we can see that if we want to quickly increase the number of readers of an article in a public account:

1) The total number of fans cannot be increased immediately;

2) The article title is decided by yourself, which is easier to optimize and has quick results. It also directly determines the opening rate of the article in conversations and Moments.

3) The total amount of article sharing is related to the life cycle of your topic, the quality of the forwarding users, the user circle covered by the topic, etc. It is also directly related to the title opening rate and article sharing rate.

4) The average number of friends in your user circle of friends. This cannot be optimized in a short period of time. It requires long-term screening of users and penetration of circles.

It can be seen that if you want to quickly increase the number of readers of an article and create a small hit, the main things you can optimize in real time should be: title and sharing. Note that I said rapid improvement!

Let’s think about this again:

The title appears the most frequently, so you can start optimizing it right away - find a few more people to brainstorm titles, refer to popular article titles for modification, send it to a title group for voting, test it in the fan group, etc. All of these are relatively quick. Moreover, no one clicked on the article, let alone how many shares it received.

As for sharing, it is mainly determined by the quality of the article content, topic selection, reading experience, title, etc. Apart from the title, it is not so easy to implement the other points, especially the quality of the article content.

Therefore, if you want to quickly increase the number of readers of an article in a public account, the title should have the highest return on investment. It’s not that improving the quality of the article content is not important, but the title will produce results faster with low investment in a short period of time.

Therefore, I said that this is a key point to quickly increase the reading volume of popular articles!

When it comes to titles, everyone has been emphasizing that writing a good title can increase the opening rate of the article. In addition, it should have at least two key functions that cannot be ignored: one is to manage user expected experience; the other is to encourage sharing.

The first is to increase the article opening rate:

The title is not about how the disease can be fatal when it gets serious!

When operating a WeChat public account, you can never escape the topic of writing titles. The title directly determines the opening rate and even the subsequent sharing rate. Success or failure sometimes depends on the title.

To increase the title opening rate, you can use various methods to attract more clicks and maximize the opening effect. for example:

Create suspense and curiosity, related to "sex", related to "me", contain conflicts, use specific numbers, describe details, chase hot spots and hang out with rich people, Zhihu style, use contrast, stimulate pain points, provide solutions, highlight benefits, create an atmosphere of urgency, emphasize scarcity, indicate the region, promise value, use big V endorsement, inventory collection, add modifiers before and after, imply danger, have guidance suggestions in the title, directly indicate the beneficiary, stimulate emotions... and so on.

The main functions of such a title are simple: attract attention, generate curiosity, arouse interest, stimulate desire, resonate emotions, guide actions, etc.

Lao Zei has previously combined the titles of many public accounts in the past with his own practice and summarized 10 methods of writing titles:

1) Numeric symbols

"5 hours and 3 views, it deserves to be the best Chinese film"

Our brains will recognize numbers first. Using numbers in titles can increase recognition and stimulate people's desire to open the article.

2) Questioning

"What's the use of this body if I can't drink milk tea?" 》

Questions can arouse users' resonance and curiosity very well. The tone of rhetorical questions will be stronger and often break the reader's past cognition.

3) Follow the trend

"The Forbidden City has released a lucky red string, Yao Chen, Jing Tian, ​​and Wu Qilong are all wearing it"

This big leg can be a famous company, a famous university, a celebrity, a star, a powerful KOL, a hot event, etc.

4) Practical tips

"Are you particularly ugly in your boyfriend's camera? With these 3 simple tricks, you won’t have to worry.

This is a typical way to tell readers that you have a solution.

5) Quote dialogue

"congratulations! I saw the most reliable eye cream review before I turned 25! 》

The easiest and quickest way is to add the words "you and me", as if the reader is right in front of you.

6) Surprise offers

"The designer bags that people are crazy about on Instagram are only 1 yuan"

First tell users that the product is popular, has high sales, is favored by celebrities, etc. Then create a sense of scarcity or surprise.

7) Dramatic Conflict

"I lost 30 pounds by eating midnight snacks every night"

The core of dramatization is to create contradictions, conflicts and contrasts.

8) Curious suspense

"If you follow the trend and buy these lipsticks, you will only become uglier!" 》

Spark your users’ curiosity without immediately revealing the answer.

9) The Law of Contrast

"These 10 small items are 100 times more useful than brown sugar water during menstruation"

By comparing with reference objects, users will be more willing to click to learn more.

10) Find your seat

What are the little quirks of Aries that are difficult to talk about? 》

Through specific tags and attributes, you can target the group of people and make users unable to take their eyes off it - this article is written specifically for them.

These methods can indeed greatly increase the click-through rate of the title, but if you just use them forcibly and purely to attract clicks, it can increase the session open rate, but it may also create spam and will not increase the overall reading volume of an article.

Because the second function of the title is to manage user expectations.

What's the meaning?

The first function of the title mentioned above is to increase the open rate. In fact, it is to increase users' expectations of the content of the article through the title of the article, make users full of expectations and yearning for it, and stimulate their interest in clicking to learn more.

For example, the FOTILE range hood creates an expectation of 360° smoking without smoke escaping in all directions. OPPO phones are even more amazing. They can be charged for 5 minutes and given 2 hours of talk time, making users more willing to learn about the product.

So the question is, if we only consider the first function and recklessly choose eye-catching titles, the result is likely to be a clickbait. You have given users very high expectations, but if your content cannot keep up, not only will it ultimately fail to increase the number of readers, it will also cause users to become disgusted and unfollow you.

Therefore, it is very important for titles to manage user expectations.

Title management is actually about striking an expected balance between the title and the content. While raising user expectations and stimulating user interest in opening the title, we must also take into account users' feelings after seeing the content. Exaggerated titles will only lead to mistakes.

From this perspective, a good title should be able to exceed user expectations from the title to the content, so as to continue to attract readers. In order to quickly increase the number of article readers, the title must give users high expectations, and the content of the article must also give users a high experience that exceeds expectations.

The title should increase the appeal based on the content, rather than amplify the value independently of the content.

This brings us to the third function of a title: to encourage sharing.

On the one hand, this expected relationship between title and content directly determines whether users are willing to share.

Even if your content is very good, but users feel that it falls short of the expectations given by the title and is suspected of being a clickbait title, they will not share it. Because he doesn't want to be a disseminator of "clickbait", and he doesn't want to give the same expected experience to his friends on a large scale.

On the other hand, even if the content exceeds the user's expectations, the user will not share it if sharing it on WeChat Moments will affect his social image. For example, "Fuck! Get Out

Therefore, when writing a title, you should not only consider the number of readers of your article, but also consider what kind of social image this title will bring to the user. It should benefit ourselves as well as users.

In short, although the new media industry has been developing rapidly, the top market has become stable, and organized operations have become a trend, the big players are more concerned about user quality and precise operations.

But there are few top readers. In reality, there are many more people who are still struggling to complete the reading task. In terms of quantity, the number of top readers is almost negligible.

In 2019, content creation will still be a core competitiveness. No matter what the content is, it must be meaningful and helpful to users. Writing titles is also a core competitiveness, and it has low investment and high returns. The best way to quickly increase the number of article readers in a short period of time is through titles.

I’d probably rather spend 2 days researching 1,000 great headlines than 2 days reading a book on content creation.

Source: Mumu Laozei