Douyin operation: How to create a Douyin template that is imitated by the entire network?

Tik Tok has started to associate videos and products, displaying them in small pop-up windows. This is an obvious signal of social e-commerce.

Tik Tok, a phenomenal product, once gained a large number of users due to its "Seaweed Dance" which was imitated by the entire network. Entertainment is the spice of life. Watching entertainment and participating in entertainment are two different ways of experiencing it.

Douyin has made the latter a reality, allowing the public to create high-quality content in an imitative manner. It provides video shooting tools, various filters, and the most popular music of the moment, making it very convenient to make short videos. The "little sister" and "little brother" on Douyin have become popular Internet terms, and a new generation of Internet celebrities has emerged.

Douyin is essentially a video microblog. Users are becoming more and more lazier online, from posting blogs to posting 140-character microblogs, and then to recording a 15-second short video. This is a progressive process. Everyone has the desire to express themselves, to write, speak, and act out what they want to say.

When users find reading text boring, writing text is even more difficult. Recording a video is easier than writing text. Moreover, when there is such a tool, which is very simple to operate, especially with the ability to beautify and dub, and the quality of the video shot will not be very bad, many people are happy to accept it.

It can also be said that a generation needs a different stage to showcase their unique personality, and the leaders of this platform must be this generation. On the platforms of the previous generation, all the rules and trends have been defined, and it is difficult to show yourself once you are on them.

It used to be said that Chinese people have no sense of humor and no spirit of entertainment. In fact, it is not that they do not have sense of humor, but that they do not have the right platform and environment to show it. Especially young people, who can easily be seen as not having enough brains if they show it anytime and anywhere.

Tik Tok has pushed entertainment to a climax time and time again. However, there is a common phenomenon that makes people worry. Many people laugh while watching Tik Tok. The more they watch, the more they laugh. The laughter gradually replaces thinking. After laughing, how many people remember why they laughed? After a long time, they will find that they have not thought for a long time, and they don’t know when it started.

From paper media to online media and then to video media, users' ability to read and think deeply is declining, their attention is being distracted, entertainment has become more important than thinking, and has become a mainstream culture today.

When a user is immersed in a platform, there must be a reason for him to stay on this platform. I have always believed that Internet products are not about catering to the current mainstream, but about leading the next popular trend.

Douyin is such a platform. From the product design perspective, it uses a screen-dominating reading mode to keep users’ attention on the homepage. The jump button is not obvious, so users will ignore the jump and keep scrolling up to stay on the homepage.

So one feeling when watching Tik Tok is that you lose the concept of time, and an hour goes by unnoticed. Think about what other products were designed like this in the past. The most common one is gaming apps that have this kind of interface.

For such an APP, it is necessary for us to understand some of its characteristics. This is also a very promising social e-commerce platform, especially since Douyin has started the association function between videos and products, and displays them in the form of small pop-up windows. This is an obvious signal of social e-commerce.

1. Recommendation algorithm

After TikTok became popular, many people have been speculating about TikTok's algorithm rules, how to recommend high-quality content to users, and how to retain them. For an APP, as long as you clean up the user population, user reading methods, and product advantages, you can judge its algorithm.

For short video apps like Tik Tok, there should be six basic indicators: user stay time, video completion rate, video clarity, jump within the first three seconds, clarity, and music. These are the basic conditions for judging whether a short video is of high quality.

Other indicators that users can see are the feedback from users after watching the short video, such as the number of likes, comments, shares, and followers. Whether a video is attractive can be seen from here. If the user feedback data is not good, there will be no continuous recommendations.

In 2018, there was a popular joke on the Internet that if you want to start a business, owning a Douyin account with tens of thousands of followers is more effective than raising 1 million yuan in financing, because with this Douyin account, two or three people maintaining it, can generate a steady stream of traffic, while 1 million yuan is indeed fixed.

The internet celebrities on Douyin are also their own self-media. Operating a Douyin account means following various indicators in the recommendation rules. Every time a video is shot, these indicators are used to measure the quality of the video, and any bad parts are modified immediately.

2. How to create a reproducible template

I define Tik Tok as an imitative entertainment short video platform, because from the content of mainstream videos, we can see that most of the content is basically similar, but the performers are different, so the display effect will be different.

Since it is an imitation video, it is very important to make a template that can be quickly copied and imitated. This is also an innovation process. It is enough for one in ten thousand people to innovate, and the rest of the mainstream people can just imitate.

An imitable template must be simple, teachable, and interesting. There are also some standards for the content. The following are the popular ones:

(1) Arousing desire

For example, cooking and enjoying delicious food can arouse people’s appetite; sharing scenery and traveling can arouse people’s desire to travel;

(2) Cognitive conflict

New inventions, fresh life, and scenery never seen before, spark curiosity and understanding of unfamiliar things, that is, sharing things that are rarely seen in daily life;

(3) Satisfying Fantasy

Other people’s pets, wives, boyfriends, etc. are always very beautiful and a bit fairy-tale-like, which cannot be experienced in real life. When we see the beauty of others, we will imitate them. After all, everyone likes to show their good side to others.

For example, @成都小甜甜, who became popular on Douyin because of a single sentence during a street interview, "How much salary do you think a man needs to support you per month?" "Support me? I think as long as he can take me out to eat," she answered with a sweet smile.

This caused cheers from netizens. This is someone else's girlfriend. It can be a great comfort to boys who are facing the pressure of finding a girlfriend or getting married.

(4) Arouse curiosity

How they did it is amazing, it’s just showing off their skills, such as magic, card skills, dancing, etc. There are also some people who have special skills. For example, some people's senses are particularly sensitive, their nostrils and ears can move, etc.

(5) Performance

This type is the most common. As long as you have an interest in this area, you have what everyone calls a dramatic quality. You can lip sync to songs, especially popular songs on the Internet. It doesn't depend on your voice, but your acting skills. Just lip sync.

The more advanced ones, who have some basic skills, can directly imitate the original singer and can also sing in their own style. For example, in early 2019, @阿悠悠 became an instant hit on TikTok because she sang a pop song in her own style at a friend’s wedding. Thousands of accounts posted this video, which was completely shared spontaneously by other users.

3. Operational Strategy

(1) Account Matrix

This is a common practice for any video self-media platform, and these accounts must also be related industry accounts.

For example, if you are a movie commentator, the best way is to create accounts according to the type of movies, such as horror movies, romance movies, science fiction movies, martial arts movies, police and gangster movies, etc.

(2) Add a topic

There are current social hot spots every day and every week, and there are also some official hot spots. If the content we produce is related to a hot topic, it is best to include this topic when publishing it. In this way, the system can be more accurate when matching.

(3) Give rewards to users

You can participate in a lucky draw by sharing videos posted by the author, and you can get rewards by liking the videos. There are also rewards for flipping the cards, which means the author will reply to you after you comment. These are all included in the reward category. This is marketing done by the author of the video to stimulate user activity. After all, these indicators are within the recommended assessment parameters.

(4) What Douyin can do

It can be said that anything you can think of can be done on Douyin. In addition to those purely entertaining imitations, there are also some valuable content that can be created, especially for social e-commerce people.

For example, teaching people to dance, sharing PPT skills, teaching art, writing, and design, as well as sharing makeup skills, sharing marketing knowledge, and sharing books. Many things can be associated with products.

(5) Product sharing function

You can have this function through three simple indicators: number of fans, number of videos posted, and real-name authentication. With this function, you will have an e-commerce showcase on your personal homepage. When you post a video, you can add products and sell them.

This is also an attempt by Douyin to develop social e-commerce. It is also very attractive to merchants, as it directly provides monetization tools and marketing promotion tools. The effectiveness of the Douyin operating team can be directly detected and judged from the product opening rate.

This is just the first step. Short video platforms of the scale of Douyin will definitely be new sources of e-commerce traffic in the future. A large wave of dividends are waiting for social e-commerce people to tap into.

Source: Jiudianxueshe (ID: jiudianxueshe)