How did she gain over 1 million followers on Douyin in just 2 months?

(Slideshow video screenshot👆)

In short, because resources are limited, the videos produced are very simple, so the production cost is also low. After all, as an editor by profession, I dare not invest too many resources in the short video platform. Firstly, I am afraid that the investment will fall on deaf ears, and secondly, I really don’t have much time.

Then, every day during lunch break, I set a goal for myself: to get two colleagues to follow our TikTok account. After doing this for more than half a month, this account still only has more than 100 followers, and I got them by begging colleagues and friends everywhere. Isn’t it pitiful? For a personal account, 100 followers doesn’t sound that bad, but this is a business account! But I'm so worried.

I discussed with my colleagues what the problem was with the video, and their general response was: the content was too dry, not grounded enough, and not interesting. After some struggle, we decided to start with the simplest approach: learning English by listening to songs . There are two reasons:

1) Who doesn’t like to listen to a nice melody?

2) You can also learn an English word, why not

After this attempt, the account's fate experienced a turning point overnight. During that period, a song on Tik Tok became popular because of a middle school student. The song was called "That girl". What is the most important thing about operations ? Take advantage of the popularity!

So, we found the original audio of this song (actually the MV would be better, but this internet hit song doesn’t have a MV) and made a simple video for learning English by listening to the song.

This video received 148,000 likes. This is the second time we have tasted the sweetness of Tik Tok, the traffic harvester. The number of fans also changed qualitatively, from a few hundred to a few thousand. We changed the name of the account to " Scallop Daily English ". These six words are very important because:

Scallops – emphasize brand ;

Daily – emphasizes frequency;

English - emphasizes content and ensures that users can find us when searching for "English".

Then, I started to strike while the iron was hot.

The second turning point of this account was the popular "face-holding kill" challenge soundtrack - "Count on me".

We found the MV and made it into a " learn English by listening to music " format. This video eventually received more than 600,000 likes and brought us hundreds of thousands of fans. On the day the video was released, my colleagues and I witnessed the number of fans growing at a rate of 1 fan per second. It's like a daydream.

(Count on me video, source: Scallop Daily English)

Gradually, I reused the format of "learning English by listening to songs" for a while, and of course I also interspersed videos of " authentic English expressions " and " one sentence a day " in between. Until users became a little tired, video data began to decline, and fans even began to decline.

I reflected again and asked my colleagues to do an internal test before releasing the video. I also asked them three questions:

1) If you see this video in the recommendation pool, will you be able to watch it to the end or will you quickly scroll away?

2) What is the reason for the slip?

3) What improvements do you think can be made to this video?

I won’t release the video until 80% of my colleagues think it’s OK.

While conducting the internal test, I began to think about our positioning: whether it is learning English by listening to music or reading a daily quote, can we beat the competitors? I asked myself the following questions:

Q: Can systematic language teaching be achieved on Douyin?

A: Yes, but due to the length limitation of Tik Tok videos, the possibility of implementing systematic teaching is small.

Q: What is the difference between us and our competitors (Pandora English by Qingke, Kuaixue English, Sun Zhili, etc.)

A: We don’t take the teacher route. Our role is to let fans experience the charm of English and cultivate their identification and favorability towards the Scallop brand.

To sum up, I have come to the ultimate positioning of "Scallop Daily English": learning English happily .

Specifically, through movies, music, funny videos and other means, let fans fall in love with English. If they need to learn English systematically, we can then recommend scallop products to them.

Later, "Learn English happily" became our guiding principle for making videos. Based on these few words, we made some highly-praised videos. As of today, the total number of fans has reached nearly 1.6 million.

I sorted through more than a thousand English videos released by "Scallop Daily English" and competing products, and worked hard to come up with the following principles.

1) 3F Principle

I have distilled the three main characteristics of popular English videos from the content level and illustrated them with cases. After learning this, you can also get 1 million followers within 2 months.

Familiarity: User familiarity

The more familiar the content is to users, the more receptive they are to it, especially if the videos have an element of the unexpected. In short, create surprises in areas that are familiar to users.

Let me give you an example. Most people’s impression of Bruce Lee is that of a martial arts star wearing tights. Just imagine, have you ever seen Bruce Lee in a suit and tie speaking fluent English? We found the interview, see below.

(Bruce Lee in a suit, source: Scallop Daily English)

As expected, this video received 110,000 likes and brought us about 50,000 fans.

Using the same routine, I found an interview video of Peppa Pig's voice actor when she was a child. The familiar IP (Peppa Pig) plus the refreshing elements (a 10-year-old cute girl with a British accent) eventually received 270,000 likes.

Fun: Humor and fun

If a video can make you laugh on a depressing day, then giving it a like is a good deed that day. Besides, the positioning of our account is “Learn English happily”, so bringing laughter to users is the meaning of our existence!

There is a series that we have published for many issues, called "Celebrities Read Bad Tweets", which comes from an American program called "The Chicken Show". We selected a series of celebrities who are popular in the country (in line with Familiarity), and the response was very gratifying. One of them received as many as 60w likes.

(Celebrities read malicious tweets, source: Scallop Daily English)

Or a video like this: A 200-pound prisoner cried and complained that he was beaten by his cellmates on his first day in prison, but in fact he was a loving young man who loved to knit sweaters for his cellmates! The reversal is so big that it makes people laugh.

Flow: Video Rhythm

Refers to the rhythm of sound and picture in a video.

As we all know, Douyin initially focused on music-related short videos. Although the focus in the later period is on "recording a beautiful life", music has always been an important aspect of Tik Tok videos. If you often watch Douyin, you will find that the so-called Douyin divine songs all follow one characteristic: the music rhythm is cheerful and simple, and particularly catchy, such as "That girl", "Count on me", "Shape of you", etc.

Therefore, when creating English content, you might as well start from this perspective and choose Tik Tok hits (historical songs also meet the Familiarity requirement) as materials and give full play to them.

These divine songs naturally have a good sense of rhythm, so even if the video quality is poor, the effect is not necessarily bad. I have seen more than one video that was simply a screen recording of a hand holding a pen singing from the first sentence of Shape of You to the 15-second mark (when Douyin had fewer fans, only 15-second short videos could be posted), and such videos could get up to one million likes. I can't help but wonder, the charm of music is too great!

In addition to covers and song tutorials directly related to the hit songs, story-oriented videos should also be used with Douyin hit songs first, so that the video has a certain probability of being seen in the display of works under the song. In addition, ensure that the picture can appear at the music node during production - that is, the rhythm of sound and picture matches.

2) 3S Principle

I classify the 3S principle as requirements for video format. The 3S principle is the reference given by the official Douyin. We have always followed it as an official guide when making videos. Let me give you a brief introduction.

Stress: Focus

It is best to highlight the key points in the first 5 seconds of the video to attract users’ attention. Otherwise, users will quickly scroll away because they don’t know what the video is about.

Simple: Simple and clear

Let me give you a counterexample so you can understand. We once played a video of Einstein talking about the theory of relativity. We thought that this video of a big IP speaking in English would win a lot of applause, but the data was mediocre and users also commented that they couldn't understand it.

Simulate: User Participation

This requirement is relatively high. Once a video goes viral, thousands of users will use the original soundtrack and replicate the same pattern. For example, killing with holding the face, Johnny eating candy, etc.

Whether we have 1 million fans or 2 million fans, what should we do after we have developed fans?

By the way, I added someone who was selling a Douyin account. The asking price was 80,000 yuan for 1 million followers. I estimated that after bargaining, I could get it for 50,000 yuan. But, apart from selling accounts, how can millions of fans be converted into traffic or money? The following are some of my thoughts on work in the past two months.

1) Followers on WeChat /Weibo

As Toutiao and Tencent continue to battle, any appearance of “ WeChat public account ” or “Weibo” in Douyin’s personal profile, videos, titles , comments, and automatic replies to private messages may result in failure in the review. Therefore, if you want to attract fans through WeChat or Weibo, there will be certain risks, and according to our data, the results are very limited.

Therefore, there is nothing much to say about this. Dear readers, you can decide for yourself whether to direct your fans to the two microblogs. If you are brave enough, just do it.

2) Open product showcase

After the number of fans reached a certain level, we applied to open the product showcase function. I failed the first time, tried again, and passed. Great joy! I started contacting my colleagues at Taobao to add possible SKUs to the Taobao Alliance, and then add them to the Douyin showcase.

(A look at the Scallop Daily English Douyin showcase)

I thought it would sell well, but I was wrong again. Since sales are not good, I am not afraid to share the data with everyone.

We have tried to sell physical and virtual goods such as notebooks, postcards, English video courses, etc. The video data has about 3k-5k likes and hundreds of thousands of views. What do you think the conversion rate of the window products is?

zero!

Zero purchases from fans! I almost want to cry. My personal public account ’s ability to sell products is not that bad!

Although the data is shocking, a closer look reveals that there are reasons for the zero conversion rate:

1) High average order value

Take the recording course as an example, which costs 69 yuan per order. After all, Douyin is not Taobao. What is the purpose of users watching Douyin? Watch the record of a wonderful life! What’s going on when a product suddenly pops up? And it’s so expensive.

2) Complex purchasing path

The user clicks on the product link below the video - jumps to the Douyin showcase interface of the product - jumps to Taobao, and then follows the normal Taobao shopping process. It’s too complicated. Why can’t we pay directly within TikTok?

The second point cannot be changed for the time being, so we start from the first point and offer free courses to users . Someone always wants free stuff, right? There's nothing to lose anyway. Sure enough, two days after the video was released, more than 1,400 people watched the course and 109 people purchased it, with a purchase conversion rate of 7.8%. Although the conversion rate is still not high, it is at least a good attempt.

In the past two days, we have been discussing some new conversion plans, but since they have not yet been launched, we will not disclose them for the time being.

Now we will enter the question-and-answer session.

1. How to authenticate Blue V for corporate accounts?

Douyin launched the Douyin Enterprise Account on June 1, 2018. If you need enterprise certification, please use a computer to open renzheng.douyin.com for details.

2. What length of video is popular?

First of all, most users only have the permission to post short videos of 15 seconds. When your number of followers reaches 1,000 or you pass the Blue V certification, you can publish 60-second long videos, but use long videos with caution as they may affect the completion rate.

It is recommended to start with a 15s short video.

3. Are there any particular requirements for the time and number of videos released each day?

Let me first talk about the situation of our account. There is one message each at 11:30 and 17:30 every day.

However, we have also conducted tests on publishing videos at 8:00, 20:00, and 22:00, and concluded that there is no significant difference between the video publishing time and the final data, and everything comes back to the video quality itself.

So, how do you explain the legend that "it will become popular if you post it the second time"?

I guess it might be the survivor hypothesis . You may not even have the chance to see those videos that don’t go viral after being posted a second time.

4. Can I buy followers or likes on Taobao?

No! Can! by! If you are discovered by the authorities, the consequences will be disastrous. Don’t ask me how I know this.

5. What is the function of DOU+? Can I eat it?

Simply put, DOU+ is a content marketing tool . As long as you spend money, Douyin will recommend your videos to more people and increase the number of video views.

Please note that DOU+ is only responsible for pushing your videos to more people to watch. As for these people’s completion rate, likes, comments, reposts and other data, the official does not guarantee it! Let me share how much money our account spent on DOU+ and the results it achieved.

"Scallop Daily English" spent nearly 20,000 yuan on testing on DOU+. Why did we dare to spend so much money on this feature at the beginning of its launch? Because I want to seize the early dividends! Worried about the price increase of headlines in the future!

The average cost of increasing followers (investment amount/number of followers) ranges from 0.01 yuan to 16.67 yuan, which is a staggering difference.

I would like to summarize DOU+ in two sentences:

1) If you have spare money, invest it

2) The specific delivery effect depends on the quality of the video content

What? Are we still using DOU+?

Of course not. No money.

Written at the end:

I don’t know how you feel when you read this article. In fact, I have been very stressed out during the months I have been working on Douyin. It is normal for me to check Douyin after get off work, think of ideas, and discuss with colleagues in the group. For the sake of data, it is normal to check Douyin, post Douyin videos, and respond to user interactions on weekends.

For the first time, I felt that being an operator was damn hard. I had never felt so anxious even when I was a content editor. In order to make it less painful for those colleagues who want to use Douyin or are currently using Douyin but have a low number of fans, I have written down my practical experience in operating Douyin for your reference only.

Source: Cheese Cat (ID:nl_cat)