How to create vertical short video content?

As content creators face this increasingly cruel environment, how can we present our content in a more vertical and diverse form?

A while ago, friends who were paying attention to the developments in the short video industry saw that Tencent’s Weishi collapsed. Some students said, does this mean that the boom in short videos is over? What I actually want to say is that the downfall of Weishi is mostly due to internal factors, mainly due to unclear early positioning and too broad a user range. Therefore, it is a bit too much to assert that the era of short videos is declining just based on the collapse of Weishi. In fact, we can also see from the side that competition in the short video industry is becoming increasingly fierce. What I want to talk about today is how content creators can present their content in a more vertical and richer form in front of everyone when facing this increasingly cruel environment?

Content format

When it comes to the future trends of short videos and the direction of the industry, everyone has already understood that it will become more and more vertical. Our content needs to become more and more vertical, and our channels are also becoming more vertical. As for the short video creation team facing vertical development, how to highlight their own characteristics and make it easier for users to identify and remember them has begun to build their own IP. Once you start operating around your own account, what form can better present your content?

Short Video

The short video format can more easily reflect the characteristics of the characters and better express our content, needless to say, because we are the short video team, we create short videos and we are very familiar with short videos. Today I want to talk to you more about another form, which is to jointly create and operate our content around our short video content - practical information posts. Let users have a more comprehensive and profound impression of us.

Useful tips

When it comes to useful information posts, some short video content creators may be a little resistant. As a short video maker, why should I write useful posts? As I just said, our short videos have gradually expanded from a point to a comprehensive operation of an IP. What we need is not just a short video, but a structured content output, which requires the support of multiple content forms.

Why do we choose the form of practical information post here? You can see that the word used is “practical information post” instead of “article”. What I want to emphasize is that "dry goods" itself reflects the meaning we want to express, which is that it must be valuable. Only valuable articles can be called "dry goods". Articles without value are not considered "dry goods" to users. So it does not simply refer to articles or graphic forms, but to valuable dry goods posts. So how does our short video team write such useful posts? I will explain it to you in detail below. Let’s first talk about channel selection for useful information posts.

Channel selection

For the short video team, channels are not very unfamiliar, or we already have a detailed video publishing channel system. However, when we add a new content format, we need to consider which channels are more suitable for publishing our useful content.

Media channels and referral channels

I have previously introduced to you that video channels include recommendation channels, fan channels and media channels. Our useful information posts can be published on recommendation channels and media channels, complementing our short videos. For example, we publish our short videos on Toutiao and Sohu, and we can also publish our useful information posts at the same time.

Before publishing, these channels can choose whether to publish videos or articles. Before we publish the useful information post, we can publish our useful information post by simply selecting article publishing. In this way, our short video account will have a variety of forms of content to present to everyone, showing our content in different appearances.

Official account channel

In addition to these two channels, another channel suitable for publishing our useful information posts is the official account. We all know that the top short video accounts "Yi Tiao" and "Er Geng" used to start with the official account, and then publish short videos on other channels. Now they are still maintaining the official account, so we can put our useful information posts on the official account, including our own official account and other content-related official accounts.

Question and answer channel

Compared with the channels for releasing videos, there is an additional channel for useful information posts: the question and answer channel. For example, Zhihu platform, Toutiao Q&A, etc. We can publish our valuable information on Zhihu's Q&A channel and also answer everyone's related questions. Eventually you will reach a point where you are a senior observer in this field. When you see related questions, you can use the knowledge in your useful posts to answer people's questions. As your answers cover more and more areas and you have answered all the questions related to this industry, you will gradually be noticed by users who are interested in this area, and they will have a very deep impression of you.

Let me give you an example. If you are a tea expert, you mainly shoot some tea-related short videos and you are called "Tea Girl". At this time, you start to go to Zhihu Q&A, and your account on Zhihu is to use short video account to answer people's questions about tea. As your answers become more and more, and more and more profound, people will think that you really know a lot about tea and then pay attention to you and your short video account.

Content selection

At this point, everyone should understand that the core of this article is to make our content available to everyone in a comprehensive manner in a variety of forms. Only when everyone sees us as much as possible can we have the opportunity to make users pay attention to us and remember us. Let me tell you how to write a practical post and where to start.

Knowledge

In fact, before talking about the practical posts, I want to mention one thing. Everyone knows that the core of short video content creation is content. Everyone is saying "content is king", and the same applies to posts about useful information. The short videos we made received a high number of views, which shows that the content was very good. The useful information post is to convert the content of the short video into text and output it in another form of content.

How to choose the content of the useful post? First of all, it must be informative. Knowledge is the embodiment of value. Users should feel that your article is valuable. Like the "Tea Girl" just mentioned, the short video can explain the classification of tea to everyone, and these knowledge points can be transformed into useful posts and published to various channels. When everyone sees the content of the knowledge, it creates value for them and is useful to users.

Practicality

Another content direction to choose is practicality. Your useful content can explain the knowledge points of this industry to everyone, and on the other hand, it can introduce some practical functions such as skills. For example, if you are making a short video about tea, you can write about how to brew tea correctly. Everyone knows how to make tea, but what is the most correct way to do it? Here are some tips on how to make tea or some tricks on how to clean tea sets. You explain this knowledge to everyone as a professional. These practical and informative articles can be transmitted and can help you better operate your own short video account.

Content Operations

There are some common aspects in the operation of short videos and practical posts. I have previously written about how to title a short video and how to choose a header image. These methods can also be applied to the operation of dry goods posts. Here we will mainly talk about some operation methods unique to dry goods posts.

title

As for the title of the useful information post, first you should take a look at the articles of the same type on your delivery platform to see which titles have the highest number of readers and what common points they have. For example, you are the one who just talked about tea-related knowledge. The greatest help that tea can provide us is in terms of health. In this way, your title should focus on the angles that people are more concerned about, grasp the core vocabulary, and be clear about which words your target users are most concerned about.

Another aspect is to take advantage of hot topics to create a title , which is also a driving force to help create a popular article. Hot spots help your useful posts to attract users' attention among multiple articles and increase the click-through rate . In fact, the aspect of title selection is compatible with how to title short videos before. I have talked about this aspect before, so I won’t go into details here.

Header Image

In addition to the title, another important aspect of useful information posts is the choice of the header image. Generally speaking, in publishing channels, the choice of header images is usually divided into one image or three images. But most of the time we will choose the format of three header pictures. When we open a platform and see a screen full of titles, we will pay more attention to the header image, so the choice of the header image is very important.

Compared with short video header images, the number of header images you can choose for articles is more. Short videos usually have one header image, while articles can have three. These three header images must, firstly, be attractive enough to users and highlight the core of your article, and secondly, have super symbols. What is a Super Symbol? It’s this industry, or everyone knows what it means as soon as they see it. If you mention selling your tea online in your useful information post, you can put relevant pictures from Taobao or Tmall in your header image. This is using the focus brought by the super symbol to help the useful information post attract people's attention.

illustration

In addition to text, illustrations are indispensable in useful information posts. When we read articles, we may feel bored or lose patience when we see long articles. If a few pictures are inserted into the article, it will increase our patience and interest in reading. Moreover, the illustrations in the article are not inserted randomly. First, they should be attractive and serve as the header image. Because the article header images of some channels are selected from the article illustrations. Second, article illustrations should help users understand the article . If some of our text is not clear enough or is relatively abstract, we can convert these texts into graphics and paste them under the article. When you see the illustrations, you will understand the meaning of the article.

typesetting

When it comes to typesetting, it’s actually very simple. The main point I want to make here is that when you convert the content of short videos into useful posts, you still have to pay attention to the structure of the article. In this way, when everyone reads the article, the logic is clear and the ideas are bright. And when we publish on the platform, we should also pay attention to the layout of the article. The platform generally has its own editing interface. Some first-level and second-level titles should be highlighted to facilitate user reading, which is also one of the aspects to increase user reading volume.

Use the functions of the channel editing interface

When we publish our useful information on various channels, we should pay attention to their built-in functions in their respective editing interfaces. For example, in Toutiao, you can insert votes, links, etc. in the article editor. In this way, when we post useful information on the platform, we can insert a vote here to increase the interaction rate with users. By inserting links to useful posts with high readership in the past, when users read this article, they can also direct traffic to previous articles. These can all be carefully observed and applied to your own articles.

release

(1) Release time

The release of useful information posts is actually quite similar to the release of short videos. When we release short videos, we also consider the release time and order. If we publish at a certain time, our readership will be higher. In this regard, I suggest that you try publishing at different time points first, record the data, observe it for a period of time, and then summarize at what stage the release time will be better based on the data fluctuations.

(2) Release order

The main focus here is on the release order of channels, which can be determined based on the actual situation of the team. It is recommended that you publish it on the recommended channels first, because the recommendation mechanism of these channels will help more accurate users see your content, and then pay attention to you and become your fans, which is conducive to the exposure of the article.

Content Management

When we publish content, we need to do some content management. Two aspects are summarized here: one is the collation of data, and the other is the management of comments.

Data organization

After the content is released, we will organize the data to evaluate how effective our content is in presenting to users. The main concerns are the number of readings, comments, collections, comment rate and collection rate. These data can reflect which of our articles are more popular among the public, the comment rate can reflect which topics are more likely to arouse people's desire to discuss, and the collection rate can indirectly show whether the article is considered valuable to everyone. These data can guide our future selection of topics and adjustments to the content direction of our useful posts. The data speaks for itself, and this is how it works.

Comment Management

We publish relatively few of our useful information posts on fan channels, mainly because such channels generally do not support the publication of pictures and texts, except for official accounts. However, we still need to pay great attention to everyone’s feedback after our content is released.

First, this will increase the interaction on the platform , and some platforms will have corresponding indexes. For example, the headline index includes interactivity, which requires us to interact with readers more through comments. Secondly, we can also see their needs from the users’ comments. Some of them will write the content they want you to present in the comments, through which we can further understand our users.

Today, I shared a series of experiences with the short video team on how to operate our content to reach a wider audience. Finally, we must remember that we are not just making short videos, and we should not limit ourselves to short videos themselves. Instead, we are creating a series of content, an IP. This requires us to have richer forms to present our content and to disseminate it more widely.

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