618 Marketing Promotion Guide for Tik Tok, Bilibili, etc.!

As May begins, many brands have entered into 618 marketing combat readiness status. Nowadays, in order to seize a place in the big promotion period, brands not only increase their investment in new social media marketing positions, but also need to have a thorough understanding of the social media environment.

So, what are the differentiating features between platforms? What are the unique advantages? What is the commercialization progress of social media platforms? What marketing mix secrets can brands rely on to stand out? What is the solution that will most impact users? Recently, Weibo and Pangjing jointly released the "2022 Mainstream Social Media Platform Trend Insight Report" , which elaborated on the above issues in detail.

01 Horizontal comparison to gain insight into the four new trends of mainstream social media platforms

Trend 1: Weibo, Weibo and Douyin occupy the top traffic camp, with Douyin and Xiaohongshu growing fastest

According to public market information, Weibo.com sorted out the monthly active data of mainstream social media platforms and found that from the perspective of stock, WeChat, a national social app used by more than 1.2 billion people, has become the number one in the social track, followed by Douyin (700 million monthly active users), Weibo (573 million monthly active users), and Kuaishou (578 million monthly active users). These three social media platforms are in an absolute dominant position in terms of user activity. In recent years, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, and Zhihu, three relatively small and beautiful content community platforms, have started from users from different circles and expanded outward, jointly supporting the third traffic camp of social media platforms.

Last year, the number of monthly active users of Bilibili reached 272 million, the number of monthly active users of Xiaohongshu exceeded 200 million, and the number of monthly active users of Zhihu also jumped to 100 million. From an incremental perspective, the number of users of Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, Bilibili and Douyin has grown rapidly. According to public market information, Weibo compared the changes in platform users in 2021 and 2020. Among them, Douyin had about 20 million new users per month, Xiaohongshu and Bilibili had about 5 million, and Zhihu had about 2 million new users per month.

In addition, based on public market data and a comprehensive comparison of the average daily usage time and average daily visit times of users of mainstream social media platforms, we found that Douyin and Kuaishou platforms have the highest user stickiness and the relationship between the platform and users is the closest. Among them, the average daily usage time of Douyin users is as high as 144 minutes, and the average daily visit times of users are about 20 times.

The inherent advantage of short video platforms lies in the fragmentation of user usage and their dependence on killing time. In comparison, the average number of times users of Bilibili, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu and Weibo platforms open the platforms is lower, but the user usage time of Bilibili and Zhihu platforms is higher. It can be seen that whether it is Bilibili, which started with the pan-two-dimensional community culture, or Zhihu, which focuses on content sharing, their user growth and stickiness benefit from attracting users with a "sedimentation-type" content model, and constantly expanding the user circle by broadening the content categories.

Trend 2: Mainstream social media platforms flock to the "e-commerce closed loop" track

Advertising, games, and e-commerce are the three most mainstream ways to monetize Internet traffic. Although many large Internet companies did not get involved in e-commerce in the early stages of commercialization, they have begun to extend their business tentacles to e-commerce in the course of development, hoping for business growth brought by e-commerce.

Among many social media platforms, the competition between Douyin and Kuaishou in the short video track has not yet ceased, and they have opened up a new front in the e-commerce track. Looking back at the construction of e-commerce business by Douyin and Kuaishou in recent years, both started with the role of "traffic diversion". Relying on their huge user traffic advantages, they directed traffic to third-party e-commerce platforms and collected commissions from them.

Soon, Douyin and Kuaishou realized that e-commerce is just one of the means of commercialization, not an independent ecosystem.

Previously, Douyin and Kuaishou cooperated with third-party platforms to make up for the shortcomings of their own supply chain. With the gradual improvement of supply chain, operation, and service capabilities, starting in 2020, Douyin and Kuaishou successively cut off external links, and it became natural to establish an e-commerce closed loop within the platform. In 2021, the two major short video platforms both pressed the e-commerce accelerator.

According to relevant data from e-commerce research institutions, Douyin's e-commerce market share in 2021 has reached 5%, second only to the three giants Alibaba, JD.com and Pinduoduo, and its GMV is close to one trillion yuan. According to Kuaishou's financial report, Kuaishou's e-commerce GMV in 2021 also exceeded 680 billion yuan.

Different from the practice of short video platforms entering the e-commerce market through live streaming, both Xiaohongshu's "Welfare Club" and Bilibili's "Member Purchase" mall have focused on self-operated e-commerce businesses in the early years and tried to build their own e-commerce ecosystems.

However, due to the imperfect supply chain system, incomplete logistics system and limited platform SKUs, the biggest problem for Xiaohongshu and Bilibili as lightweight content communities lies in their B-side integration capabilities. After several years of strategic adjustments, Xiaohongshu's "account and store integration" strategy has gradually become clear, and it proposed the concept of "private domain position" for the first time. Bilibili, on the other hand, has been cautiously restrained in developing the Magic Blind Box gameplay in its membership shopping mall, tapping into the closed loop of distinctive e-commerce.

Another platform that is highly similar to Bilibili is Zhihu. Zhihu entered the commercialization stage with online advertising, and later, with the entry of a large number of new knowledge payment players, it continued to increase knowledge payment. In September 2019, the launch of the "Zhihu Good Things" recommendation function showed Zhihu's interest in e-commerce business. Since then, Zhihu has started the live streaming sales model, launched the "Zhihu Friends Welfare Station", launched its own brand "Zhihu Zhiwu", and launched a list of highly praised good things on Double Eleven last year, showing the basic prototype of its own e-commerce.

WeChat Video Account, which started the latest, can be said to be connecting the entire WeChat ecosystem and has strongly launched commercialization in a running posture. From 2020 to the present, WeChat Video Account has rapidly upgraded and iterated its functions, and has cooperated deeply with third-party services. The Video Account live broadcast room has connected subscription accounts and mini-programs. The Video Account has launched a product promotion function and supports direct purchases from the shopping cart. More and more brands have settled in the Video Account, seeking development opportunities in this new field of public and private domain linkage.

Trend 3: Brand advertising changes hands, budgets are largely allocated to emerging platforms

As social media platforms develop rapidly, they are also allowing more and more brands to target their marketing efforts and open up new channels for in-depth dialogue with consumers. According to the analysis data of KOL social media investment by Weibo, judging from the distribution of investment amounts by brands on mainstream social media platforms in the past two years, the transaction advantages of Weibo and WeChat are slightly insufficient. Short video platforms represented by Douyin and sophisticated, vertical, interest-focused social platforms represented by Xiaohongshu and Bilibili have risen on a large scale.

Judging from the number of brand transaction accounts, Weibo has always maintained the top position among mainstream social platforms in terms of the number of transaction accounts. In 2020, Weibo still had a large gap with the second place with a share of 52%. By 2021, Xiaohongshu's share of transaction accounts surpassed Weibo by 5% to become the first, and its media purchasing volume also increased significantly by 114%. The proportion of Douyin accounts with transactions increased by 10%, and more and more brands began to allocate their budgets to emerging platforms.

In addition, Weibo.com analyzed the focus of major industry brands on social media platforms through KOL social media analysis data comparison and found that since 2021, Douyin and Xiaohongshu have almost become the favorite delivery platforms for the beauty and daily chemicals, food and beverages, maternal and child care, and 3C digital industries. For example, in the beauty and daily chemical industry, the transaction amount of brand owners on Xiaohongshu and Douyin platforms surpassed Weibo for the first time in 2021, and the investment intensity achieved a significant increase of 2-3 times.

Trend 4: The grass-seeding track is highly crowded, and mainstream platforms all want to do Xiaohongshu's business

In the era of content marketing, the grass-planting model came into being, and in recent years, grass-planting has become a very crowded track. Internet giants have even begun to redo what Xiaohongshu has done, betting on community business and opening up "grass-planting communities."

Among them, Douyin's actions are obvious. At the beginning of this year, some users discovered that "Planting Grass" was shared alongside other first-level entrances such as "Same City" and "Learning". In October last year, Douyin tested the picture and text promotion function. The content of the picture and text promotion is the same as that of short videos. Creators can select pictures in the shooting function to create, and then publish a collection of pictures with text. The content can also include product links to realize the monetization of goods.

Users can comment, like, and forward, etc. Nowadays, when users are browsing Douyin, there will be a picture and text note interspersed between almost every two or three short videos. It seems that Douyin is ambitious in the "grass planting" track, and its intention to break into the heartland of Xiaohongshu is becoming more and more obvious.

Not only are short video platforms making efforts to promote content, but content community platform Zhihu is also trying to overtake and cultivate a platform-based content promotion atmosphere. In December last year, Zhihu released a video titled "The Forest of Zhihu", proposing the content marketing concept of "planting grass elsewhere and planting trees on Zhihu". Different from the grass-planting model, the long-tail effect of Zhihu content is better than other platforms. Planting trees symbolizes the vitality of recommending good things. The platform leads content creators and brand owners to grow together.

In addition, traditional e-commerce platforms have ushered in the "small circle" era. Whether it is Taobao's "Guangguang", JD.com's "Guang", or Pinduoduo's "Pin Xiaoquan", e-commerce platforms cultivate a platform atmosphere through differentiated pictures, texts and short videos, so that users' consumption habits gradually change from "search" to "browsing", with the aim of attracting traffic to their own products. It is understood that data released by Alibaba last year showed that the number of monthly active users of Taobao's "Browse" app has reached 250 million, exceeding the 200 million monthly active users of Xiaohongshu.

Let’s look at Xiaohongshu. As the earliest social platform to target the grass-planting economy, its huge amount of UGC content has enabled Xiaohongshu to quickly grow into a “grass-planting artifact.” At the same time, the platform also had problems such as false content, fake orders and volume, ghostwriting and posting. Community atmosphere is the basic foundation of Xiaohongshu. In order to maintain the content foundation of Xiaohongshu, Xiaohongshu has continuously upgraded its content governance in recent years. From regulating content to regulating brands and gray industries, it shows that Xiaohongshu is building a healthy and clear community atmosphere and insisting on "real content".

02 The "single + integrated" dual-engine methodology allows social media marketing to break through

In order to help brand owners take the initiative in the complex social media marketing campaigns and achieve accurate and efficient communication with target users and effective information interaction, Weiboyi combines years of social media marketing service experience and resource accumulation, integrates platform value, gathers massive resources, releases the advantages of influencers, and condenses and summarizes relatively typical single-platform marketing methods and full-platform integrated marketing method solutions. Help brand owners find suitable marketing communication channels to achieve double growth in brand effectiveness.

1. Typical marketing method on the Douyin platform - Douyin Challenge

Nowadays, Douyin Challenge has gradually become an important tool for brand owners to harvest traffic. The challenge can not only help brands gain access to Douyin's global traffic, but also gather high-quality creators to inspire their creative enthusiasm, trigger early exposure, and use a variety of interactive inspiration tools to attract a large number of users to imitate, drive a long-tail effect, and achieve exposure, conversion, fan growth and other benefits for the brand.

In terms of content strategy, Weibo proposed that the challenge should have three characteristics: "down-to-earth + easy to imitate + entertaining". It concluded that the key to the success of the challenge lies in whether it can attract the whole nation to follow suit and imitate, thus forming a fission effect.

2. Typical marketing methods on Xiaohongshu platform - Xiaohongshu hot-selling notes rule

Xiaohongshu platform has now become a recognized community for promoting popular things. So how did the popular notes that frequently appear on Xiaohongshu come about? Weibo.com helps brands obtain the rules for hot-selling notes through Xiaohongshu’s traffic distribution mechanism and the secret code of hot-selling notes’ content.

3. Typical marketing methods of the B-station platform - the creation of B-station breaking circle events

The Bilibili platform is deeply loved by people for its creative and interesting medium and long videos. The high concentration of Generation Z people has also allowed Bilibili to continuously expand from typical content such as the second dimension and animation to the pan-entertainment community, making it one of the most suitable platforms for breaking circle events.

Based on this, Weiboyi summarized the methodology for creating B station's breaking circle events by combining practical cases, customized content through the "1+N" UP host combination strategy, broke down content barriers, enhanced brand image and precipitated brand assets through long-term topics, and enabled multi-channel brand communication through online and offline linkage to achieve social fission.

4. Integrated marketing across all social media platforms

Previously, Weibo had proposed eight steps to launch a brand/product, namely anchoring, entering the circle, embedding points, deep digging, breaking the circle, harvesting, retention, and optimization. Among these steps, social media platforms play a very important role as an important channel for information communication in today's society.

• Steps to enter the circle: The five major platforms, Bilibili, Xiaohongshu, Kuaishou, Zhihu and Video Account, have obvious community and circle attributes, and are more suitable as the first launch platforms for brands or new products to break through.
• Steps for embedding points : According to the brand marketing focus, you can choose social media that is easier to raise the tone, expand the influence, and lead followers. For example, Weibo is suitable for taking the lead and expanding the influence, Douyin and Kuaishou’s large traffic is suitable for accumulating popularity and rapid penetration, and Xiaohongshu is suitable for laying the tone and leading followers.
• Deep digging stage : Brands need to leverage the breadth and depth of content across the entire platform to dig deep into product selling points in multiple dimensions and scenarios, differentiate content with the platform’s tone, and continuously guide user minds.
• Breaking the circle stage : After the brand has accumulated extensive preparations in the early stage and entered the middle and late stages of social media advertising, it can consider creating a marketing value of 1+1>2 by breaking the circle. By leveraging the pan-entertainment attributes of social media platforms, we can attract and attract new user circles and continue to expand the brand's interested users.
• Harvest period : Brands can try to lay out conversion paths at any time through traditional e-commerce, live broadcasts by celebrities and influencers, platform-built e-commerce, off-site jumps, platform indirect conversions, etc., so that conversion harvesting and grass-planting guidance can be carried out simultaneously.
• Retention period : User retention also accompanies the entire process of brand integrated marketing. Therefore, in the first few steps, the brand also needs to simultaneously build and operate its own private domain. For example, the refined operation of the WeChat ecosystem, the construction of corporate accounts on platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Kuaishou, and Bilibili, while social media platforms are attracting incremental populations, they are also responsible for cultivating existing populations and converting transactions in a timely manner.

03 Conclusion

With the diversification and complexity of communication channels, a single platform or a single marketing thinking can no longer keep up with the diverse communication demands of brands. If brands want to have effective conversations with target consumers, they need to gain deeper insights into target users’ social media preferences and social media usage or consumption habits.

Therefore, by comparing the mainstream social media platforms horizontally and re-examining the characteristics of each platform at this stage, it may help brands clarify the focus of social media marketing before the 618 campaign begins , allocate budgets reasonably, and help brands achieve more efficient marketing during the mid-year promotion period, more accurate user mind management, and more substantial business growth.