5 ways to quickly increase your Zhihu followers!

To be honest, I am quite reluctant to share this skill. Although many clever people can gain some fans on Zhihu just by doing it casually based on their feelings, a guide for gaining fans for " big V " that lowers the operation threshold to the "retarded" level is undoubtedly rare and unattainable.

I have made a batch of accounts myself, and most of them completed the cold start in less than a month. The number of fans quickly increased to over 10,000, and some outstanding ones even exceeded 100,000.

Even though he is extremely lazy and has almost never produced any content on Zhihu and only posted articles from public accounts , the account "Xu Ge" has nearly 35,000 fans.

If you also want to build a personal brand and become a V on Zhihu, I believe this article will give you a lot of surprises.

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Before we talk about the specific operations, let’s first sort out the ideas of creating a Zhihu celebrity.

Become a big V - get as many followers (fans) as possible - get as many likes, collections, and thanks (especially likes) as possible - create content that captures the user's psychology, get as much exposure as possible, and guide user behavior .

Once you sort out your thoughts, I believe even a mentally retarded person can see which specific areas to start working on.

Let me lay the groundwork and sort out the traffic distribution logic of Zhihu for everyone.

The traffic distribution logic of any Internet product is hidden in the specific product form and function. Generally speaking, as long as an old hand with a good sense of the Internet has an account, he can flip through the pages one by one and use each function to figure out the logic and context of the product's traffic distribution.

As for Zhihu, although there are many ways to expose its content, the most core ones are only three, namely on-site and off-site search + topic tree + social networking and algorithm recommendation.

Zhihu site search display section

The previous article also explained the on-site and off-site search, which refers to the off-site traffic mainly provided by search engines such as Baidu. The on-site search is the display traffic brought by the Zhihu site search result page. On Zhihu, an appropriate content can often get good traffic both on and off the site.

Secondly, all questions on Zhihu are connected through a topic tree , with big topics containing small topics, which is well organized and makes the massive content structured.

Topic Tree

Even if you start from a very small field, you can dig up and down through the topic tree (view the entire topic structure), and finally the outline of the entire discipline (or industry) will emerge.

Zhihu Topics

This invisibly provides multiple openings for content exposure. For example, "Essence" will display a series of answers under the topic ranked according to the number of likes received. Occupying a position in the rankings under hot topics is of great significance. Many users have the habit of looking for the highest-rated answers, which generates a steady stream of traffic.

The key point to mention is Zhihu’s content distribution method. Unlike WeChat which focuses on social distribution and Toutiao which focuses on machine intelligence algorithms, Zhihu attaches equal importance to social distribution and algorithm recommendation in terms of content.

Zhihu homepage, November 2018

Social distribution is mainly reflected in the fact that the updates (answers, likes, questions, etc.) of subscribed bloggers will appear in the subscribers' information flow . At the same time, users will also receive partial notifications when there are new answers to the questions they follow. The reason why it is partly because there is an anti-harassment strategy intervention here. After all, if there are 1,000 answers to a question and each one is pushed to the subscriber, the notification bar will explode.

The above mechanism means that the more subscribers you have, the more people’s homepage information streams your content will be displayed in, giving you more exposure opportunities. At the same time, answering popular questions will also help you get more exposure.

Social distribution can also produce a social fission effect, because the relationship between subscribers and those who are subscribed is a nested network. When fans like your post, this dynamic will appear in the fan's fan information flow.

Algorithm recommendation is a section that Zhihu has intentionally strengthened in recent years (on the other hand, it means the weakening of the influence of big Vs on users). Whether it is the app or the PC, algorithm recommendation content occupies a separate column, almost on par with social distribution. It is even more favored on the PC, ranking before the "Follow" column.

The platform’s increased intervention in content distribution is mainly to enhance advertising monetization capabilities. The more intervention, the more advertising space there is.

Recommended interface

The content recommended by the algorithm mainly comes from the popular topics (or columns) subscribed by users. The old version had a high threshold and basically had answers with thousands of likes. Now, content with hundreds or even dozens of likes has the opportunity to enter the user's homepage recommended information flow.

There is no need to think twice about grabbing traffic from algorithm recommendations. Generally speaking, once you grab the traffic from social distribution, recommendations will come naturally.

After finishing the above preparation, you can directly point out the skills of creating hot answers——

Popular Question Examples

1. Try to answer popular questions under hot topics. The reason is simple. Each topic corresponds to a corresponding group of people. The popular questions under hot topics not only have a large instant traffic, but the traffic brought by "digging up the past" in the future will also be considerable.

It should be noted here that popular questions often also mean fierce competition. One trick is to quickly browse the existing answers to see if there are any desperate answers (those with detailed content and an explosion of likes that make people despair). Although many hot questions have high attention, the quality of the replies below is questionable. If you put in some more thoughtful content, it can stand out. Such hot questions are fertile ground worth focusing on.

Of course, if you think you are strong enough and your content is powerful enough, you can just go straight to the most popular questions and address them head on.

p.s. Zhihu has released a special hot list, and many third-party tools also have Zhihu’s hot spot analysis, so it is not difficult to capture hot spots.

2. If your industry does not have much content on Zhihu, but industry-related keywords have a good index on the search engine, you can use another account (or even no other account), create questions based on existing popular questions, and ask and answer them yourself.

For example, "How to write a hot article on WeChat official account ?" has become a popular question. If you are working on headlines, you can ask a question called "How to create a hot article on headlines?"

When asking questions, remember to grasp the key words and avoid being vague.

You can ask the question first and wait for a while, then other people will come and answer it to serve as supporting roles for you. Generally speaking, a third party's casual answer cannot outperform your long-planned answer.

3. There are too many things to consider when writing content, so here we only emphasize these points: make it as long as possible, include both text and pictures, be beautifully organized, and be well-organized.

Zhihu has long passed the era where you could gain followers by making a witty remark in just a sentence of a dozen words (fewer words would be folded). The more words you code, the more impressive it looks and the more advantages you have.

Being longer is not necessarily better, but it reflects an attitude, and the "friends" who are searching hard for the truth on the question-and-answer platform really like it.

4. Guide people to like

Example of guiding likes

Isn’t the purpose of writing so much to entice readers to give you a like? Just say it directly.

At key points, you can be clever and make some witty remarks to ask for rewards, and you will get twice the result with half the effort.

"Everyone who liked this comment, if a man's penis grows an inch, a woman's breasts will grow by one cup size~"

" The information is so shocking, please give a thumbs up before watching to prevent loss"

…

As for attracting likes, as long as your content is acceptable and your wording is appropriate, Zhihu will not delete your posts at the moment. If you don’t believe it, you can try reporting a few.

As for increasing likes and followers, manual increase is too expensive, and machine increase is easy to be blocked, but mutual aid groups are feasible...

5. Hot sale diversion

No matter how unlucky a person is, as long as he perseveres, he will be able to produce some hit products. At this time, he must not miss the well he has already dug. You can attach relevant (or even irrelevant) previous answers or columns at the end of the article, using a similar approach to the related readings at the end of WeChat public accounts.

Another area where you can do something is with the questions themselves. If you answer a few more questions, your account will have editing permissions. At this time, you can link unpopular questions with popular questions. For example, many mirror questions are related to each other.

High salt value can really do whatever you want

It can be said that through editing permissions (you can play with it carefully yourself, there are many ways to play), you can even define an industry, not to mention making a niche topic become a hot topic.

Thinking divergently, Zhihu accounts can directly lead small accounts, and can also form groups and alliances, especially high-authority accounts, which are more powerful.

Source: Xu Ge