The popular model commonly used in NetEase H5!

Good ideas are not impossible to replicate. This article summarizes the underlying model and rules of popular activities, and further introduces how to operate activities .

Every new media editor has a dream of 100,000+ readers, and every event operator has a dream of sweeping the screen. As the saying goes, no one cares about you if you do odd jobs for ten years, but you will become famous all over the world after one success.

Many operators believe that screen-sweeping is largely a matter of luck and is generally difficult to replicate. Deep Selection, an operator who has produced screen-sweeping content many times, believes that good ideas can be copied.

I agree with this. Although each hit product looks different on the surface, there are still similar underlying rules to follow. This is enough to explain why there must be followers behind the successful event leaders.

The underlying logic of screen swiping is social fission - users promote sharing, which is also (one of) the lowest-cost ways of growth at present. That is, through activities, old customers can share on their own WeChat (monthly active 1 billion) social channels , and through the contact of friend relationship chains, the dissemination, acquisition, retention and conversion in the WeChat ecosystem can be achieved.

There are many methodologies on the Internet for planning activities to promote sharing. The common conclusion is that the tipping point comes from the mobilization of various human desires (the "seven deadly sins" of human nature), but this is too general, and having only one tipping point is not enough.

The purpose of writing this article is to try to summarize a more specific underlying model/rule of popular activities. Some typical viral activity case observations will be interspersed in the text to support the point of view.

At the same time, because the underlying rules can be deduced and summarized in many ways, this article only provides one of many ideas, and we welcome thinking and discussion from more dimensions.

1. Underlying Model

Professor Xu Zhibin, a researcher in the field of social dividends, once proposed the concept of "viral spread index" and provided a formula for it: the ratio of user benefits to user expenditure costs, also called "user cost-benefit account" or "user input-output ratio". The greater the benefits and the lower the costs, the easier it is for a company's products or activities to spread virally and grow explosively, thereby fully profiting from social dividends.

Viral diffusion index = user revenue / user expenditure cost

The decomposition of costs and benefits to users yields the following:

The cost mainly refers to the cost of participating in activities, including time cost, understanding cost, thinking cost, trust cost, etc. This can be understood as the principle of simplicity. The human mind naturally resists complex information and tends to prefer simplicity.

In addition to the income from real money, the income also includes social currency between people.

The concept of social currency comes from the book "Contagious: Let Your Products, Ideas, and Behaviors Go Viral". In layman's terms, it refers to the attention and recognition from others in the social relationship chain. We enjoy consuming our knowledge reserves and publishing content (original or forwarded), which in turn earns us social currency. However, publishing meaningless content such as micro-business and purchasing agents is consuming our own social currency. Jonah Berger classifies human social behaviors into five categories: finding topics to talk about, expressing ideas, helping others, displaying image, and social comparison.

Therefore, if the content and activities created by an enterprise can satisfy these five social psychology of users, they will be happy to spread them.

Compare this to activities aimed at social fission:

User expenditure cost = time cost + understanding cost + thinking cost + trust cost

User benefits = cash and actual benefits + image building + showing off achievements + finding topics to talk about + helping others

(Note: The essence of social comparison is the psychology of showing off, so I classify it as showing off achievements; expressing ideas and finding topics to talk about are similar in meaning, so I classify them as one)

Therefore, what planners of H5 activities need to do is to reduce the user's participation cost as much as possible and increase the user's expected benefits. The more benefits there are, the stronger the desire to forward, and the higher the probability of successful screen-sweeping .

1.1 Reduce participation costs

Time cost : The time to participate in the activity from beginning to end should not be too long, so as to avoid users losing patience; multiple traders have said that the more H5 screens there are, the higher the user churn rate will be, because there will be churn at each level; it is best to control it within 3 pages, and no more than 10 screens at most.

Consider the cost : The gameplay should be simple and easy to get started. Remember that users are lazy. Don’t over-pursue creativity and special effects to make the activity complicated, or design a bunch of up, down, left, right, or button clicks. If the path is deep, you need to give guidance in product design, or simply adopt the form of sliding. For example, NetEase Dada took advantage of the popular film and television drama to produce an H5 test "Unlock Your Ode to Joy Personality", which adopted a design of sliding the page to the bottom. It does not require any learning cost and has become a super hit with 31 million views.

Cost of understanding : The content should be straightforward and easy to understand. If there are industry-specific terms in the copy (such as "Jungian psychology test"), explanations should be given to avoid obscurity; if it is a test question, the difficulty of the question should be controlled. If the gameplay of an activity is innovative, it may cause difficulty in understanding, so put the activity into a scenario. For example, "NetEase Drama Queen Julia" uses the character of an intern to bring users into the daily workplace, causing emotional resonance and thus becoming popular.

Trust cost : For a credible event, the rules of the event should be as transparent as possible. If it is a charity event, it is necessary to provide an introduction or certificate from a third-party charity organization, explain the destination of the raised funds, and provide a traceable path; the endorsement of a well-known brand (if it is a partner) can increase user trust.

Participation cost : For interactive and game- based activities, clever gameplay design should be used to make users feel more involved, but the participation threshold should not be too high. Some activities hope that users can generate personalized things by using UGC nicknames, comments or photos, but photos may not be ready-made, so some templates should be provided.

1.2 Improving expected returns

1.2.1 Cash and actual benefits

Activity design from the perspective of interests should not be one-sided profit, but mutual benefit. The hugely successful Didi red envelopes, takeout red envelopes, Luckin free cups, etc. all work on the same principle. Both the sharer and the friends who see the share can get discounts, and the sharer will not be "blacklisted."

However, these red envelopes and coupons are based on rigid or high-frequency demand, and it is difficult for other products to reuse them. Moreover, even Didi’s red envelopes cost a lot of money, and their effect is now fading after a brief boom.

So how do you conduct profit-making activities?

The value that purely profit-oriented activities bring to users is too low. Purely material incentives no longer bind users and need to be accompanied by appropriate values .

The following figure shows the activities divided into categories:

The "NetEase Xijing Class" that went viral before was a popular way of paying for knowledge because of its profit sharing. However, multi-level distribution has begun to be monitored by WeChat, and it is difficult to make a splash again. It is worth exploring more new ways of playing.

Lian Coffee is a "cafe in your pocket". You can earn income when your friends place orders in your store. This creative form provides a good reference for e-commerce products and is no longer restricted by the ideas of WeChat business, purchasing agents, and group buying.

1.2.2 Image building

The starting point of image shaping is to create an ideal persona for yourself, or a positive impression in the eyes of others, or to show off your own personality and preferences to attract attention from similar people. This type of event planning is usually implemented in the form of testing (XX test, XX signature), knowledge (XX industry report, practical information ), and public welfare activities.

The following figure shows the test activities:

Testing activities have become commonplace in WeChat Moments , such as NetEase DaDa's "My Philosophical Temperament", NetEase Cloud Music's "Personality Test" in collaboration with Identity V, NetEase Cloud Music's "User Manual", and Amazon Prime's "Everyone is a Wonderful Book" that dominated the screen on World Book Day ...

On the one hand, they are popular because the public is highly aware of testing as a form of gameplay, and their instinctive curiosity about the results stimulates participation; on the other hand, the customization and personalization of test results allow participants to form a deep sense of identity, expressing to their friends "what kind of person I am" on their own behalf, so sharing becomes reasonable.

Of course, there are many test H5s, why are these the only activities that are flooding the screen? For example, Himalaya has previously conducted a "curiosity test", and NetEase Yanxuan and Beike have conducted a "gregariousness index" test, but they were only circulated in a small range.

Either it does not comply with the first item of the underlying model and the cost of user participation is too high, resulting in users leaving before the test is completed; or the test theme lacks creativity, and the test results (reflected in the copy) do not help participants "shape their image". The copy is incomprehensible, out of touch with reality, and may even be an adjective that detracts points (the sociability index is higher than 16%, just think about it). Why would users forward it?

Ultimately, the difficulty of testing activities lies in the content. From the questions to the test results, they must be convincing, which especially tests professional knowledge and writing skills. The former can collaborate with external professionals and research experts, or seek inspiration from real-world theories and obtain theoretical endorsement, while the latter relies more on the personal abilities of the planner.

Let’s look at NetEase’s “Philosophical Temperament” test, which has 10 test questions and 27 options, matching dozens of different adjectives and isms. Assuming there are 30 words in total, there are as many as C (30, 3) = 4060 combinations, and they are all positive and fancy compliments, which shows the investment in content. However, this test has one shortcoming. Some options have obvious directionality, so you will see that even with thousands of combinations, the probability of repetition of test results shared by friends in the circle of friends is still quite high.

The following figure shows knowledge activities:

Xin Shi Xiang's "Book Throwing Campaign" dropped 20,000 books on subways in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, awakening young urban people's enthusiasm for reading, an ancient way of learning. By sharing the content of the event, they flaunted their "literary youth" persona and sought recognition, understanding and a sense of belonging.

Dedao spent 100,000 yuan to buy Ma Boyong's new work "Ming Dynasty Under the Microscope" and gave it to its "close users" for free, asking users to help share a promotional poster called "Zhang Yi Zheng" with their WeChat friends, which is completely in line with users' psychological expectations of the positive personality of "love to learn" and " Luoji Siwei fan".

The event also affirmed and enhanced the brand value of the company, not just staying on the surface of the screen-sweeping effect. The user growth and product conversion data after the screen-sweeping effect were both good.

1.2.3 Show off your achievements

It is usually based on user comparison and competition, and seeks a sense of superiority through showing off. This type of social demand is usually implemented through games and inventory activities.

The following figure shows the game activities:

The natural fun of the game can increase the user's sense of involvement, and stimulate the user's desire to share through game elements such as achievements, scores, friend PK, and rankings . It is best to include the avatar of the person forwarding the message to make it more realistic and personalized.

The " Alipay Five Blessings" campaign during the Spring Festival of 2016-2017 took advantage of the scarcity of the "Diligence Blessing" and seized the human instinct to show off, triggering a nationwide campaign to show off their cards and share and give away cards among friends.

The " Honor of Kings Group Ranking" applet produced by WeChat Games directly pulls out an intuitive strength ranking, prompting players to forward it to WeChat groups to show off their own or spy on others' achievements, successfully attracting a wave of traffic to the game.

However, there is a drawback to gaming activities. After users enter the gaming scene, they pay more attention to the fun and gaming experience and easily ignore the brand and product. How to organically combine the target to be promoted with the activities is a challenge.

The following figure shows the inventory activities:

"Alipay Annual Bill", Alipay will generate an annual bill for users at the end of the year, including the total consumption and distribution of the year, etc., as well as rankings and keywords , becoming a type of content for comparison or self-deprecation.

Of course, this kind of inventory needs to be based on a massive number of users and data. Otherwise, it lacks credibility and is prone to self-satisfaction as well as disputes and complaints about data security.

If there is really no data basis, there can also be an annual inventory of a marketing nature, such as "NetEase Entertainment Circle Pictorial" and "Baidu Boiling Point List".

1.2.4 Finding topics to talk about (starting a conversation)

Different from sharing test results to show yourself, this type of activity is more personalized because it usually requires users to generate something personalized themselves, with their own work results in it, allowing this article or picture to convey a point of view or a voice on their behalf.

It is also about sharing content to trigger social topics and maintain connections with others.

The following figure shows the creative activities:

The 2018 Spring Festival "Wang Nian Family Portrait" is a creative brain-opening activity that includes users participating in the generation of DIY works, which can reflect the participants' ideas and stories about family concepts and easily trigger likes and comments from friends; "New World Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou " is an online + offline communication and creation activity that requires participants to make an "escape" (travel) decision within 4 hours. Of course, although many people did not really take action, forwarding also demonstrated an attitude and won resonance and interaction from friends.

1.2.5 Helping Others

The following figure shows charity activities:

Love is the warm side of human nature, and showing love is also necessary to enhance one's image. Charity activities have room to exist, especially with the endorsement of large companies, and the effect is generally good. Tencent Charity's "Children's Gallery" aims to allow users to help special groups by "buying paintings for 1 yuan", and it was all over the WeChat Moments on the day it went online.

The reasons are, firstly, the cost of participation is very low, and everyone can do charity; secondly, it uses the form of selling works, which includes appreciation and affirmation of the works, rather than pity and charity, giving new colors to charity; the most important point is that it protects the privacy (photos, names) of the people being helped, which is neglected by many charity activities.

2. Three Elements of Screen Sweeping

In addition to the above formula, there are three non-core elements to help increase the success rate of screen swiping.

2.1 Creativity

Attracting activities requires constant creativity. Creativity is not just about the theme, but also about the gameplay, such as the instant feedback of distribution income introduced by paid knowledge courses. However, creativity cannot be self-satisfied. It can be tested on a small scale before being fully released online.

Test scope: employees, core user groups, targeted push.

2.2 Technology

2.2.1 Reduce production costs

In recent years, H5 marketing has seen more innovative technical expressions and added a lot of cool interactive gameplay. However, it cannot be ignored that behind an H5, a lot of technical and design work is often required, and the cost is relatively high.

At this time, you can think more about how to reuse a set of activity templates in various ways (such as N tests of NetEase)?

Reduce unnecessary fancy animations and interactions, and focus on content creativity rather than form? Is it possible to directly reuse third-party marketing tools to create an activity that can attract users at a low cost?

2.2.2 Prevent blocking and make contingency plans

Many veterans of the fission business say, “Every time I do growth, the biggest fear is not that the activity fails to fission, but the policy risks of WeChat (such as account suspension, fan removal, domain name blocking, etc.)”

The daily sharing threshold of WeChat Moments is about 1 million times (data from the omnipotent uncle). After exceeding this, the shares will become visible only to yourself.

When planning for this, you need to consider the contingency plan after being banned by WeChat.

For example, is it possible to develop a system on your own and equip it with multiple domain name switches to prevent being blocked? If there is an order process in the activity, how can we ensure that the user experience and service are not affected so as to avoid negative feedback and complaints?

2.2.3 Guide sharing

Generally, a sharing button is designed at the end of H5. After the user clicks it, a mask pops up to inform the user that they can share by clicking the upper right corner.

Of course, today’s fission activities have expanded into other forms, such as official account posters and mini-programs. Every link in the mini-programs can guide users to share, and posters even directly make sharing a prerequisite for participating in the activity.

Of course, in order to increase the sharing rate, necessary interests or human inducements are still necessary. We cannot simply rely on the user's self-consciousness. This involves how operators design sharing copy and activity links.

2.3 Channels

2.3.1 Find cold start groups and reach them accurately

In the context of circle solidification, the cold start of an activity must accurately identify super nodes among target users . This includes both well-known KOLs among them and “connectors” similar to those in the book “The Tipping Point,” that is, key figures who can cover a large number of “insiders.” You can spend money to invest in these users, or you can exchange them for free resources. It would be best if they are the seed or core users of your product.

For example, the NetEase Drama Screen-sweeping Course promoted by the Operations Deep Selection Team chose the WeChat group of operators who had previously sold courses for cold start. The objects of their friend circles and WeChat groups are all precise operations colleagues.

For example, Xin Shi Xiang’s “Book Throwing Campaign” has found more than 100 “co-actors”, including well-known entrepreneurs, cultural figures, as well as famous actors and directors. In short, by grasping these super nodes and key figures, the channel problem will be basically solved.

2.3.2 Control the rhythm of communication and intensively trigger it

Try to publish and guide the forwarding of activities in a concentrated time period to ensure the "dissemination density" of each user's circle of friends. If there is competitive gameplay data, create a sense of "everyone is participating" and urgency of competition by publicizing real-time data, rankings, etc.

3. Operation

Operation actually runs through the entire process of the event, and plays a key role after the event is launched.

3.1 Data observation and process optimization

Although the industry likes to use "whether it is screen-sweeping" or whether it exceeds the WeChat sharing threshold to evaluate the success of an event. But what I want to say here is that swiping the screen is not the goal, and detonating is not the end. What is more important is how to further operate the conversion through monitoring data. It cannot just be an explosion. The operator is responsible for the conversion.

This conversion may be to guide customers to download an app, follow a WeChat public account , or convert orders (for example, Amazon's "Everyone is a Wonderful Book" provides an entry to purchase Prime membership when generating posters). Pay attention to monitoring data from different channels through embedding points.

Growth hackers are well versed in the AARRR model , which means they need to focus on the entire process of customer acquisition, activation, retention, monetization, and viral spread. What is the conversion rate of each link? How to improve new user retention ?

Do a good job in attracting new users, inform them of what kind of product this is, and provide onboarding guidance and exclusive benefits.

3.2 Review

Review is a comprehensive review of the activity process, an acceptance of the activity results, and feedback on the work results of team members. It includes the achievement of activity goals, other visible effects, experience gained during the activity, shortcomings, reasons, and subsequent optimization plans.

If you think one step further, you can consider whether it is possible to achieve secondary dissemination of the activity content based on the review and give play to the long-tail effect of the activity. For example, Alipay’s koi marketing this time. After the koi appeared, it still relied on a wave of gift lists and the creation of memes about the koi itself to create topics and voice on the social platform.

One screen-sweeping event after another has made NetEase's image as a "hit-making machine" deeply rooted in people's hearts. However, for most companies that do not have the cost investment and strategic-level support of NetEase's dedicated team and that strictly consider ROI for each event, it may be much more difficult to replicate NetEase's success.

Whether it is the above underlying model or the method routine, these factors determine whether an activity can be disseminated on a large scale. However, for planners, if they want to achieve the ultimate goal of conversion, they also need to closely match the product positioning and user portrait . That is, starting from the characteristics and needs of potential users of the product, think about how to use activities to attract new users and convert them into old users. Otherwise, it will be futile to be excited about swiping the screen and unable to escape the pit of "conversion".

Source: Liao Liao Dimension