How does "Meipian", which has 80 million users, conduct content operations?

Meipian's slogan is to record the beauty and share the touching moments. It mainly occupies the online social market for middle-aged and elderly users in China. This article will briefly analyze Meipian’s efforts in content operation from three aspects: content direction, content production, and content opening rate.

Meipian APP was launched in 2015. As of now, it has accumulated more than 80 million users, including 40 million on the mini program side. The company has currently received over 100 million yuan in Series B financing led by Mango Cultural and Creative Fund, with participation from Matrix China and Zhen Fund, with a post-investment valuation of 1 billion yuan.

In the eyes of many young people, Meipian is "a special app for sharing beautiful scenery and beautiful articles specially created for parents" - with Meipian in hand, there is no need to worry about posting pictures. Meipian CEO Tang Qi has always emphasized that Meipian has "0 promotion ", but it has firmly occupied the online social market for middle-aged and elderly users in China.

As of the time of writing, according to Kuchuan data: Meipian ranks 23rd among iOS social application apps.

Such impressive results make one wonder: How was it done?

This article will briefly analyze Meipian’s efforts in content operation from three aspects : content direction, content production, and content opening rate .

1. Product Information

Experience environment:

Product Information:

• Product positioning: Mobile picture and text sharing and creation platform, allowing users to post 100 pictures and texts in their circle of friends
• Product slogan: Record the beauty and share the touching moments

2. Content Direction

Huang Youcan mentioned in "The Light of Operation": "The core problem that content operation needs to solve is to build a virtuous cycle around the production and consumption of content, and continuously improve various content-related data , such as: content quantity, content views, content interaction, content dissemination, etc."

If applied to Meipian, Meipian needs to pay attention to the following issues:

1. What are the characteristics of the target user group? What is the demand? (Above 30 years old/write and post pictures to share)
2. What are the basic attributes of content? (Text/Picture/Video)
3. What kind of tonality is needed? (Serious/Literary/Good Times)
4. Where does the content come from? ( UGC / PGC )
5. How is the content organized and presented? (Special topic/recommendation)
6. How to create content that users like more based on what is already available? (Content planning/content selection/attachment to hot events and figures)
7. How can existing content be consumed more easily and more frequently by users? (Content title /how to push good content to users/push frequency/push method)
8. How can content production be sustainable? (Creation incentives/contracted authors/article appreciation dividends)
9. How can I better guide users to interact with my content and even spread it? (Meipian can consider creating some topics)

On this basis, let us analyze Meipian’s content production and management bit by bit.

Target user analysis

Time period: September 2018

The following data are from iResearch:

According to data provided by iResearch APP Index, Meipian’s users are generally older, with users over 30 years old accounting for 57.55% . The difference in gender ratio is not very obvious, and most users come from relatively developed provinces and cities.

Note: It is said that 80% of Meipian’s users are over 30 years old, and Meipian’s CEO also stated that the main users are people over 30 years old. This user portrait determines that Meipian is different from most Internet products on the market - it serves middle-aged and elderly people. Therefore, many contents and designs that young people are accustomed to are difficult to be accepted and promoted by middle-aged and elderly people.

Content Targeting

Targeting this user group, Meipian's content positioning is to provide a picture and text sharing and communication platform for middle-aged and elderly users, encouraging them to publish and post their own photography works, travel diaries and life insights, and to expand the social attributes of the product. Therefore, in terms of basic content attributes, text, pictures, and videos are supported.

The content topic is naturally related to the content positioning. Currently, Meipian’s content mainly covers the following five major contents:

Each topic can be further subdivided. For example, the photography topic can be derived into landscape, portrait, mobile phone photography, urban imaging, documentary photography, animal photography, and flower appreciation.

From the above topics, it can be seen that all content that middle-aged and elderly people are particularly concerned about falls within the topic scope of Meipian. These topics were not designed at the beginning of the launch, but were added and adjusted based on the platform user characteristics and content data analysis .

In addition, the editor will reprocess some of the content topics of Meipian, which are mainly included in "Topics-Recommendations", "Topics-Activities", and "Topics-Official":

• Activities: Plan topics based on festivals, seasons, business collaborations, etc., and encourage users to create. For example: during the National Day, the topic of "National Day 7 Days of Joy" was launched, and after cooperating with Panzi Nürenfang, the topic of "Ancient Style Goddess" was launched.
• Official: After integrating and analyzing UGC content, Meipian officials classify the article content and match it to users. For example: "Highlight Recommendations" section, "1 Million+ Meipian" and so on.

3. Refined content production methods

Content production mainly includes content production sources, content processing, and content organization (topic planning). Based on these three points, let’s take a look at Meipian’s content production mechanism.

1. Content Source

Meipian's content sources are mainly UGC and PGC, which are the two most common methods in content sharing platforms.

(1) UGC (User Generated Content)

UGC is the main source of content for Meipian. As soon as ordinary users open Meipian, they can see user works pushed by the background on the homepage. In order to guide users to produce articles with high-quality content and strong professionalism, Meipian has adopted a very attractive incentive plan - "creation incentive".

The backend placed this event on the homepage to simplify the registration steps. After users click to register, they can "earn income by writing articles every day and create wealth with their talents", and can also view the rankings and bonus income.

Moreover, the "Creation Incentive" plan adopts a competition model of "the more readings, the more income" , taking advantage of the competitive nature of human nature, stimulating users to share more articles and invite more friends to join, which naturally increases the number of content readings and the popularity of the platform. It can be said to kill two birds with one stone.

In addition, in order to guide users to produce high-quality content, Qing Feng, the editor of Meipian’s travel column, even posted a message on the official website, “Teaching you step by step to be selected”, which is truly the conscience of the industry.

Article link: https://www.me ip ian.cn/bcq8x1z

Suggestions for UGC: You can design a user growth system (refer to Tencent products) to stimulate users to create, improve user stickiness, and expand the influence of the product. For example: continuous logging in, posting articles, liking and commenting can earn points for upgrading, and reaching a reading volume of xx million can be exchanged for small gifts, etc.

(2) PGC (User Generated Content)

Meipian co-founder and CEO Tang Qi once expressed his attitude at Nanjing University's campus recruitment presentation:

Meipian wants to be a product that values ​​UGC, making the texts written by users more warm, rather than over-emphasizing the profits brought by the articles.

This shows that Meipian’s attitude towards users is very sincere, but in reality, high-quality content can attract new users , retain users , promote activation, and conversions , and is still the most scarce resource on major social platforms, and the same is true for Meipian.

In order to further promote the production of high-quality content, Meipian launched the "Contracted Author" activity in 2017. For signed authors, they can be exempted from the withdrawal fee of the "reward fee", receive compensation from the official Meipian, and add a V and "contracted author" logo. Moreover, the "Contracted Author" Tab is designed directly on the first-level page, which is very intuitive and reduces the user's operation procedures. Users can sign up to participate just by following the instructions.

Suggestions for PGC:

1. If a certain number of PGCs can be recruited, it is recommended to open multiple vertical official accounts based on the classification of content topics. For example: travel photography experts, overseas travel experts, food sharing bloggers, etc.
2. If big Vs and celebrities who are well-liked by users join Meipian, their influence can bring unexpected good results. (Reference: Douyin invited Wu Yifan to be its spokesperson, Xiaohongshu invited celebrities to share their beauty tips, etc.)

1. Content Processing

Regarding how to organize and present content, Meipian mainly adopts topic classification, secondary processing editing and topic planning.

(1) Thematic classification

Based on the characteristics of the content, the backend editor classified the UGC content. The classified content has been mentioned above, mainly in the "Photography", "Essays", "Travel", "Emotions" and "Life" sections. At the same time, in order to guide users to pay attention to various types of content, Meipian adopts two methods:

① Active recommendation by backend algorithm

As shown in the figure below, you can select your favorite category to enable personalized recommendations. In addition, after using the product for a long time, the background can also deliver content more accurately.

② Guide users to follow manually

In "Homepage-Topics", you can view the following categories (mentioned above) to meet the different needs of users.

(2) Secondary processing

Some articles that are officially considered to be high-quality content will be integrated and recommended by Meipian editors (as shown in the figure below). The purpose is to increase the reading volume of high-quality content, let UGC users know what kind of content is good, and stimulate them to produce better quality articles.

At the same time, the official secondary editing can also bring users a better reading experience. By comparing user-generated content with edited content, we can see that the Meipian editor has distilled a central idea from the original author's article, allowing users who read the article to quickly get the key points of the article and avoid missing out on the information they want.

(3) Special topic planning

Since Meipian’s users are mainly people over 30 years old, in order to cater to their characteristics, the backend editors attach great importance to the annual Army’s Day and Party’s Day. For these foreseeable major holidays or events, operating related content in advance can obtain more views and interactions.

However, Meipian has a characteristic when planning special topics: it almost never follows hot topics unless necessary . The content pushed to me on the homepage is always about peace and tranquility without quarrels. Even if the content ferments and explodes on Weibo, it is difficult to become a hot topic on Meipian. This is certainly related to the characteristics of the user group, but it would be a pity to completely ignore hot topics.

suggestion:

1. You can make special plans for popular phenomena on the Internet (positive energy/red and professional/nostalgia), for example: the commemorative photos of 18-year-olds that were all over the screen a long time ago can evoke everyone's youthful memories.
2. You can plan for native content. For example, judging from the number of followers on a topic, "Traveling in China" under the topic of "Travel" has the highest number of followers, with a total of 790,000 followers. Editors can plan an event called "Beautiful China in My Eyes" for this purpose, or even set it up as a competition to encourage users to create.

4. Content delivery channels

1. Message Push

The general ways to push messages are Push, in-site messages, and EDM. In the process of using Meipian, I found that Meipian mainly uses Push, and the push time has a certain regularity. As shown in the figure below, Push notifications are generally sent during three time periods: 8 a.m., 8 p.m., and around 3 p.m.

We know that the app’s message push should be in line with the user’s living habits. Since many users have not yet retired, push messages should be sent to users during working hours as much as possible. At 8 o'clock in the morning, the user is not at work. At 8 o'clock in the evening, the user has just finished dinner. They have free time and are in the mood to click on the message and continue to check it. As for the push notifications after 3 p.m., maybe it’s to ease the boring working life.

1. Push Channel

(1) For new users

There are two main types of content push for new users: machine algorithm recommendation and popular high-quality content recommendation .

After all, the backend cannot grasp the browsing information and content of interest of new users at this time, so it is easier to retain users by promoting high-quality content first.

As shown in the figure, the number of articles pushed on the homepage is relatively high:

In addition, a "personalized recommendation" (mentioned earlier) will pop up on the homepage shortly after use, and users can click on the label to select the content of their interest. What’s interesting is that as a user, you don’t know when this “personalized recommendation” will pop up, it feels like a surprise.

(2) Retention

In order to retain users, in addition to continuous content production, Meipian also adopts the following methods:

① Recommend users to follow high-quality accounts

② Encourage sharing to other platforms

③ Related reading extension

Since I am not a heavy user of Meipian yet, I am not very sure about the content delivery channel in the future. However, based on other social platforms, after gradually gaining control of user data, Meipian will be more inclined to "caterize to users' tastes", for example: continuously pushing corresponding content based on my search history.

(3) Targeting new customers

Click "The little man in the upper right corner - Invite WeChat friends" to invite new friends to join Meipian. The operation is simple and easy to use. You will learn it after one teaching. In addition, as long as you share Meipian articles to your circle of friends, your friends will see Meipian’s traffic button after clicking it, and they can download it by clicking it.

4. About content opening rate

There are many ways to increase your content open rates. When users use the app, good titles/topics/hot events can attract them to click on it, so the backend content operators should do some topic planning and article integration as appropriate. When users are not using the app, you need to find ways to get them to open the app and increase daily activity.

For example, you can create some eye-catching titles when pushing messages:

1. Complain about famous products/people
2. Subverting the public's perception
3. Hot Topics
4. Light-hearted and humorous entertainment gossip...

If Meipian Mall is still in business, you can emphasize some benefits when pushing the message:

1. Today's special offer: 60 off for purchases over 300
2. If you don't buy it this time, you will have to wait half a year next time.
3. My daughter said, don’t buy discounted products, except this time…

In addition, if the background detects that a user has not opened the Meipian app for a long time, some caring Push messages can be pushed:

• The article posted by your friend xxx is very popular
• When you were not at Meipian, something big happened.
• There are updates to the topics I collected before, why not take a look...

V. Conclusion

I used a mind map to briefly summarize the content operation methods of Meipian app, and found that there are four points in Meipian's content operation that deserve people's attention:

1. Determine content direction based on target audience;
2. Produce refined content based on user needs;
3. Diversification of content push channels/methods;
4. There are many ways to increase content opening rates.

Later, I will further use the Meipian app to observe what methods it will use to retain users when they enter the maturity stage, decline stage and churn stage.

Operational knowledge is profound and operational skills need more practice. Please point out any shortcomings.

Source: Caramel Pan's Energy Station (jiaotangpan)