Taking stock of the "history of the operational war between Tik Tok and Kuaishou"!

How do you evaluate the operation of Douyin ?

This is the work of the elite team from Neihan Duanzi and Toutiao . It gained momentum in a short period of time and formed a situation of two Weibo and one Douyin, which is great.

                               ——This is what the male god, Poxun, whom I worship, said.

So don’t you still want to know Douyin’s operating routines? Below I will discuss the operating strategies of Douyin and Kuaishou at two levels:

① Analyze the operation strategies of Douyin and Kuaishou from information obtained from three channels : Weibo, WeChat , and Baidu News

②The difference in operating styles between Kuaishou and Douyin.

1. How did Tik Tok become popular?

1. Overall rhythm

Tik Tok started with a video forwarded by Yue Yunpeng in March 2017, which triggered a surge in the Baidu Index. Then Tik Tok began to come into the public eye.

Since December 2017, TikTok has entered a stage of full-scale explosion. While launching an intensive marketing rhythm, we continue to introduce creative new features on the app. Among them, the dance machine function launched on December 25th became popular overnight, pushing Tik Tok to the top of the app download list.

The main operating methods of Douyin are as follows:

①Sponsor the current hot variety shows : "The Birth of the Actors", "I Want to Sing with You", "High Energy Youth League", "The Rap of China", " Happy Camp ", "I Am a Singer", "This is Street Dance", "Werewolf Prequel", "Star Detective"...

② A large number of young celebrities : Wu Yifan, Yang Yang, Angelababy, Yuan Shanshan, Dilireba , Chen Weiting, Lu Han , Guan Xiaotong, Lu Han, Zhang Jie, Zhou Dongyu, Chen He, Yi Yang Qianxi, Huang Zitao, Luo Zhixiang, Han Geng, He Jiong ...

③Organized activities : #TikTok Campus New Singer#, #Original Musician#, #LPA Music Award#, and many celebrities jointly sending out red envelopes for Chinese New Year greetings…

④ Release a series of content every week : "Weekly Vitality Chart" and "Weekly Song Selection Chart", counting the top 10 popular videos and songs of the week.

④ Carry out various daily interactive conversations with users.

⑤Hold a forwarding lottery event every 10 days or so.

2. Weibo promotion rhythm

Since December, Douyin has launched intensive marketing and officially surpassed Kuaishou.

Tik Tok’s Weibo marketing strategy is to use various celebrities and influencers to trigger the trend.

Many apps are becoming popular in this way. For example, the mainstream products such as "Rush to the Top", "Millionaire Heroes", "Cheese Superman" and "Millionaire Winner" that became popular at the beginning of this year all came into the public eye by spending money and relying on celebrities.

In the video industry where the demand for "watching" is very strong, celebrity influencers are very suitable.

I analyzed the major nodes that affect the fluctuations of the Weibo Index and the events behind each hot spot.

We also sorted out the corresponding Weibo marketing accounts behind the marketing events that were triggered. (Only the main ones are included)

It can be seen that many big Vs are long-term partners and regular forwarding players. (TikTok is really rich ==)

Take the #TikTokcampusnewsinger# campaign launched on September 18, 2017 as an example, because this was TikTok’s first big-budget battle for fame:

The activity rhythm is once a month, each issue has a different theme, and two different stars will be invited to hype the topic in each issue. There are 4 issues in total, ending on November 25th.

① The first episode started with Ning Huanyu, Erdi, Bai Jugang , stars and big Vs in the music field, and then slowly other stars and big Vs were added, Guigui Wu Yingjie, Ali, Jin Jiuli, Tianyu Media, Ma Li of Happy Twist, etc. continued to ignite. Following closely behind are various small Vs with tens of thousands of followers.

② We also collected a large number of WeChat accounts on WeChat for promotion .

It can be seen that these WeChat accounts are all university accounts or music-related vertical accounts.

Moreover, many accounts posted multiple messages from the beginning to the end .

Here are 39 of them .

Such a large sum of money is like taking over all the schools in the country...

Being able to negotiate so many accounts in such a short period of time...

The Douyin dad who attacks from all sides is really awesome, whether it is execution or financial power...

③At the same time, I used a small account to ask and answer my own questions on Zhihu, but Zhihu did not make any noise.

④There are also various news dissemination cooperation.

Finally, this topic reached 35.178 million views and 470,000 discussions on Weibo.

Personally, I think these data are not very high in absolute terms.

However, this full-network marketing campaign was the peak of Douyin and Weibo hot topics in 2017, and it can also be regarded as Douyin’s famous work .

3. Analysis of news publicity rhythm:

I found the corresponding reasons from the fluctuation nodes of Baidu Index every month. The news dissemination content of Douyin and Kuaishou starting from November 2017 has been sorted out.

After summarizing these, it can be regarded as all the marketing routines of Douyin and Kuaishou...

The news highlighted in yellow is the one with the greatest impact that month.

We can compare the news dissemination content of Douyin and Kuaishou. Although Kuaishou also has its merits, there is still a big gap in the eye-catching degree of the content.

Tik Tok’s event marketing revolves around celebrities, variety shows, IPs and other content. Each title contains enough eye-catching keywords , which are very topical and spreadable.

However, Kuaishou’s communication direction is still focused on the CEO’s industry voice, which is a conventional approach and is not attractive enough.

For example, this news about Kuaishou clearly contains eye-catching words such as Ma Dong, Gao Xiaosong, and Wu Xiaobo , but it has to be given a news broadcast-style title.

Change to "Kuaishou teamed up with Ma Dong and Gao Xiaosong to compete with Luo Zhenyu in the 2018 "Thought New Year's Eve". Who won? 》Is it better? (I am a rookie , just throwing out some ideas, just take a look~)

In the video industry where the demand for "watching" is very strong, Kuaishou's news publicity is not eye-catching enough.

4. Analysis of WeChat communication nodes

I have basically said everything above about major event marketing.

WeChat also uses some marketing accounts to cooperate with the above event marketing, so if you want to break it down, just search for "event keywords + Douyin" listed on my Weibo, and the various communication nodes will be clear at a glance...

See what you can learn. The routines are quite similar, so I won’t go into details.

2. Kuaishou’s Buddhist Operation

1. Overall rhythm

There is a huge gap between Kuaishou and Douyin in terms of operation and content tone. Through a series of well-designed operations, Tik Tok has made rapid progress and gained popularity in a short period of time.

However, Kuaishou does not seem to have any obvious signs of operation, and even says that it leaves the operation to the users. Their team is simply very Buddhist, and it is difficult to find things like event marketing and activity operations .

It really fits what CEO Su Hua said, that there is no star orientation, no popular figures are promoted, and the company acts as an "invisible" hand.

Compared with Douyin, Kuaishou’s operations do not have too many routines. I personally think that the popularity of Kuaishou is a bit like the previous phenomenal apps such as Footprints and Face Meng, which were almost all caused by word-of-mouth communication among users. The entrepreneurs are also grassroots teams.

Kuaishou started to emerge in February 2017:

① Stars : Pan Changjiang, Liu Yan, Wang Zulan...

②Sponsored variety shows : "Qi Pa Conference", "New Year's Eve of Thought", "Tucao Conference", "Birth of a Star", "Running Man", "Sound into the Scene", "Happy Camp"

③Organized events : #Kuaishou’s 500 hometowns#, #Kuaishou takes you to see the world#

④Forward and get movie tickets : Starting from February 2017, Kuaishou used some movie tickets to carry out the "Forward and get movie tickets" activity to activate fans. On average, there are about 2 such activities per month throughout the year.

The reposting effect of some popular movies is quite good, such as "Assassin's Creed", "Resident Evil: The Final Chapter", "La La Land", "Monster Hunt 2", "The Ghost Story", "The Little Namiya General Store", "City of Lights"...

2. Weibo

After looking through each hot topic, I found that Weibo is not a platform for Kuaishou's operations and promotions . There is basically no trace of Kuaishou's operations on Weibo. From a marketing perspective, there is nothing worth dissecting and learning.

①The hot trends on Weibo are basically other events with the keyword "Kuaishou", not this "Kuaishou short video app".

Most of the news related to Kuaishou are negative :

For example, in June 2016, an incident that swept the entire Internet involved an elderly woman with the ID " Foodie Fengjie ", who was suspected to be coerced by her son to film incredible videos of herself eating raw insects, goldfish, light bulbs, smoking with her nose, etc. in order to increase her followers. It makes people speechless.

Kuaishou internet celebrities Yang Qingning and Wang Lele, this pair of internet celebrity "early pregnancy couple " that destroys people's worldview, performed all kinds of bloody battles involving mistresses, cheating, domestic violence, AIDS, etc.

The news on Kuaishou are all about internet celebrities on the platform, such as individual news about Paipaiqi, Saobai, Tianyou and others. Kuaishou itself has very little brand voice .

② In fact, Kuaishou held an event in March #Kuaishou takes you to see the world# , and also embedded advertisements in the Qi Pa Conference: Ma Dong, Xiao Xiao, Yan Rujing, etc. have all shot advertisements.

However, it did not become a big hit because there was no marketing campaign to repost it:

The advertisements inserted by Mark Chao and Xiao Xiao in "The Weird Conference" , such a topical program and star, basically had 0 reposts and 0 interactions .

The video in which Ma Dong and Cai Kangyong jointly promoted the advertisement at the Qi Pa Conference was only forwarded by one large account, and the rest were forwarded by transparent small accounts.

As mentioned above, Kuaishou’s New Year’s Eve event sponsored Zhejiang Satellite TV’s “Thoughts for the New Year”. This powerful New Year’s Eve party hosted by Ma Dong, Gao Xiaosong, Wu Xiaobo and Zhang Shaogang did not form a three-dimensional large-scale dissemination.

The amount of news disseminated is small and the news headlines are not focused . There are basically no results when searching for "Kuaishou Thoughts for New Year's Eve" articles on WeChat. There are basically no results when searching for articles about “Kuaishou Ma Dong” on WeChat.

The other variety shows and activities sponsored by the above companies are not well operated, especially #Kuaishou’s 500 Hometowns# and #Kuaishou Takes You to See the World#, which have a long time span and great content. The marketing has not been fully carried out...

So I feel a little strange, I think Kuaishou’s operation is a bit contradictory.

If it is because of the content and user positioning that users are not active on Weibo and are not the audience of the Qi Pa Conference, then why spend a lot of money to sponsor expensive programs such as the Qi Pa Conference and Thought New Year's Eve?

Since you have sponsored it, why not promote it well? From the perspective of marketing effectiveness, the publicity of an event is more important than the event itself.

Shi Yuzhu said, if you want to advertise, you should either not do it or if you do it, you have to make it as big as possible.

It's like boiling water. When it just gets a little hot, you turn off the fire and the water will never boil. The fire in front was also burned in vain.

Personally, I feel that their marketing positioning is inaccurate and unfocused, and it feels like they are shooting here and there. I will talk about this in detail later.

3. News dissemination routine

See above for a comparison of news dissemination with TikTok.

4. WeChat communication node

The above routines basically cover it.

Conclusion

1. Comparison of the two operating styles:

① The “ social +” era has arrived. Without social interaction, there is no operation.

The biggest advantage of Douyin compared to Kuaishou is its grasp of social media, and Douyin works very hard on UGC .

Wave after wave of activities and events formed a continuous pulse-like dissemination, so it became popular all over the Internet in a very short time. The whole set of operations is fast, accurate, ruthless and steady. Just as Boxun said, they are the operational elites who have come down from Neihan Duanzi and Toutiao and have profound operational experience .

But every coin has two sides. Personally, I think this kind of strong operation also has disadvantages . For example: How can you be sure that the trends you create will always satisfy the ever-changing tastes of the audience? (No one knows)

②Kuaishou’s operating style is more Buddhist , and basically no traces of operation can be seen.

But after various analyses, I feel that Kuaishou’s behavior is confusing. As mentioned above, a lot of money was spent on sponsoring variety shows, but the marketing was not done properly to achieve the desired effect. I feel like I'm being restrained and can't let go.

My guess is that there is confusion about content positioning within Kuaishou now .

Although the outside world has been saying that the two apps have different market positioning, Douyin is targeting the first and second-tier populations, while Kuaishou is surrounding the cities from the countryside. But in fact, the two have overlapping users and are in direct competition.

So even though Kuaishou talks about "decentralized operations", it makes everyone the protagonist. But faced with a strong rival like TikTok, I still panicked.

He reacted instinctively by fighting back, but his move was not fierce enough. Because the goals and positioning are not clear. On the one hand, they were concerned about their original operational positioning, and on the other hand, they were afraid that the enemies behind them would catch up. There is a feeling of being on this shore, looking at the other shore, with neither shore reaching the other end.

2. So what will be the future outcome of Kuaishou and Douyin?

China's urbanization is accelerating, and it won't be long before the Internet genes of small and medium-sized cities and towns fully explode. Users in third- and fourth-tier cities need a platform to speak out, and this is a huge advantage for Kuaishou.

Moreover, there are indeed many beautiful videos from the grassroots on the Kuaishou platform, which make people feel the power of simplicity. Compared to the coolness of Tik Tok, Kuaishou makes me feel very familiar. This primitive life seems to be like the aunts and grandmas in my family.

Therefore, Kuaishou should stabilize its current advantageous position, and further penetrate and optimize on this basis, so as to truly surround the cities from the countryside. Don't focus on your competitors, but on the future.

Based on my current limited investigation, there is still a lot of room for development in Kuaishou’s operations, and the content positioning also needs to be more precisely built.

For example, user atmosphere is Kuaishou’s biggest weakness. There is no lively discussion among users, no sense of proud advocacy for the platform. They all watch the show from the perspective of attracting attention and curiosity. No closed loop of virtuous interaction has been formed.

Some top internet celebrities are often involved in sensational and eye-catching news such as quarrels and fights. These will cause great damage to the brand. It may be that Kuaishou’s non-interventionist operating style has failed to create a beautiful aspiration for them.

So Douyin also realized this point, and its brand slogan is "Record a beautiful life". Through strong guidance, we give users such aspirations, so that they have a sense of honor and belonging. Therefore, Kuaishou needs to speed up the improvement of content tone and operational strategy. This is currently a matter of life and death for Kuaishou.

The era when good wine needs no bush is over, and customers will no longer come to your door on their own initiative. Products and marketing are equally important. The best product may not always win. If you invent a new product but don’t have an effective way to market it, it will be difficult for your product to survive - no matter how good the quality of your product is.

In addition, giants such as Tencent, NetEase Cloud Music , and 360 have also entered the market, and the competition has entered a period of intensive competition. For startups that have already entered the battlefield, there is no time to hesitate. The fast fish eats the slow fish, it all depends on execution. Not only must you fight, you must win. There is no middle ground.

Not only do you have agency over your own life, you also have agency over an important corner of the world.

The author of this article @贤者豆角 is compiled and published by (青瓜传媒). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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