3 loops that Tik Tok uses to retain users!

This article divides the operation of Douyin into three parts: "user loop", "content loop" and "user-content loop", and uses the AARRR model to analyze how Douyin attracts users.

Tik Tok seems to have "magic", which gradually attracts users to the "Garden of Eden" it has built and allows them to "live happily". Behind this magic lies solid product, operation and marketing basics. Here, with the help of the AARRR model, we try to analyze the mystery behind the "magic" of Tik Tok through "3 loops".

Douyin uses three loops: "user loop", "content loop" and "user-content loop" to firmly lock in users, and uses retained users for commercial monetization and acquiring new users.

1. User Loopback

Through the "user loop", Douyin continuously "acquires-activates- retains -and-reacquires" users to form its own user pool - it acquires users through relationship chain diversion, cross-industry cooperation, ASO and other methods; then guides and activates users with excellent product experience, allowing users to quickly experience the value of the product; then retains users through personalized high-quality content recommendations to form its own user pool; finally, users in the user pool recommend high-quality content to their friends, helping Douyin acquire new users and forming a user loop.

The following is a brief summary of the main actions of each link:

1. User acquisition

• The early V1.1.0 version provides a relationship chain import function, which supports importing address books, QQ, WeChat , and Weibo friends, providing product support for viral transmission.
• In the early stage, we used Toutiao, the “Dear Father”, to divert traffic and complete the cold start.
• In the early days, thanks to the promotion of KOLs such as Yue Yunpeng and Wu Yifan, the number of users increased dramatically
• Cooperate with many variety shows, such as Happy Camp , Day Day Up, and The Rap of China, to drive user growth
• …

2. User Activation

• Excellent preparation: In terms of product, we should prepare for a large influx of users while ensuring a complete experience; in terms of operation, we should introduce early creative users and high-quality content in advance.
• After the user enters the product, the full-screen high-definition video will be automatically played without any operation, instantly attracting the user's attention and allowing the user to feel the core value of the product.
• It is easy to use and provides operation guidance such as swiping up to play the next video and double-clicking to like, which teaches users the basic actions of exploring the product in a very short time.
• Guide users to create short videos at the right time, further explore products, and become content producers
• Through props, music, demonstrations, etc., the cost of short video creation is greatly reduced, and the possibility of user experience of the core value of the product is greatly improved.
• …

3. User retention

• Through popular content screening + personalized recommendation algorithm, we recommend content that users are really interested in, gaining users' recognition of product value while increasing the possibility of users returning to the product after exiting.
• Through easy-to-use functions such as likes and comments, we promote interaction between content consuming users and content producing users, and encourage users, especially content producing users, to stay
• Through interesting shooting functions, and constantly updated props and music libraries, users are attracted to become and continue to become content production users and retain them.
• By making the video itself “popular” and having a high number of likes, users are inspired to think “I can also shoot a popular video”, which in turn stimulates users to continue to create and retain videos.
• Through the "See Music Plan", original musicians are attracted to contribute music content on Douyin and retain it
• Recall users through push notifications
• …

4. User Recommendations

• Through personalized recommendations and interesting creation methods, users' recognition of video content and products is greatly improved, making it possible for users to spread the content spontaneously.
• Add logo watermarks to videos distributed outside the website to increase customer acquisition channels
• In order to gain more attention, content producers may spontaneously spread their own videos to help Douyin gain more users.
• …

Through the above four links, Douyin has successfully built its own user loop, allowing new users to stay and play, freely consume or produce content; at the same time, further acquire new users through the accumulated user pool.

2. Content Loop

Douyin promotes the continuous production of content through product design, community atmosphere, external stimulation and other means, forming a content loop.

Based on the dimension of content supply and demand, Douyin users can be divided into two categories: content production users and content consumption users.

Content producing users contribute content and gain income; content consuming users consume content and gain pleasure.

The content loop is the dynamic loop of the platform's content production, which generally includes the following aspects:

1. "Popular" videos with high likes make users feel that "I can also shoot popular videos", which stimulates their eagerness to create.
2. The endless stream of #challenge activities, combined with the emotions created by the first one , constantly stimulate content production users to create new content, and through the low threshold of event participation and creation tools , convert some content consumption users into content production users.
3. "Take the Same Style" is similar to the challenge, and provides a solution with a lower threshold for creation.
4. Based on the first three points, some users are successfully converted into content production users, and the benign interaction between content production users and content consumption users constantly stimulates the former to create new content, forming a content loop.
5. The first four points mainly discuss ordinary content generators. In addition, there are some internet celebrities and self-media big names who are for profit. Their desire for traffic or income directly forms external stimuli, becomes a continuous driving force for their creation, and constitutes a content loop.
6. A community atmosphere that encourages creation also has a positive impact on content recycling.
7. In addition, with the surge in TikTok traffic, external public opinion such as "how to make a viral TikTok video" also has a positive stimulus on the content loop.
8. Finally, after the content loop is formed, Douyin continues to convert content-consuming users into content-producing users, and continuously converts content-producing users into higher-frequency and higher-quality content-producing users, continuously optimizing the content loop, causing it to spiral upward and enter a virtuous circle.

Through the methods mentioned above and those not mentioned yet, Douyin has built its own content loop and provides support for user loops and user-content loops during continuous optimization.

3. User-Content Loop

Tik Tok uses artificial intelligence algorithms and other technical means to continuously optimize the matching effect between users and content. As the number of users increases, user relationship chains and video content also increase, the data available for machine learning becomes richer, the accuracy of personalized recommendations is improved, and user satisfaction with recommended content increases, thereby stimulating users to consume and produce more content, forming a user-content loop.

The user-content loop is to optimize the matching efficiency of the two. The main methods are as follows:

1. Through the content screening mechanism, in the continuous testing of each video, the high-quality content that users are most interested in is screened out to form a content pool, thus ensuring the content quality from the source. There are a lot of speculations about TikTok’s content screening mechanism on the Internet, so I won’t go into details here.

2. Match the content in the content pool with the user and provide personalized recommendations for the user. I guess Douyin uses the same “collaborative filtering + content recommendation” algorithm as Toutiao for recommendations.

There are two types of collaborative filtering algorithms:

One is based on the "people" dimension, which first finds people with similar interests to the user through user behavior (such as likes), and then recommends the videos they like to the user;

The other is based on the "video" dimension. It first obtains the similarity between videos through the video preferences of all users, and then recommends similar videos to users based on the user's historical favorite video records. However, this algorithm cannot solve the cold start problem, that is, it cannot recommend videos to users that have not yet generated user behavior data (such as likes).

Another algorithm complements this well - the content recommendation algorithm, which finds similar videos through video tags and recommends similar videos to users based on their historical preference records. The tags can be manually tagged or abstracted from the video content itself.

In addition, through the prompt "People you follow liked this video" that appears in the recommended videos, it is speculated that the algorithm also integrates social relationship networks.

1. Recommend non-matching content in the content pool to users, relieve users' aesthetic fatigue, expand users' interest tags, and dynamically update user-content matching relationships.

2. Recommend people who may be of interest to users, enrich the relationship chain, and optimize the matching effect. The recommendation categories visible in the product are roughly: friends in the social chain, people with common friends, people you may know, people who people you follow also follow, people who may be interested, etc.

The user-content loop accomplishes the important task of user retention by continuously optimizing the matching relationship between the two, allowing users to have a content consumption experience that they cannot stop scrolling.

In summary, we can see that the three loops have a "you in me, me in you" relationship. The optimization of any one loop may lead to the improvement of the effects of the other two loops. This is what I understand as the magic of Tik Tok that makes me unable to stop.

Careful readers must have noticed that the monetization link in A AR RR did not seem to be mentioned in my explanation. Since monetization is the ultimate goal of commercial products, it will be discussed in "Middle Part: The Commercialization of TikTok and Its Trends". Thank you all for your valuable time.

Source: lilyblood