When operating Douyin, you must avoid 3 types of data traps

With the increasing popularity of short videos, more and more content workers are joining this industry, more and more institutions are publishing research reports and data, and more and more training courses are "arming" themselves with data. Short video entrepreneurs are also happy to discover information, develop skills and explore opportunities from it.

As a data worker born in the 90s and above who has devoted himself to the short video industry of Tik Tok, I want to share some of my experiences. This may not be enough to help you make your first pot of gold, but at least it can teach you how to prevent fraud and help you save money.

01. Understand with an open mind and doubt with caution

All data cannot be trusted lightly. Taking "reports" as an example, all reports have a dissemination mission, especially free reports and those that are "accidentally leaked". Including the official reports of Douyin, WeChat, and Kuaishou, their essence is public relations promotion, which is the official publicizing the information they want to tell everyone. When you read it, be critical, think about the context, think about what the report publisher actually wants to say, and verify it with more data and your own experience.

Therefore, you must listen more, watch more, compare more, analyze more, understand everything with an open mind, and doubt everything with caution. Be careful about being misled by cheap data reports. The same principle applies to the saying that believing in countless numbers is worse than believing in countless numbers.

How to identify unreliable reports at the first time? Share a simple method:

If there is no one or even several pages of research description (including sample conditions, such as the distribution of gender, age, marital status, education level, etc., as well as the sample size, how to clean the data, which numbers were eliminated, and how the secondary data was collected), it is just an entertainment report .

If it is officially released, it is an official report; if it is from a third party, it is a fabricated report.

Taking the currently widely circulated Douyin data as an example, let’s talk about several common data traps.

The first trap: cutting corners on fan portraits

The second trap: the sum of fans without deduplication

The third trap: the mysterious entrepreneurial mentor

02. User portraits that cut corners: Discovery and solution to the first type of trap

There are problems with the fan portraits of Tik Tok influencers produced by many organizations. There are two reasons for this:

1. The data analysis was lazy and used the data obtained from convenience sampling to infer the population.

The so-called convenience sampling, in simple terms, is to do it in the most convenient way. For example, in a report titled “I crawled xxx data and found xxx”, the author usually analyzes whatever he crawled, but the parts that were not crawled may be more important. The data obtained through convenient sampling cannot infer the overall picture, and it is inevitable to generalize.

2. The quality of the original data is low and no correct conclusions can be drawn without careful cleaning.

The information of most users in the Douyin app is not true or accurate, and it is unlikely to analyze the correct results by crawling this data. There’s a saying in computer science called “garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO), which is also very applicable to data analysis.

For example, reports from fans of many influencers show that the highest proportion of zodiac signs among TikTok users is Capricorn. It is recommended not to look at such portraits. Why? Most people choose January 1st (default value) as their birthday, which happens to be Capricorn. Now you can understand why there are so many Capricorn users on TikTok. This is a serious mistake, but there are indeed many people who work with data and are irresponsible.

So what kind of fan portrait data is credible?

1. You can view your own data through the Douyin Enterprise Account Management Platform (available to Blue V accounts and accounts with shopping carts). This is similar to the backend of WeChat public accounts, where you can see more detailed data; you can view the fan portraits of any resident influencer through the Star Map platform. The official has complete data, and the calculated results are more accurate.

1. After the unofficial data has gone through a rigorous cleaning process, the statistical results also have certain value, but many data researchers omit this step in order to save costs.

A suggestion to third-party researchers is that the data obtained by crawlers is of very poor quality and is not recommended for analysis. If you must analyze it, you need to perform strict cleaning. The following is a feasible cleaning method:

First, remove the data whose birthday is January 1st.

Secondly, we need to filter out the large number of gray market accounts among the influencer’s fans (for example, I once analyzed the fans of Serious Girl_Yan Jiu and found that there were hundreds of consecutive accounts, and the content of the works published was exactly the same, and they all directed traffic to a social account to sell things).

In addition, corrections should be made based on the gender and age distribution of netizens released by authoritative organizations (such as the distribution of mobile phone netizens released by CNNIC).

Finally, publish the sample size and data set to increase credibility.

Creating such a fan portrait is a responsible research and can be shown to others. Of course, doing so requires extremely high investment.

03. The sum of fans without deduplication: Identification and prevention of the second type of trap

This type of mistake is common in exaggerated propaganda by training classes, MCN agencies, and industry communities.

There are some training institutions/communities in the short video industry that claim to be the top institutions/communities of Douyin, with a total number of fans of 2 billion or 3 billion. The most exaggerated statement I have heard is 8 billion. This is a really ridiculous statistic.

If you have ever been exposed to the effectiveness evaluation of TV commercials, you should know that there is a concept called GRP, which is called gross review point in Chinese. It is the result of multiplying the ratings by the reach and then adding them up to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising. Duplicates are not removed during the calculation process, and very large numbers are often calculated, which are used by many people to deceive advertisers. This indicator was created in an era of backward technology (it was not easy to monitor data and deduplicate data at that time). It did play an important role in a certain historical period, but it was also widely criticized for its fatal flaw of not being able to deduplicate data.

After the Internet era, the concept of UV (deduplicated unique page views) has been deeply rooted in people's minds. Technically, deduplication can be effectively performed to obtain the real number of visitors or the number of audiences. If someone talks about the number of fans at this time and simply adds them up without removing duplicates, it would be very suspicious.

So when someone throws you a piece of data and says how many fans the Douyin account matrix has accumulated, you must ask him how many there are after removing duplicates. This is the basic quality of a data person.

If the other party cannot answer, there are two possibilities: one is that he is not clear about the situation of his own fans (in this case, it is because he is not capable enough), and the other is that he is deliberately concealing it (in this case, it is because he has a bad conscience).

04. Mystifying entrepreneurial mentors: How to spot and avoid the third type of trap

All truly big accounts have one thing in common, which is that their content is impressive enough to “impress the algorithm” (because the algorithm is also designed to screen out good content and achieve survival of the fittest).

Reference: Toutiao Algorithm Principle (full text)

However, many speculators have obtained a large amount of traffic in a short period of time through improper means, and then sold their "successful experiences" to engage in "knowledge payment". But in fact, the gray operations they teach, such as "raising accounts", "moving", "brushing fans", "buying likes", "playing the edge", "removing watermarks", "opening permissions", "buying accounts", "simulators", "ARM machines", etc., cannot allow the accounts to grow continuously and healthily. On the contrary, they will cause the accounts to be banned, interfere with the normal order of the platform, and lead to the consequence of "bad money driving out good money", which makes many people rack their brains to find loopholes and have no intention of creating.

Most of these "mentors" cleverly take advantage of a misunderstanding in most people's minds: rapid growth. Is rapid growth a good thing? Not necessarily, it depends on how long it is. What does it mean if the number of followers quickly increases to 10,000 or 20,000?

It doesn't explain anything. At the beginning of 2018, because there were relatively few authors and relatively many viewers, any video with a little bit of quality could attract tens of thousands of fans. Even if you cheated to buy fans, the price was very cheap. Nowadays, there are relatively more authors, while the user growth (audience growth) of Douyin is relatively stable. There are more wolves and less meat, and more and more videos have fewer opportunities for exposure, so it naturally becomes difficult to increase fans. Due to the technological upgrade of the platform, buying fans has also become more and more expensive. These "mentors" accumulated some fans at low cost when it was easy to increase followers, and then sold courses to attract people when it was difficult to increase followers. As a businessman, of course I admire them, but as a teacher who imparts skills, I don't think they deserve it.

A small suggestion: when you enroll in a teacher's class, carefully observe whether the teacher's fans are still growing, investigate whether the teacher's students have become truly big accounts, and see how many people are commenting on their videos and what they say in the comments, to determine whether he is deceiving you.

I also read a "battle report" written by a traffic tycoon of the classical Internet, saying that the number of fans of a new account reached several thousand a few minutes after the video was released, tens of thousands after ten minutes, twenty thousand after half an hour, and one hundred thousand when he opened his eyes the next day. I looked at the comments under his video and found that the content of every comment was the word "repost", so I speculated that this person paid for forwarding by sending red envelopes in the group, and accumulated a certain number of fans through the long-tail effect brought by the forwarders. I think the boss may not understand TikTok. Sure enough, when I checked that account again a week later, it still had 100,000 fans.

A friend advised me that everyone should go their own way and I should not hinder others from making money. I don't think this is the case. It is precisely because these people broke the rules that some good videos were not recommended. Whether we report or expose, we are simply trying to take back the traffic (nv) that should belong to us.

Mentors also have a bad habit of making up rumors that sound plausible but have no basis in reality when you think about it carefully.

For example, one device with multiple accounts or one account with multiple devices will be restricted, one device with two SIM cards will be restricted, multiple accounts using the same WiFi will be restricted, deleting videos will be restricted, files cannot be transferred using WeChat but must be transferred using DingTalk, Blue V cannot be authenticated, Dou+ cannot be used, @TikTok assistant cannot be used...

Some of it is nonsense, while others only cover the surface and not the essence. In fact, the reason for the traffic limit is very simple. Your content is not up to standard and is not worth recommending at all.

I was cheated when making TikTok and my family members were in tears.

Some people who make Tik Tok videos are eager to achieve success and immediately look for training classes. I think this method is not advisable. In fact, there are many official resources that need to be studied and practiced repeatedly, such as "Must-Read for Beginners" (reply "TikTok Beginner's Guide" to view it), such as the live broadcast of E-Commerce Assistant and the documents of E-Commerce Study Society. Most of the questions can be answered in these two places.

Another point to note is that even compliant, well-intentioned, white-hat experience sharing does not always work.

Because TikTok is driven by algorithms, each person is different. In 2018, I have seen a lot of people who shared their little experiences and insights to sell courses, but they were ultimately proven to be useless by students. I have also seen some big scammers, and I think you know that. You can listen to and learn from other people’s methods, but apart from the principle of insisting on creating high-quality content, which is definitely a correct principle, every expert needs to explore a unique path that suits him or her.

This road is destined to be lonely.

Source: Data Youth