Reviewing TikTok: How to achieve user growth?

There are many articles about how TikTok reached the top, and many experts have expressed their opinions. So this article is not to analyze why TikTok has made us so addicted, but to familiarize ourselves with the routine of user growth through TikTok’s growth strategy.

User growth:

The author believes that user growth can be roughly divided into three channels: acquiring new users, maintaining old users, and recalling lost users. Corresponding to the AARRR conversion funnel model , it exists in three stages: attracting new customers , promoting activation, and retaining customers.

Let's clarify the definitions of these three stages again:

• Attracting new users, that is, acquiring traffic , refers to allowing potential users to come into contact with the product for the first time and achieve "user growth" . The source paths at this stage are diverse, such as advertising promotion , search discovery, and leveraging hot spots.
• Activation refers to guiding users to complete key business behaviors, making them recognize the value of the product and completing the transition from new users to loyal users. Activation includes recall churn, but reducing churn does not increase activation rate.
• Retention , that is, improving user stickiness , is a key issue after user activation, because the cost of retaining an old user is generally much lower than the cost of acquiring a new user. Therefore, improving retention is an important means to maintain product value and extend the life cycle.

TikTok’s Growth Journey

In the figure below, the development of Douyin can be divided into three stages: product polishing period (September 2016-May 2017), the first wave of rapid growth period (May 2017-December 2017), and the second wave of rapid growth period (January 2018-present)

However, we can assume that the second wave of rapid growth may be due to the increase in user activity caused by the hot quiz activities and the Spring Festival holiday. Therefore, this article only divides Douyin’s user growth strategy into two stages for analysis, namely the product polishing period (September 2016-May 2017) and the product development period (May 2017-present).

Tik Tok’s Growth Strategy

Growth strategies during product polishing period

Product polishing period: This stage is more about verifying the feasibility of the MVP product and whether it has achieved Product /Market Fit (it is best to use Musical.ly for analysis at this stage, after all, Douyin is a complete copy). During this stage, Douyin did not engage in large-scale user acquisition, nor did it do any special operations (the number of Weibo users following it was extremely low). Instead, it verified the effective means of user activation by constantly adjusting its product development strategy to ensure that users wanted to stay after they came.

During the product development phase, large-scale new customer acquisition began , with the specific means mainly involving sponsoring variety shows to achieve large-scale brand exposure. Since the product development model and some user activation methods have been verified in the early stage, which can effectively avoid the situation where users come and go in large numbers, the functional modules of Douyin have basically not changed much at this stage, and the main goal is retention. Through a series of operational means, we can improve user stickiness and seize the market.

In general, Douyin's development model is somewhat in conflict with the previous rule of "speed is invincible" for Internet products. It first concentrates on polishing the product and exploring the most perfect development direction. Once PMF is created, it will promote it on a large scale to attract new users and assist in multi-party operation strategies to seize the market . This is also closely related to the current psychological state of users: in the past, users were hungry because they wanted something; but now users are indifferent because they are afraid of choosing.

Specific analysis: User activation during product polishing period:

The main purpose of user activation is to make new users aware of the value of the product and generate motivation to use the product repeatedly. The two problems that Douyin faced at this stage were: how to acquire the first batch of cold-start users and how to determine a perfect user activation model.

1. About User Cold Start

As a product positioned as entertainment with a majority of its audience being young people, users can invite Internet celebrity IPs to develop KOLs during the cold start process to drive the development of operations, enhance social attributes, and improve the self-propagation mechanism.

Although Douyin has always been promoting the "decentralized" UGC idea, its operational strategies in the early stages of development were all centered around "centralized" PGC : contacting the family guild of the live broadcast platform , importing KOLs in batches from Meipai , and accepting celebrity resources from Toutiao to carry out fan dissemination with KOLs as the core; in the early days, Douyin specially opened a page for adding friends, and friends can be added from the address book, QQ, WeChat , and Weibo.

2. How to determine the perfect user activation model

There are many articles that can be written about user activation, and user activation is also a process of continuous optimization and iteration through data until you find a few Aha Moments that can promote user conversion.

The earliest version of Douyin open to the public was the 2017.7 version, and the earliest version iteration record was 9 months ago. Therefore, the author has no way of knowing the product form of Douyin during its exploration period, and only searched some information from the Internet. Therefore, this part is more theoretical, please forgive me.

We already know that user activation is to make users recognize the value of the product and complete the key business behavior of the product, so as to promote the retention of new users , so its means are inseparable from functional design and data monitoring. Generally speaking, it is about designing activation methods around the goal, monitoring activation performance, and continuously iterating activation methods.

1. In terms of designing activation methods, we can use the psychological HOOK addiction model to design a closed loop that encourages users to actively use the product. Here are a few questions to consider:

• What is the core function of the product? This is a big premise. Only when the product function is clear, the first step of the Hook model, the "trigger" part, will have a foundation to create a detonation point.
• What behavior of the user prompted him to stay? This corresponds to the second step of the Hook model, "driving user behavior ". The product must find value points that promote the retention of new users and meet user psychological expectations before it is possible to further convert users .
• Among the features that encourage user retention, which ones can quickly and cost-effectively reflect the value of the product? This corresponds to the last two parts of the Hook model, including improving user experience and increasing sunk costs.

1. When monitoring activation performance, the data that needs attention are the number of activated users and the ratio of activated users ;
2. In terms of iterative activation methods, it is necessary to optimize the call to action by product + operation means around the part with higher loss in the activation conversion funnel , and supplement it with process incentive strategies to improve the overall activation conversion rate until the optimal activation strategy is established.

The following is a detailed analysis of Douyin’s activation strategy:

As the first step of activation, Douyin focused on the positioning of music short videos and maximized the display of this core function: establishing topic video challenges internally to stimulate the growth of the video library; hiring professional dance or music experts to shoot videos and publish them to major video platforms for publicity and traffic .

The H5 page for traffic diversion is also well designed. The optimization point here is the user access path: when a new user opens a Douyin short video shared by a friend and clicks "like" or "comment", he/she will be redirected to the APP Store to download the product. The H5 sharing page will have multiple videos of the same type recommended, and users can also click to jump to download.

As a short video product, there are many operational behaviors that can promote the retention of new users, such as watching a few videos, liking, commenting, sharing, shooting videos by yourself, etc. The video display page of Douyin is relatively simple. You can switch videos by swiping down (everyone knows the role of the algorithm here, so I won’t go into details). The right side lists several core function buttons such as like, comment, and share. Douyin’s assistant also has a special course to teach users how to play Douyin and shoot high-quality videos.

When it comes to user feedback, Douyin mostly does invisible work, such as optimizing algorithm logic and improving loading speed. The author has experienced another short video product called "Naitang", and its feedback is quite obvious. Within 2 days, the video uploaded by me (a new user) would get more than 30 likes and even comments. Further analysis of these users who liked the video revealed that most of them were "water armies" with no information.

Specific analysis: Attracting new customers and retaining new customers during the product development period:

During this stage, Douyin has determined and improved its user activation mechanism, so it can be promoted on a large scale to obtain traffic; in just half a year, the number of users has increased more than 10 times! The main growth engine at this stage is the operations side. Let’s analyze how Douyin acquires users.

The common tactics used to attract new customers are channel placement, including pre-installation, manufacturer, and third-party store resource promotion. Not only Douyin, other growing apps such as Kuaishou and Pinduoduo, all achieve rapid brand exposure by spending money to appear on the most popular programs.

The issue that needs to be considered here is how to improve the efficiency of delivery. Everyone can think of the solution. For delivery materials, it is to optimize the materials to increase CTR . For delivery strategies, it is to refine delivery to increase ROI . Personalized operations can be achieved through algorithms, and refined delivery can be carried out based on user registration duration, activity level, etc.

For TikTok, the target users in its development stage are young trendsetters, so it sponsored variety shows with similar audiences, such as "The Rap of China", " Happy Camp " and "Day Day Up", and quickly attracted a large number of Chinese young people who pursue independence, individuality and have nowhere to go for loneliness.

This is the most important development stage of Douyin so far. This stage has completely exposed Douyin to the public, achieved dual diffusion of brand and product, and established its leading position in the music short video category. At the same time, at the beginning of 2018, by introducing the new trend of " live Q&A", Douyin ushered in the second wave of rapid product growth and continued to move forward triumphantly.

Another common method of acquiring users is through a task system, using "profit" as bait to get users to split , such as the Xin Shi Xiang that has been flooding the WeChat Moments recently, Qutoutiao whose DAU has soared, and Pinduoduo whose GMV far exceeds that of JD.com . However, TikTok has not made any efforts in this direction because there is no point that can directly benefit users.

The next key point is retention.

Regarding the difference between retention and activation, the author believes that retention focuses more on long-term retention, while activation is for short-term retention; retention is for old users, and activation is for new users. Generally speaking, if the core value of a product solves user needs and creates a closed loop of usage with a good experience, retention will not be low. However, only by continuously improving retention can we avoid being buried by competitors, swallow up more market share, and thus consolidate the product's position.

Generally speaking, there are three options for retention:

1. Build a user incentive system: The user incentive system can extend the overall life cycle of users, improve user stickiness, loyalty and brand awareness. This is also a big topic, and I hope to find some time to do a special topic on user incentive system.
2. Do a good job of user reach: Simply put, it means doing a good job of Push. You can continuously optimize the push content, channels, sending strategies, etc., and observe the effect of each push in order to make push more refined and improve CTR.
3. Organize activities: The most significant effect of an activity is to increase the activity frequency of old users and increase their usage time. Secondly, it can also help attract new users.

For Tik Tok, all three retention methods are involved.

In terms of user incentives, Douyin does not have a superficial incentive system (such as sign-in, medals, levels, etc.), but continuously optimizes solutions around user needs. Users have two core needs: one is to be able to keep watching their favorite videos, and the other is to be able to easily shoot videos with high likes.

Therefore, Douyin continues to improve its recommendation algorithm to capture user preferences; improve its music library, add a new dance machine, and acquire Faceu to obtain more sticker filter effects to increase the fun of shooting; use black technology to more intelligently distribute videos, increase the frequency of contact between video publishers and potential audiences, and increase attention and love; actively support the display of Weibo on personal homepages in order to increase the stickiness of influencers and encourage the production of more high-quality content: influencers will divert traffic to Weibo and monetize with the help of Weibo's ecosystem.

In terms of user reach, I believe everyone will find that as a strongly operated product, Douyin will send me about 3-5 push messages a day. The content is vivid and down-to-earth. I don’t know the specific data, but the CTR should not be low.

In online activities, Douyin's usual routine is to constantly launch challenges and display these challenges on the search homepage, such as hot searches, banner images, subcategories, etc., to ensure that participating users get more exposure opportunities, and who knows, one day they will get tens of thousands of likes.

In addition, it continues to launch large-scale competitions , such as the Aidou Trainee Weekly Competition and the Street Dance Competition. The winners can obtain exclusive resources, Douyin peripherals and other rewards; it launched the Douyin Original Music Plan , teaming up with 8 judges and hundreds of well-known musicians to find free and independent original musicians. On the one hand, it provides an outlet for original musicians, and on the other hand, it expands the music library of Douyin’s own community, benefiting both others and oneself, which can be said to kill two birds with one stone.

Some thoughts on user growth:

First of all, user growth is a systematic methodology that will guide the direction of work. Specific actions need to be implemented in practice based on the actual situation of the project.

Secondly, user growth requires team collaboration. Currently, many companies have set up User Growth teams. I believe that the task of the UG team is to seek every possible channel to drive growth based on the business development of the product itself, and do their utmost to implement it. The core here is data analysis and cross-team communication.

Finally, this article is just some of the author’s recent thoughts, and it cannot be considered a deep insight. Everyone is welcome to communicate.

The author of this article @MMBellaaa compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games