How does TikTok achieve user growth through the AARRR model?

Product positioning: Douyin was launched on September 26, 2016. It is a music creative short video community focusing on the new generation. It displays creative content in the form of shooting + music = short video. It is a music UGC product with a clear brand image.

Tik Tok user profile : mainly 19-34 years old, male users are currently dominant

1. Product introduction phase: new user acquisition

On the product: In the early days, Douyin has been polishing its products, meeting user needs through basic functions such as uploading videos, playing music, and inviting friends, allowing users to participate with a very low threshold, and on this basis, continuously optimizing based on user feedback.

Operational level: Before March 2017, Douyin's customer acquisition channels have always been mainly based on the platform itself, without much external investment. However, the number of new Douyin users reached its first peak in March. Through the 360 ​​Index, we found that Douyin itself held a voting campaign. After March, Douyin launched a series of actions such as imitation shows, quiz competitions, and hot topics on Weibo to attract new users .

Marketing strategy: Online, Douyin came into the public eye through the "Look-alike Xiao Yueyue" video reposted by KOL Yue Yunpeng on Weibo.

Offline cooperation with NetEase Cloud Music has attracted users to participate through "Tik Tok Addiction-Stations in Various Places".

During the product growth stage, Douyin used the "Million Heroes Quiz" event to attract users with high rewards. After failing the quiz, old users could gain resurrection qualifications by sharing the page with friends. Friends then opened the link to download the APP and participate in the quiz. This marketing fission event brought nearly one million new users to Douyin.

In terms of brand exposure and topic creation, Douyin has cooperated with Burger King to open offline co-branded customized stores, cooperated with the popular program "The Rap of China", and invited popular stars to stay... A series of brand activities have brought a large number of new fans to Douyin.

2. User Activation

(I) In terms of product structure, in order to activate users, Douyin has placed its core focus on its own positioning - music short videos

When users enter for the first time, they will see a horizontal video with music playing when they open the Douyin interface (I clicked it in the office at the time, and the scene was very embarrassing when the sound effect came out. Douyin should give a good reminder here so that users can be mentally prepared)

Swipe down the screen and you will see the videos automatically pushed by the APP. On the right side of the interface, there are four buttons: follow, like, comment, share, and music play. When the user clicks one of the buttons, it will reach the user's aha moment. After clicking the button on the right, the user will be prompted to register and log in. I believe that the user's completion of binding the mobile phone number is an activation behavior, and following, liking, commenting, sharing, and making videos are all subsequent behaviors to promote activity. Later, user stratification can be done based on these user behaviors to define core users. However, Douyin has not yet built a user growth system, which is also part of the reason for user loss .

In addition, Douyin’s product operation does not clearly guide new users, and it relies entirely on the product’s functions to encourage users to shoot and post videos. When it comes to difficult video editing, production, and synthesis, it is difficult for users to obtain learning channels to produce high-quality videos. Although the official has educated users through the Douyin Assistant, this entrance is hidden too deeply. It is recommended that users automatically follow the Douyin Assistant after completing the login.

(2) At the operational level, Douyin creates UGC by establishing topics and video challenges. Because ordinary users have weak video production capabilities, Douyin relies on professional dancers, musicians, comedians, and internet celebrities to shoot videos and publish them to other platforms to attract traffic.

In the operation of Douyin Blue V, Douyin has launched three operation methods : hot content, label content, and advertising content.

(III) In terms of marketing activities , Douyin uses popular celebrities and popular programs to further enhance brand exposure and allow users to participate in fun and interesting activities.

3. Improve user retention

1. Product Function

With the help of Toutiao's powerful technical background, Douyin continues to improve its recommendation algorithm to achieve "one face for each person". It has to be said that Douyin’s product functions have very strongly grasped the users’ love of beauty, expression, originality, and the desire to be noticed, admired and pursued. When users choose to post videos, Douyin prepares various types of filters and stickers for you , especially after acquiring Faceu, it has added a lot of sticker filter effects.

At the same time, Douyin has also tried to launch dance machines, theaters, quiz shows, live broadcasts and other functional entrances for different users at different times. These fun and interesting functions not only capture the user's curiosity, but also increase the user's competitive spirit and desire to perform, which can easily make users addicted and indulge in them.

2. Operational level

Through Tik Tok's black technology, different videos are distributed to users. Combined with background user tags, precise user management can be performed to push messages to different types of users. For example, reminders of the host’s online live broadcast, reminders of fans’ attention, reminders of comments and likes, etc. However, apart from focusing on pushing videos that users like, Douyin has not yet built a deep user growth system and honor system. Functions such as user tasks, user levels, user IDs, user privileges, fan gifts, and fan rewards have not been developed. Moreover, as a PGC platform for short videos, users can only comment on videos and send three private messages to their friends, but they cannot get in-depth information about their followers’ WeChat accounts or communicate in real time. This will reduce user enthusiasm to a certain extent and reduce stickiness with the platform.

(III) Marketing activities

Douyin uses the platform's resources to continuously display challenges and other activities in hot searches, banner images, and segmented categories to increase user enthusiasm for participation. At the same time, excellent works are given priority, allowing participants to fully feel the sense of superiority of being noticed and having a surge in views.

Content reminders such as celebrity arrivals and celebrity live broadcasts continue to stimulate users to pay attention to the latest sharing from their idols.

In addition, it continues to launch large-scale competitions , such as the Aidou Trainee Weekly Competition and the Street Dance Competition. The winners can obtain exclusive resources, Douyin peripherals and other rewards; it launched the Douyin Original Music Plan , teaming up with 8 judges and hundreds of well-known musicians to find free and independent original musicians. On the one hand, it provides an outlet for original musicians, and on the other hand, it expands the music library of Douyin’s own community, benefiting both others and oneself, which can be said to kill two birds with one stone.

4. Revenue Monetization

As a short video platform, Douyin has the following ways to monetize:

(1) Inserting advertisements into video information streams

When users keep scrolling down to watch the next video, they may "accidentally" slide to the mid-roll advertisement, such as the three brand video advertisements launched in cooperation with Airbnb, Harbin Beer and Chevrolet. For Douyin, they are advertisements, but they are also high-quality short videos.

(2) Customized on-site challenges

The most representative one is the OPPO advertisement #If you have 20 million#, which is used to promote the brand slogan of "20 million front and rear camera phone".

(3) Live broadcast

Unlike most live broadcast modes that use show formats, Tik Tok imitates the live broadcast function of Instagram. Users can only watch the live broadcast content of influencers they follow. This form of live broadcast serves the interaction of fans accumulated by high-quality short videos, and can also be seen as one of the steps in Tik Tok's future transformation into a social network.

(4) E-commerce traffic entrance

This is a feature that was added recently. Taking the animation video self-media named "Jia Ge is Picasso" as an example, a shopping cart button appears in the short video of this account, and product recommendations will appear after clicking it. This is not an isolated case. Shopping cart buttons and product recommendation information have been found in multiple Douyin accounts, and the number of fans of these accounts is over one million, or even close to ten million.

Compared to the Douyin platform, which has the strong backing of Toutiao, the monetization needs of the photographers seem to be more urgent.

In addition to the platform's dividends, many internet celebrities have also posted their WeChat and Weibo addresses on their personal homepages, encouraging everyone to add QQ, WeChat, and Weibo, and then use micro-business to monetize members, completing the routine of attracting and washing fans.

5. User Recommendation

1. Product Function

Users can share their personal homepage in the "My" settings. After shooting a video, they can also share their personal video with friends on the site, WeChat, Weibo, QQ... with one click. Click More to share to more off-site platforms.

When users share interesting videos with friends, there are basically two ways of sharing: one is to save the video locally and then share it, and the other is to share the H5 directly to WeChat. Currently, short videos are in the rectification period, and the H5 link needs to be copied to the browser . However, the huge exposure of TikTok has implanted its icon and brand image into people’s minds, and users will naturally understand that this is a link to the TikTok APP when they see it.

(II) Operation and marketing activities

Through the “Million Question Guessing” contest, Douyin takes advantage of users’ herd mentality and desire to take advantage of others, requiring users to share the page with their friends if they want a chance to be resurrected while participating in the quiz. Or you can share it to your friends circle and have them scan the QR code to download the APP to complete the resurrection task. This activity of old customers bringing in new customers has driven another wave of growth for Douyin.

Douyin has also launched a creative competition based on "voting", in which contestants share competition videos and invite friends to click and support, watch videos, and other behaviors to help them. This way of ranking the competition taps into the users' competitive spirit.

At each stage of the event, Douyin continuously displayed the schedule information to users through off-site advertising and on-site resource positions, further stimulating user participation and sharing.

6. Growth Suggestions

I think Tik Tok should improve its user retention

1. Build a complete user growth system based on the user's life cycle to enable users to achieve better growth on the platform.

2. Build a social atmosphere within the site to provide users with more opportunities to connect: access information, initiate and organize offline activities , etc.

3. Carry out refined user operations based on the distribution channels, classify users according to channel sources, and push highly relevant video information in real time.

Author: Xingchen_M, authorized to publish by Qinggua Media .

Source: Jianshu