Remember these rules, and you can get users to voluntarily help you promote like a snowball without spending a penny.

In this era where mobile phone addiction is rampant and mobile Internet is becoming more and more popular, self-media is a good choice.

Especially Toutiao accounts : their communication power is obviously stronger than other self-media platforms such as official accounts that need to accumulate fans first. Even with 0 budget and 0 fan base, articles can reach target users . They are especially suitable for promoting projects in the start-up stage that lack funds and budget.

Due to space constraints, last week we only gave a brief introduction to the content distribution features of Toutiao. This week we will focus on:

1. How to write articles that are more easily recognized by the Toutiao system, which will help you promote them to more users like a snowball for free;
2. How to write articles that are more easily recognized by Toutiao users, so that they can voluntarily help you forward them to N platforms accessible by Toutiao to achieve better advertising benefits.

We have previously introduced that if you want to take advantage of Toutiao’s large traffic , you must first obtain Toutiao’s approval, that is, the articles you publish must be marked as “recommended” by Toutiao. Articles that are not recommended are not included in Toutiao’s content recommendation mechanism, which means you have failed at the first hurdle.

So, what kind of articles are likely to be marked as “recommended”? Ultimately, the content must be interesting. You have to make the headline robot feel:

This is a piece of content that must be widely disseminated - for example, time-sensitive or popular content;
This is content with specific target readers - with specific tags, such as entertainment gossip, horoscopes and emotions, mother and baby care, financial management , etc.
The content is not purely clickbait , repeatedly published, or widely plagiarized.

It is important to note that headlines should not only contain news, but also information.

What is information?

Baidu's definition is: information that users can obtain and utilize in a timely manner, which can bring them value in a relatively short period of time and is timely and regional. The most common ones are notices about power/water outages, daily life, discounts, exams, and recruitment . These are time-sensitive and regional, and need to be widely disseminated so that local people know about them.

The definition of information on the Toutiao platform is broader: as long as a considerable number of users are interested in the information or it is useful to users, it may be considered as valuable information by Toutiao and then recommended to relevant users.

For example, if a university wants to release a college entrance examination brochure through Toutiao, if it is released in January, there is a high chance that this article with the promotional brochure will not be recommended, because users' attention to the college entrance examination is relatively low at that time, and the brochure will be considered as useless information and not recommended.

However, if he posted a graduate student admissions brochure, it would most likely be recommended and widely circulated, because January itself is the month that focuses on graduate student admissions - so, if a considerable number of users are interested and the content itself caters to user interests, it will be recommended by the headlines (Note: this idea of ​​catering to interested users also applies to information flow advertising , and I will have the opportunity to write about it and share it later).

1. The higher the quality of the content, the easier it is to be promoted in large quantities.

It should be noted that the quality mentioned here is not the quality we usually refer to. Toutiao’s quality judgment criteria are completely user-oriented. Contents that users like to click on, are willing to read on, and finish are of good quality.

When your content is marked as "recommended" by Toutiao, the system will start the first round of content quality testing. If the reading rate is high and the reading completion rate is high, it will be considered to have passed the quality test and formal promotion will begin.

Focus on explaining 3 issues:

What is a good reading rate?

The reading rate of Toutiao articles can be synonymously replaced by the click-through rate of advertisements when information flow advertisements are delivered.

Please note: the number of article readings counted by Toutiao backend is the sum of the number of readings inside and outside the site, but the reading rate used as a reference for promotion is only calculated based on the number of readings within the site.

For example, for the article below, the number of users who recommended it to the platform is 98,000, and the total number of readings is 43,000. In the background, we can see that the number of readings from within the site is 11,000, which means that the reading rate is 11%.

There is no doubt that a reading rate of 11% is already excellent, and it is worth it for Toutiao Robot to spend a lot of effort to help you promote it for free .

You must be wondering, what reading rate is enough to convince the Toutiao robot to launch large-scale promotion for you? The answer is inconclusive.
For some niche content, or when there is a lot of content with similar topics on the platform at the same time and there are many interested users, a reading rate of 2-5% can convince the robot to help you promote it. For some popular content with fewer users, a reading rate of 15% or even higher may be required to gain the recognition of the robot and push it for free.

In a nutshell, if you are in the Toutiao platform, you must create content based on similar Toutiao accounts and the interests of target users in order to obtain considerable reading volume and thus achieve better promotion.

What is reading completion rate?

Simply put, it refers to how much of an article a user can read after clicking on it.
Different from reading rate, Toutiao calculates reading completion rate based on the reading completion status of all readers (including those on and off the site).

Assuming that for a 4,000-word article with both text and pictures, 35% of users can read more than 80%, 45% of users can read about 65%, and 20% of users enter the article and exit after reading less than 20% of the article. The average browsing length is about 65%. In this case, the recommendation strength of this article will basically not be ideal, and the promotion speed can only be mediocre.

But if it is like the picture below, the average reading progress can be close to 96%, that is to say, the readers have basically read it all. Toutiao will think that the quality of this article is very good and very popular. Since it is popular, it will be promoted vigorously!

How to control bounce rate?

The bounce rate refers to the proportion of all readers (including on-site and off-site) whose reading progress is less than 20%, which can be understood as users who exit the site as soon as they enter.

Toutiao has three types of publishing formats: articles, photo albums, and videos .

The bounce rate of articles and picture albums is determined by the length of the reading space. If there are too many users whose reading progress is less than 20%, the machine will think that the users may have been attracted by clickbait titles and clicked to read, and that there may be inconsistent sales pitches, poor content quality, etc., and the machine will likely slow down the recommendation process or even end the recommendation.

The bounce rate of a video is judged by the reading time, which is why short videos try to present more content in less time. Short videos that are concise and have content from the beginning are more competitive.

We recommend that you pay attention to the following when writing your article:

Title Focus

Whether it is an article, photo album or video, the robot will initially make targeted recommendations based on the title and content. It is recommended to make titles and content that are clearly targeted, easy to focus on, and of interest to users. If the title is too broad, the robot will not be able to help you with accurate distribution, that is, it will not be able to find the target reading group that your content should correspond to. If it cannot even find the right target group, it will be difficult to achieve effective reading.

For example, if I write an article introducing information flow advertising , and the examples given in the article are all related to weight loss products, and they take up a lot of space, the system is likely to use weight loss as a tag for my article and push it to users with the weight loss tag. If the user herself is not interested in marketing but receives my article, she will definitely not read it. Even if she reads it, she will find that it has nothing to do with her after entering it, and she will definitely exit quickly, resulting in a high bounce rate.

So, a little trick is: in similar articles, either give some examples from all walks of life, or consciously add some marketing industry terms in the article to dilute the system's capture of some unnecessary keywords .

Reduce foreplay

You must clearly know that users are attracted by your title, and they want to see content related to the title immediately, rather than a bunch of irrelevant compliments. Be sure to express the topic you want to talk about within the first three screens (referring to the length of the mobile phone screen). Otherwise, users will easily exit immediately or quickly exit after a quick browse, resulting in too high a bounce rate, which in turn affects the recommendation volume.

Golden sentence highlights

Make good use of the tools on the Toutiao editing platform to highlight attractive content, mark out key points and golden sentences every few lines, and attract users to continue browsing until they finish reading.

Timely release

In addition, a high bounce rate of articles and videos may also be due to the fact that users are short on time. After opening them, they may collect them if they think they are good and then watch them when they have free time. This reminds content publishers that if they feel that the content is nutritious and may require users to spend time to read it in detail, which is time-consuming, they can choose a time that is more suitable for long-term reading to publish it, such as after meals.

2. The higher the Toutiao account index, the easier it is to get high recommendations

You can think of the Toutiao Index as how worthy your content is to be recommended. Every week, Toutiao conducts a comprehensive evaluation based on five dimensions: the health, attention, dissemination, verticality, and originality of Toutiao accounts, and calculates an overall index based on the scores obtained in the corresponding dimensions. Among them, the full score for each dimension is 10 points, and the full score for the Toutiao index is 950 points.

Generally speaking, the higher the Toutiao account index, the more free traffic you can get.

So how can we improve the scores of health, attention, dissemination, verticality and originality to obtain a better headline index score?

We can equate the weekly score assessment to an exam that Toutiao prepares for you——

Originality and verticality are easy questions to get points for

These two items are the easiest to score.

Why?

Let’s talk about originality first. Nowadays, many people are happy to be content porters. It only takes a few minutes to write an article with simple excerpts. However, because they are simple excerpts, some of them are even inconsistent and illogical. The content between platforms is highly overlapping, which leads to a decrease in user interest in reading. If most of the articles on a platform are like this, I believe this platform will not last long. Therefore, for the survival of your own account, originality is the first requirement, reduce excerpting, editing, and organization; and publish first on Toutiao.

Speaking of verticality, that is to say, the content must be specific.

Although Toutiao does not restrict authors from publishing articles about a certain industry, and authors can publish content in multiple fields (such as food, travel, sports, etc.), the system will select the most popular content based on users' reading behavior data (number of reads, views, comments, likes, shares, etc.), thereby determining the author's areas of expertise (one or more, usually one); for content outside of one's areas of expertise, the account verticality score will be lowered. Therefore, it is recommended that you decide what you will do before setting up an account. Since these are easy questions, don't lose points for no reason because of uncertainty and keep changing them.

Spread is a common question

When we were students, the only way for us to do well in routine questions was to practice more. So in Toutiao, the method we can adopt is to publish articles frequently, think about the problems in your industry from multiple dimensions, write a small point every day to attract users to read habitually, and publishing more articles itself will help to practice the quality of writing. High-quality content itself will also help to increase the number of readers of a single article and improve the popularity score.

Health is a huge problem

The healthiness comes from the machine's analysis of user reading behavior. Every click, stay, like, comment, collection, etc. will add points to the account. Accounts with high health levels often have very attractive content. As suggested in the previous article, do not use exaggerated titles that do not match the content details, otherwise it will easily cause user disgust and be crossed out (as shown below), and may even lead to reports or suppression by machine recognition.

Attention is an additional question

The attention score mainly depends on the absolute number of Toutiao fans, which is a consideration of the number of Toutiao fans and fan loyalty. The more fans an account has, the higher its popularity will be. Accounts with a large number of article readers and comments, and those that make meaningful responses to fans' high-quality comments will also have higher popularity.

As Toutiao products continue to be enriched, Toutiao authors can increase their followers through various channels to feed back to their own Toutiao accounts. For example, participate in more Wukong Q&A and post more often on Weibo. High-quality Q&A and interactions are very helpful in increasing followers.

3. Comply with Toutiao platform rules and avoid duplicate submissions

This is a hard rule. Try to complete the manuscript in one go. Repeated revisions and repeated submissions for review will seriously affect the number of recommendations.

In summary, the Toutiao algorithm robot is a user agent, and its task is to distribute good content to users accurately. If you want Toutiao to spend a lot of effort and provide a large amount of traffic to promote your content for free, your content must be able to keep users coming back for more during quality testing and subsequent official push. The greater your ability, the greater the scale of promotion and the faster the speed.

A tried and tested trick: always think from the user's perspective whether the content you want to publish is what the user wants to know, how to attract users to keep reading, what to say to make them willing to interact with you, etc. If you do a good job of content marketing , you can easily achieve free promotion.