How to operate Wukong Q&A? Share 4 tips!

Last year, Wukong Q&A provided subsidies of 10 billion yuan and signed thousands of answerers in various fields, which quickly increased the popularity of Wukong Q&A. After writing several million-read Q&A articles in a row, the author of this article would like to share with you his experience in operating a Q&A account.

Compared with previous years, the Internet circle in 2018 is more like a song of ice and fire.

At this time last year, Wukong Q&A poached 300 big Vs from Zhihu in a high-profile manner, attracting users' attention to the Q&A platform. Subsequently, Wukong Q&A continued to increase its investment, investing 1 billion in subsidies and signing thousands of answerers in various fields, quickly increasing its brand awareness.

At that time, Zhihu had already established its own moat, most of whose users were high-quality users with high education, high income and high consumption. It is difficult for Wukong Q&A, which has a more down-to-earth user base, to shake Zhihu's position, but there is still a lot of room for it to get a share of the Q&A market.

Judging from the development of ByteDance, its strategy is to cast a multi-line net in the content field and focus on fishing. In addition to the conventional information, Q&A, short videos , etc. that we know, there are also knowledge payment and even self-made variety shows. It is said that there are dozens of internal experimental products. There have been recent reports that ByteDance is going to abandon Wukong Q&A and merge Wukong into Weitao, but ByteDance has denied this.

At the Toutiao Creator Conference at the end of last year, Zhang Yiming said: Toutiao will move from smart recommendations to smart social networking , ushering in a period of fan dividends. Wukong Q&A is also a very important part of Toutiao’s social strategy. As to whether it will be demoted internally, there is no conclusion yet. From the answerer's perspective, the profit sharing from the contract is still continuing and the interactive level of the answers is increasing.

From my personal point of view, the main channel for increasing followers comes from Wukong Q&A, followed by Weitao. Users are quite enthusiastic in discussing some issues on Wukong. This time, I want to talk to you about my experience in operating a Wukong Q&A account.

1. Start with user portraits and analyze the platform’s tone

No matter how small an individual is, he or she has the desire to express himself or herself. The elites need Zhihu, and the general public also needs Wukong Q&A. Unlike the people with "three highs" on Zhihu, most of the users of Wukong Q&A are more down-to-earth, and the total number of overlapping users between the two is less than 50,000, which means that the operating method of Zhihu accounts may not work on Wukong Q&A.

The questions on Wukong Q&A are more life-oriented. For example, the most popular questions on the homepage are mostly "How to make money", "Which female star is more beautiful", etc. Don’t underestimate these seemingly boring questions. You should know that there are hundreds of millions of users paying attention to these daily life issues.

The entry threshold for participating in Wukong Q&A is low. The official will invite ordinary users who are not Toutiao creators to participate in the Q&A, and the answers can reach a large number of customers through Toutiao. It is easier to get likes and comments on Wuguoqia than on Zhihu. Answers with high likes will trigger the next round of large-scale intelligent distribution on Wuguoqia, thereby motivating the answerers to participate in the Q&A.

The official operation mode of Wukong Q&A is incentive-based, using a dual incentive mechanism of invitation + subsidy to mobilize all users to participate in Q&A. In addition, users can participate in answering questions through the question and answer entrance forwarded by the answerer. Both the answerer and the user will obtain question and answer income, which effectively stimulates users to forward and answer questions efficiently.

The concept of big V on Wukong Q&A has weakened, and there is no big V effect. Compared with the answerer, users and platforms are more concerned about the Q&A content itself. Even if a user follows a certain answerer, he will not specifically browse the answerer's questions and answers, but will browse the content of interest on Toutiao or the homepage of Wukong Q&A. The most popular answers on the homepage are mostly from ordinary users.

Under this platform tone, a large number of ordinary users who are not Toutiao authors began to spontaneously become active answerers. They have no fixed approach to Q&A; they just answer questions that interest them, be it economics, emotions, or life. The authors of Toutiao accounts, whose account positioning is down-to-earth, have a natural traffic advantage when operating Wukong Q&A.

So, how do you operate a Wukong Q&A account by targeting a segmented vertical account?

2. There are skills in choosing questions and tricks in answering them.

1. Consistent positioning

Information in the mobile Internet era is fragmented and explosive. Accurate account positioning can help self-media people quickly build a recognizable personal IP.

However, on the Wukong Q&A platform, the most popular questions and answers are those related to life and gossip. This brings up a problem. Many niche fields have no one paying attention, no relevant questions and answers, and no page views, which leads the answerers to go to two extremes:

1. Either they deviate from their own positioning and go with the flow to answer popular questions with high traffic;
2. Either because there is too little traffic in their field, some answerers are in a semi-abandoned state.

Accurate positioning is the advantage of the answerer. Deviating from the positioning to answer high-traffic questions is not only a short-sighted approach of exchanging short-term gains for long-term development, but will also make the answerer lose his or her characteristics and eventually become lost in the crowd. The answerer can only produce high-quality questions and answers in the field in which he is proficient.

However, after operating for a period of time, you will find that questions in various fields begin to increase, and with the help of Toutiao's huge traffic, any question and answer can reach the target audience of interest.

The official data from Wuguoqia also shows that answerers who focus on one field gain followers faster.

2. Tips for answering questions

In the "Answer Tips" on the Wukong Q&A homepage, a few key points are briefly introduced:

1. Regarding the Q&A content, answer high-quality questions, do not answer meaningless, malicious, or outdated questions, insist on originality, and avoid plagiarism;
2. In terms of account personality, create personal characteristics, introduce yourself in one sentence at the beginning or end of the answer, deepen the reader's impression, and get closer to the reader with a personalized tone;
3. In terms of Q&A interaction, guide users to follow the account at the beginning, guide readers to leave messages and comments at the end, and reply to readers seriously;
4. Strictly prohibited behaviors include plagiarism, rewriting, adding QR codes, vulgar content, malicious abusive content and marketing advertisements; answers irrelevant to the question will not be read; pictures should be relevant to the content, and meaningless pictures should be reduced; the same answer should not be used for multiple questions; Toutiao article content should not be used to answer questions.

How to make Q&A in a niche field reach millions of views?

With such a huge amount of data on Toutiao, how can the answerer’s questions and answers stand out?

The key method is to choose questions with a high reading volume to answer.

The trick is to seize the three major traffic entrances and tap into hot spots. Mastering these four tips will allow you to get millions of traffic even if you are not a contracted answerer:

The three major traffic entrances are:

1. Toutiao’s Q&A channel;
2. Popular sections on the Wukong Q&A homepage;
3. The Q&A homepage of Wukong Q&A in the background of Toutiao account.

The questions and answers that appear in these three places are the most read, most popular, and most concerned by users. Answerers in niche fields can find questions related to their own fields through these three entrances, and gain more readings than usual.

It doesn’t matter if you can’t find relevant questions. On the homepage of Wuguoqia, click on the section you are good at, such as: technology, entertainment, finance, and the questions that appear are also arranged according to popularity and attention.

The prerequisite for discovering hot spots is to be quick, because hot spots have a time limit, and after they expire, the attention will also decrease. Generally, when a hot event occurs on a social network , related questions will appear on Wuguoqia. The answerer can then go to the homepage or search for keywords to find the question and give a relatively complete and high-quality answer as soon as possible, which will attract a lot of reads and likes.

Answerers who are experts in their field can also try to bring up hot topics and ask questions in their own field, and answer them, leveraging hot traffic to achieve communication effects.

The classification of Wukong Q&A is very detailed, covering areas such as animation, collection, health, etc. It even has a section on agriculture, rural areas and farmers, and has signed contracts with a total of 39 answerers in the field of agriculture, rural areas and farmers, accounting for 1/50 of all signed answerers.

In the words of Toutiao Vice President Zhao Tian:

“Here, you can find entrepreneurs, wealthy people, celebrities and scholars, as well as water and electricity meter readers, bricklayers and ocean-going sailors. Here, answerers with diverse backgrounds share knowledge and exchange opinions through the platform.”

From here, you can have a more intuitive understanding of the differences between Wukong Q&A and Zhihu.

3. How should respondents in different fields operate specifically?

Wuguoqia has more than 20 sub-fields, and it is difficult to conduct a detailed analysis of each field. Here we list three fields: technology, entertainment, and food for analysis. Technology is a field with operational experience , while entertainment and food are the fields that are closest to the general public, with a large number of followers and good fan-increasing effects. No matter which platform or field you choose, the core of content entrepreneurship lies in persistence, output, operation and learning.

1. Technology

Take technology accounts as an example: the readership of niche technology accounts cannot certainly be compared with that of lifestyle accounts. At the worst times, the readership is only in the single digits. After a period of operation, the number of questions answered increased and the number of readings maintained a long-term growth. The questions that were answered before are still being browsed and commented on by users.

To increase the amount of reading, we need to focus on popular issues. The technology account I operate had over 10,000 readers for the first time. It answered questions that were broadly related to technology but were also of interest to ordinary users, such as: analysis of newly launched mobile phones, analysis of BAT 's products , recommendations for useful mini-programs , recommendations for useful apps, and minesweeping for Internet financial products, etc.

The first time the number of readings exceeded one million was a hot topic in the general technology category, such as: Will Bullet Messenger shake the WeChat social chain, and will Douyin threaten WeChat and Weibo. Feng Timo’s accounting scandal, Chen Yifa incident, Didi’s problems, JD’s love story, etc.

Afterwards, the account was operated according to the three major traffic entrances and hot spot mining methods. Currently, the account fans and revenue maintain a steady growth.

2. Entertainment Account

Entertainment accounts are easier to operate because they are popular. Generally, entertainment accounts will have a highly recognizable name, such as: Play Entertainment, Entertainment Gossip, Entertainment Class Representative, Entertainment Big Shots Talking about Entertainment, etc. You can see them under various celebrity gossip and movie analysis questions.

Make good use of entertainment accounts to narrow the distance between you and your readers. Don’t use cold and formulaic language. Try to use a more personal and emotional writing style to deepen your own recognition and let readers feel that this account also has emotions. The answerer, like the readers, likes certain stars, likes certain movies, and has his own unique insights.

3. Food and cooking

Wukong Q&A is connected to Toutiao, which has users from all over the world. Answerers can choose to answer local food questions based on their location and include the place name in their account name to deepen the reader's impression. Wukong Q&A will also add labels to answerers based on how they answer questions. For example, the food account called "Big Mouth Eats All Over the World" has its official label "Food Q&A Expert".

If the answerer is positioned as a local food account, then giving priority to answering local food questions and answers will be more convincing to readers and gain accurate fans. For food accounts with a nationwide coverage, there are not too many taboos, but producing high-quality content is still a major prerequisite.

To summarize the experience of operating accounts in different fields: analyze user portraits, grasp the platform's tone, follow hot topics quickly, have high recognition, have clear positioning, have self-consistent views, have warm texts, choose topics that are popular, and most importantly, persist.

4. The smoke of war on the Q&A platform

Domestic question-and-answer platforms have a long history. Sina iAsk, Baidu Knows, and Tencent Soso Q&A are all early question-and-answer products. There is still a blank in the field of professional Q&A platform. The rise of Zhihu has redefined the Q&A platform.

The emergence of Fenda, a paid voice Q&A platform, has allowed the industry to see the feasibility of monetizing Q&A, and has also marked the beginning of major giants entering the Q&A market. Baidu's Baidu Pie, Alibaba 's UC Ask, Tencent's Penguin Q&A, NetEase's Q&A, Weibo Q&A, Wukong Q&A and WiFi Master Key's Sesame Q&A all appeared one after another.

After a year of industry reshuffle, these products have gradually widened the gap. Some people left, some people entered, Baidu Pai was shut down, and Sesame Q&A just went online. Penguin Q&A relies on two major traffic pools, Tiantian Express and Tencent News , and its subsequent development still needs time to verify. The one-yuan viewing method of Weibo Q&A is novel. Wang Sicong collected 80,000 yuan in viewing fees with just a four-word answer.

As users' payment habits are gradually formed, coupled with the strong payment awareness of the Internet-native Generation Z, in an era of information overload, users are eager to quickly acquire effective knowledge. The future of the Q&A market is promising, and "if you have a problem, go to a Q&A platform to find a solution" will become the norm.

As the Matthew effect intensifies, Zhihu's leading position remains difficult to shake, and Wukong Q&A has also achieved some results by relying on headline traffic, sinking strategy and subsidy stimulation. But the two cannot be careless easily, because in the big knowledge market, their real competitors are not only each other, but also audio platforms with growing user base.

summary

After the industry reshuffle, question-and-answer platforms that took advantage of the boom in knowledge payment have moved from wild growth to stable development. Looking at the rise and fall of question-and-answer platforms, apart from the superficial appearance of traffic and burning money, the core of question-and-answer is content, and only content can attract and retain users. Zhihu, which provides high-quality content, Wuguoqia, which is popular, and Weibo Q&A, which attracts a lot of attention, are all using content to build moats.

Q&A may be a difficult track to make sexy, but with so many strong competitors, it is bound to be restless. Because in this battle for user time, all you gain is luck, and all you lose is a ticket to the next stop of mobile Internet , and no one dares to take this risk.