Talk about short video tracks and topic selection strategies

The traffic conversion model with short videos as the main and live broadcast as the auxiliary is becoming the focus of attention of various businesses. Many businesses enter the market with full confidence, planning to get a share of the public domain platform, but find that the traffic of short videos is really difficult to grab~

It is clearly carefully prepared content, but the number of views does not exceed four digits. Or maybe a lot of effort has been spent on upgrading equipment and personnel, but the final traffic output still has not been "upgraded", and the video has only sparse likes.

Remove the bones and take out the meat, and find the root. Today, we will put aside the high-sounding methodology and take implementation as the first premise to talk about the positioning issues in short video operations - short video tracks and topic selection techniques.

1. Analysis of each track in the short video

First of all, new merchants should focus on mastering one platform first, rather than trying to do their best on all platforms. Today’s short videos basically rely on algorithm distribution, which is a process of short videos finding people. If you want to tap into your own traffic through short videos as much as possible, you must first understand where the traffic of a specific group of people is and which platform has the most advantages in the current track.

1.1Which track is running fastest between Douyin and Kuaishou?

Let’s first talk about the two big brothers in short videos. Douyin’s daily active users have exceeded 600 million, and Kuaishou’s daily active users have also exceeded 300 million. Recently, when talking about Douyin, I believe that keywords such as young, energetic, and Liu Genghong will float in everyone's mind, while for Kuaishou, keywords such as agriculture, rural areas and farmers, down-to-earth, etc., but as of 2022, these two seem to have new changes, and some are unexpected.

The product layout and structure of typical consumer industries show obvious differences between the two platforms: Douyin has a wide distribution and low unit price, while Kuaishou is the opposite; and from the perspective of live broadcast sessions, Douyin's monthly live broadcast sessions are much higher than Kuaishou's - QuestMobile 2022 China Short Video Live E-commerce Development Insights

Douyin broadcasts more shows and its unit price is lower than that of Kuaishou. Contrary to the traditional impression, Kuaishou, which has always been known for its down-to-earth and urban impression, has an average customer unit price that is about 2.5 times that of Douyin. The differences in average order value are explained and reasons are given in the following data on consumption proportions.

In Douyin live broadcasts, high-frequency, low-priced products such as food and beverages dominate sales, with snacks and convenient fast food products having particularly significant sales; while the overall sales of the two major industries of maternal and child care and home appliances account for less than one-third. On the Kuaishou platform, live streaming sales of beauty products are particularly strong, especially skin care products, whose sales are significantly different from other categories.

Compared with the flourishing of various industries in Douyin, Kuaishou's beauty industry stands out, accounting for almost 40% of consumption. This is an order of magnitude higher than other consumer products, which indirectly explains why Kuaishou's average sales unit price is much higher than Douyin.

The huge consumer market for beauty products on Kuaishou may be something that many businesses have not anticipated. After all, content such as "appearance", "changing clothes" and "makeup" are more in line with Douyin, and stereotypes such as "Lao Tie 666" have always been attached to Kuaishou. Judging from the data alone, Kuaishou seems to be more "centralized" in the industry, while Douyin is "decentralized". Although the data for this report is collected from KOLs with >5 million active users, and many long-tail KOLs are not included in the statistics, as far as the top KOLs incubated from the two platforms are concerned, we can also roughly understand the strategic direction of the platforms.

As an aside, in terms of live streaming logic, Douyin mainly emphasizes "speed", and orders are mainly placed on impulse. Orders can be placed simply because the hostess is pretty or because the host's slogans sound nice. There is no need to think too much about the decision-making process. Therefore, in terms of overall product selection, fast-moving consumer goods have an advantage. Low prices, volume-based profits, and weak demand can greatly reduce consumers' decision-making thinking, thereby selling more.

Kuaishou's live broadcast logic is close to private domain operations and is based on trust. Kuaishou announced in the recently released "Kuaishou Private Domain Operation White Paper" that 70% of its e-commerce revenue in the third quarter of 2021 came from private domains. In addition, private domains also contributed 80% of the live broadcast reward amount. Kuaishou has obviously been making strategic decisions around the "private domain".

Although algorithms are very powerful, we do not think that everything in the future should be solved by algorithms. The trust between people and the emotional connection between people are very powerful and very valuable. If the trust economy, which is centered on algorithms, content, and social connections, is done well, it can drive the next round of innovation in trust mechanisms. “This is an opportunity to reshape the consumption decisions of 1 billion users.” - Yan Qiang, senior vice president of Kuaishou

Back to the main text, the beauty industry has a huge market, but the competition is also quite fierce. If you want to cold-start short videos, Kuaishou's audience will be larger and more concentrated; if it is other industries belonging to fast-moving consumer goods, Douyin obviously meets the requirements more.

1.2 What are the advantages of the up-and-coming video account?

I have already discussed the mechanism and logic of the video account in my previous article, so I will not repeat it here.

Due to the familiar environment under the WeChat ecosystem, information, life, education, and emotions occupy the main market, with "positive energy" as the core keyword. On the contrary, funny jokes and beautiful dances that are popular on Douyin and Kuaishou perform mediocrely in the video account.

Moreover, the industry consumption data in the video account is consistent with the trend of content consumption, mainly covering training and education, novels, books and musical instruments, and the consumption types revolve around knowledge payment. This may also be because most of the current knowledge payment industry conversions are based on the WeChat ecosystem, and private domain operations are arranged in advance. Because in the initial stage of the video account, knowledge payment type consumption still accounts for the majority, and other industry consumption in the video account still needs to be explored.

1.3 Summary of the short video track

If you are starting with 0 traffic, then there is no doubt that Kuaishou and Douyin are the best choices; if you are in the beauty and skin care industry, Kuaishou's consumer group will be more concentrated, which is more conducive to later live broadcast conversions; for fast-moving consumer goods and other industries, Douyin can give you more opportunities.

If you have your own traffic (such as your own app to attract traffic, or already have a stable source of private traffic), you can give priority to operating it in the Video Account. The Video Account has incomparable advantages because it has strong support in the WeChat ecosystem, combined with the mechanism of leveraging the public domain from the private domain, and the current situation of relatively low pressure from competitive products. Especially for the knowledge payment industry, it can help you achieve the "compound interest" of traffic.

2. Tips for choosing topics for short videos

After clarifying the platform and track of our choice, let’s focus on the basics - topic selection.

As the first step in starting short video shooting, topic selection is naturally the top priority. Based on my personal experience, if the topic selection is based solely on inspiration and "feeling", it can be barely completed when the workload is light. However, if the update frequency becomes higher, or if multiple accounts need to be incubated at the same time, then a set of topic selection thinking logic is needed to improve the efficiency of topic selection.

The content of topic selection is relatively large. In order to facilitate reading and comprehension, the following content is divided into two parts: the criteria for topic selection and the ideas for topic selection.

2.1 Three criteria for selecting short video topics

(1) Clarify the direction of the video and use the content to find the target audience

When making short videos, many companies often make the mistake of not clearly positioning their users. They think that since it is public domain traffic, they want to adopt the strategy of "collecting as much as possible", and the more people the better. As a result, when it comes to conversion, they find that although there is enough traffic, the live broadcast effect is very poor, or once marketing content appears, the fans drop sharply. When they review the whole process, they find that they are blaming others:

"Your live broadcast skills are not good enough"

“The product did not address the user’s pain points”

"The host's speech was too boring and the pace was too slow"

…

So what does it mean to have clear positioning? The best way is to work backwards from the product you need to convert, that is, what problems the product can solve, and then find out the group of people who cover this part of the problem. Let me give you an example of a project I once worked on – paid posture correction courses.

After the three-step simple analysis, we can at least roughly know the target users. There is no need to rush to execute at this time. Although these three types of people are all demand customers of the product and all have problems with long-term sitting posture, the scenarios in which each person's needs arise are indeed very different.

When you choose a topic, you need to delve into the scene to analyze the problem and clarify the angle of the shooting copy. For office workers, you should use the tone of a friend or a doctor. For mothers, you can use the perspective of a child. For students, you can explain from the perspective of a parent.

In the early stage of creating an account, you need to maintain the verticality of the content and output content in one field for a long time. On the one hand, it makes it easier for algorithms and users to know who "you" are, and on the other hand, it can also create an expert image to the outside world. The fans attracted by these contents are naturally the ones who demand the products, and there is no need to worry about the product implantation being too sudden.

(2) Clear purpose

"My purpose is very clear." Some people say "The purpose is to get traffic balalala"

Obtaining traffic is the goal of the entire project. From the perspective of a single video and topic selection, it can be roughly divided into content or emotion. Generally speaking, content like life, fitness, finance, education, and makeup convey practical information, that is, knowledge content; while content like gender, appearance dance, and comedy and entertainment convey emotional content, and the emphasis of the two directions is different.

Therefore, when choosing a topic, you need to have a general idea in your mind about how to convey the content/emotion to users in a short period of time. The more the content of the topic meets user needs (i.e. high frequency + rigid demand), the easier it is for the video to spread among the group.

(3) The topic should be close to the general public

This is a mistake made by many operators who come from private domains or public accounts, ignoring the differences in the target groups. People in the private domain usually have a certain understanding of your product or a certain field. In-depth and practical content may have a higher click-through rate and is more likely to arouse heated discussion.

However, most people in the public domain are encountering the product for the first time, and many professional terms in the product are difficult for users to understand for a while. For example, in posture correction, you may not have heard of "upper crossed syndrome". In fact, upper crossed syndrome = hunched back.

Even if what you say is very practical and in-depth, users will not think you are great and will just want to swipe away and move on to the next one. Just like the experience courses of major paid knowledge courses, what is shown in the short video is more of a "muscle show" process. There are usually two types of demonstration processes:

Useful information sharing: scenario demonstration - problem discovery - problem solving

Product promotion: low threshold, easy operation, quick results

Therefore, topic selection should focus on the 80% basic population. Different from the content selection in private domain operations, it is necessary to produce content from the perspective of zero-based users in order to retain as many users as possible while maintaining verticality.

2.2 Sources of daily topic selection ideas

(1) Benchmarking against competing products and selecting advantageous themes based on their actual performance

As the saying goes, peers are the best teachers. By reading the content of the top 20 accounts in the industry, you can have a basic analysis of user preferences and avoid pitfalls. Competitive accounts can analyze topics from three specific aspects.

a) Content level

After making a list of the corresponding orders for competing products, you can arrange them according to the number of likes, comments, collections, and reposts of the video, so as to conduct a multi-dimensional data analysis, such as which topics are more popular with users; what kind of content has a high like rate but a low sharing rate; and what effects articles with high shares and comments can bring.

Generally speaking, the user psychology corresponding to the data indicators is:

High number of likes = high popularity

High number of comments = controversial topic

High collection and sharing volume = useful/interesting content

But some people think, "Just look at the number of likes. Videos with high likes must have the highest other indicators." However, this is not actually the case. Let's take a look at an example.

It can be clearly seen that even though the number of likes for the first video is about 4 times that of the second video, the number of comments is far apart. What is the key reason? We opened the comment section of the second video and found that the users were not discussing the effectiveness or problems of the action. Instead, the topic of discussion became a joke contest related to the sexes. It can even be said that it was the popularity of the comment section that made the Tik Tok algorithm push it again and again, and finally it became a small hit.

This is why it is emphasized that when selecting topics for competitive content, the content needs to be classified according to different indicators, so that when we select topics later, we can have more ideas for creating popular products.

b) Pay attention to user-level feedback

The most real needs often come from user feedback, rather than from operations' guesswork.

When analyzing competitor accounts, you must go to the comment section to understand users' real feedback and suggestions, list the issues that users are generally concerned about, and upgrade and optimize the original topics of competitors. Here, I will use Dingxiang Doctor as an example to explain the idea to you.

The original meaning of the video: A young man passed by and was surrounded by several beautiful women who asked to take a photo. When taking the photo, the doctor came forward to point out the young man's body problems and then demonstrated corrective actions.

The above analysis is only a very small part of user feedback. In reality, you can even find a week's topic from a video. Generally speaking, in user feedback, in addition to understanding the user's feedback, we also need to understand the user's role, is he a father or mother? Office worker? elder? So that you can clearly identify the audience who likes the video. Only when user feedback + user roles are matched can the scene be considered complete, and the subsequent shooting topics can be clearer.

(2) Hot Topics

The public domain is like an ocean, and the hot spots are the waves.

How to use hot topics to upgrade topics is naturally a skill that every content operator must learn, and it is also a powerful tool for harvesting traffic on the platform. Hot spots themselves have the attributes of low cognitive cost and easy sharing, and are a kind of temporary social currency. Hot spots can be simply divided into node type, current affairs type, and platform type.

a) Current affairs hot topics: usually hot topics triggered by social, livelihood and entertainment events.

Features: strong burst, high traffic, uncertainty; requires creators to respond quickly to ensure the timeliness of hot spots;

Reference for topic selection ideas: Extract core keywords for light creation, with saving time as the first goal.

b) Node-type hot spots: major industry nodes and festivals, such as Double Eleven, Christmas, College Entrance Examination, Spring Festival, etc.

Features: Predictable and easy to plan; requires creators to have new perspectives and unexpected content;

Reference for topic selection ideas: You can plan video content around festivals and create special columns.

c) Platform-based hot spots: activities held by the platform, popular background music, challenges initiated by KOLs, content materials that are imitated or used on the platform, etc.

Features: high frequency, easy to imitate, long validity; requires creators to have big imaginations and be able to produce content based on their industry;

Reference for topic selection ideas: Only choose activities and imitate content that match your own positioning, there is no need to deliberately join.

There are already many practical tutorials on the Internet about how to expand on hot topics, so I will not go into details here. The only thing worth mentioning is that there is an unwritten rule about riding on the hot topics, which is: do not ride on political events, negative events, or controversial events.

Conclusion

Track and topic selection are both top priorities in the early stages of launching a short video, and are equivalent to setting the tone for the account.

Today, short video platforms have become the official accounts of the past. Major companies have already entered the market and operated them one after another. Different gameplay contents will inevitably be generated during the operation process. However, no matter how the gameplay changes, only by firmly positioning one's own content + continuous output can one gain a long-term foothold in the wave of short videos.