How to operate content-based products? These 5 steps will solve everything!

What I want to share with you today is the operational improvement of content-based products.

1. Content-based product sorting

1. Content-based product definition

In the current mobile Internet market, most products with relatively active users are content-based products, such as Toutiao , iQiyi , Kugou Music, iReader and other pure content-based products ; there are also some "content +" products , such as WeChat and Weibo for social + content, App Store for application downloads + content, and UC Browser for tools + content; pure tool-based products have found it difficult to gain an advantage in the mobile Internet . Judging from the top applications, it seems that except for maps, almost none of them are without content . "Content +" has become a strategy for products to capture users. Next, let’s take a look at how content-based product operations should be done.

Basically, apart from social communication, users spend most of their time on content-based products. Content products include traditional text, comics, audio, video, as well as new categories such as live broadcasts . The content products we usually refer to are products whose main business revolves around providing users with content services such as text, comics, audio, and video.

2. Content-based product classification

There are many categories of content-based products, and each category has a lot of product competition. Let us now understand the current market situation of content-based products.

Video: Tencent Video , iQiyi, Youku, etc. ( Short video : Kuaishou , Xigua, Miaopai , etc.);

Live broadcast: Huya , Douyu , YY, etc.

Music: Kugou, QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music , etc.

Audio: Himalaya , Lanrentingshu, Qingting FM, etc.

Information: Toutiao, Tencent News , Yidian Zixun , etc.

Reading: iReader, QQ Reader, Kuaikan Comics, etc.

3. The core of content products

There are many content products on the market now, but no matter what type of content product you make, you must clearly know that the key core of the content product is - content! A product without excellent content cannot maintain good long-term operation no matter how excellent the experience is. On the contrary, if there is good enough content, users will hope to have a better user experience. The Mango TV mentioned earlier is a good example. As a product of a non-Internet company, it has the unique resources of Hunan Radio and Television. Although the product experience is inferior to other mobile Internet products, it can still occupy a place in video content products.

Speaking of the key role of content, let me give you another simple and clear example. Recently, major short video products have begun to increase their investment and recruit anchors from various platforms. For example, Kuaishou’s “top star” MC Tianyou is said to have joined Toutiao’s Volcano Short Video at a sky-high price. In fact, although these short video products are poaching anchors, what they actually value is the anchor's influence. An anchor may have tens of millions of fans, and the anchor's job-hopping may bring about a sharp increase in the number of users on the new platform; and the reason why fans pay attention to the anchor is mainly because the content provided by the anchor is attractive enough. Similarly, major video platforms are competing to grab the exclusive copyrights of certain film and television dramas in order to attract more users with good content; when users want to watch specific content, they can only watch it on platforms with copyright authorization. This content advantage will allow the product to attract a large number of users in a short period of time. Only with good content can more users support and consume your products. Therefore, when making content-based products, you must remember that content is the key!

2. 5 steps to operate content-based products

The purpose of operations staff for content-based products is simple - to get more people to view the product, the more content the better, and the best thing is to get more people to pay to view it. To achieve these goals, there are many things operations can do.

1. Find highlights - hot spots, discoveries, and excavations

Every company that produces content products has a department responsible for content procurement. Sometimes this department belongs to the operations department, and sometimes it belongs to the copyright department. After all, if you want to make your products bigger and stronger, you can’t escape formal copyright authorization. (Even the most popular self-media platforms are actively reducing duplication and cracking down on plagiarism and piracy.) Operations colleagues should work closely with copyright colleagues, pay close attention to content hotspots on the market, and when hot demands are discovered, they should raise content demands as soon as possible.

Take video content products as an example. When it comes to catching hot spots, for example, the TV series "Daytime Chase" was very popular for a while, so the operation had to make a request to the copyright department or the content provider department, asking whether it could obtain the online broadcasting rights of "Daytime Chase", or other film and television dramas by the author, or similar suspense TV series, or even other film and television dramas in which the protagonist of "Daytime Chase" has starred; if the content is indeed scarce, you can only create a gimmick yourself, find some online dramas similar to the TV series, and make them into sister works of "Daytime Chase" from the content perspective, etc. In short, anything related to hot topics can be the prey you are looking for.

Then another very important thing is that operations students must be able to dig. Often, a lot of the content purchased by the copyright department is purchased in bulk. Some of them may be "pearls in the ocean" or some may be excellent themes. Operations colleagues need to understand and accumulate them on a daily basis to dig out the highlights and present them to users. Another type is user's UGC content. Taking short videos as an example, many users will upload some self-made video content. In fact, there are also some works with good themes and excellent shooting. Operations colleagues should create and package them, recommend them to more users, and find ways to make some top users into stars in their own products. The benefits of doing this for the product are obvious: first, it increases user recognition of the product, and recommended users will be more willing to upload good content to the product; second, it allows other top users to see that ordinary users can also become stars on the product platform, allowing more users to participate in the production of UGC content; third, it finds suitable product content to recommend to users, allowing users to feel the difference of the product.

To sum up, students who operate content-based products must understand content, make good use of content when there is content, and when content is relatively scarce, you have to learn how to "dig" it yourself, and learn how to create stars!

2. Content packaging: pain points, polishing, and star creation

As I said earlier, when looking for content, it is very important for you to find the highlights and then learn how to create stars. The creation process is actually a process of continuous optimization of content.

At this time, the author remembered an example. Sina Reading's original works were well-known in the industry back then. There was a plan to create "10,000 Yuan original writers" at that time. In order to create typical authors with monthly incomes of over 10,000 Yuan, the contracted editors and authors worked together to polish the works from the time they were just online, to the titles , covers, and introductions during the creative process, and even to the later chapter structures. At this time, the operations staff is a bit like the editor of the original publishing house. They connect the authors and the user groups, and tell the authors how to polish their works so as to hit the users' pain points and make users like reading more. When recommending content, operators cannot modify the author's original work at will, but they can make some additions and adjustments: for example, add an attractive subtitle to the book, add an editor's recommendation before the introduction, tell the author to change the cover style to a more pleasing style, create special topics and interviews for the author to increase the exposure of the work, maintain book reviews and ratings, maintain the readership, and so on, until the clicks and payments stabilize to a certain level, and then start creating a new work.

This also applies to other content-based products. For example, each major live streaming platform has its own top anchors. These top anchors have more or less connections with the platform, such as being official contracted anchors, or contracted anchors of a guild that has close cooperation with the official. It is basically rare to see unsigned anchors achieve good results on the live streaming platform. The official signing or cooperative guild signing here means that the anchor gets more opportunities for packaging and promotion. For example, there will be official recommendation positions, sponsorship from guilds, various atmospheres during live broadcasts, etc. For other users, these are actually "packaging" of the anchor. Of course, these packages are not free. The signed anchors usually have to share profits with the signing agency. The profit ratio ranges from 55 to 82 depending on the influence of the anchor.

Reasonable content packaging is very important. From title packaging, pictures to specific content, and then to all content-related elements, such as comments, community, user feedback, etc., all need to be packaged. These are all necessary tasks for an operator to push the work to a higher level.

3. Accurate recommendation - time, place, and people

When it comes to recommendations, each product has its own recommendation rules. If the product you are responsible for operating does not even have an operating specification, then please quickly formulate an operating specification. You will find that your work will only become simpler and simpler. Basically, there are three main elements related to operational norms: time, place, and people. What kind of content should be pushed to whom, at what time and in what place. In fact, in addition to content-based products, other products are the same, such as e-commerce recommendations and recommendations in social products. The principle is the same.

It sounds a bit complicated, but it is actually much easier if you look at it separately. Let’s take information content products as an example to analyze it.

Everyone is clear about the factor of time . Basically, users of all content products are active during non-working hours. Morning, noon and evening are the three traffic peaks. Especially in the evening, which is basically the highest peak of traffic for the whole day. We must make full use of this time point. During the working hours of 7-9 a.m., the content pushed to people should be more easy to read and have a certain amount of information content, such as current affairs, hot topics or professional information content; the lunch break from 12 noon to 1 p.m. is not long, so the content pushed to users should be relatively short and concise, with some interest, which are more likely to attract people's attention, such as entertainment information; there is more time from 10 p.m. to 12 noon, and many users will use the time before going to bed to browse relatively long content, such as recommending some special topics, videos, or short stories, comics, etc., which are all very appropriate.

Location factor. This is not something that all products will encounter. It only appears in specific products with regional characteristics. For example, usually each information product will have a "local" column, which is mainly used to convey local news to users. For another example, when I was using Sina Mobile, traffic from users in Guangdong Province accounted for more than 20%, and users in Guangdong love to read urban online novels, and do not like romance or fantasy novels. Therefore, a Guangdong version was specially customized at that time. As long as it was determined that the user was from Guangdong, he would see the Guangdong version of the content when he came in. After implementing this strategy, user income in Guangdong Province increased by more than 20%.

At present, this method of recommending based on people has become very mature in major personalized recommendation information clients, represented by Toutiao. Basically, it uses machine algorithms to determine what content users are interested in based on their browsing behavior and browsing data, and recommends corresponding content to users. Some products may not have complete machine algorithms, so the most basic thing is to divide users according to their gender, occupation, age, and interests and hobbies; label users and content, and only make recommendations to users when the user attribute labels overlap with the content attribute labels. Currently, many e-commerce products have the function of making recommendations based on user attributes. They can even calculate through data that users who have purchased one category of goods are more likely to purchase another category of goods. These recommendations are based on human factors.

If you can make good use of the three elements of time, place and people, then it will not be difficult to make recommendations. Of course, all of this is based on the premise of accurate data and continuously optimized algorithms.

At this point, many people may ask whether it is possible for our products to make personalized recommendations. For example, when a user comes, we will see the content he likes to watch and whether it is appropriate. The author’s judgment on personalized recommendations is that personalized recommendations are a good thing, but don’t be superstitious. If used well, it will improve the user experience of the product to a certain extent. First of all, the data basis for judging personalized recommendations must be relatively accurate. This is the premise of everything. The rules for personalized recommendations must be what they are, and the algorithm must be updated in a timely manner. Secondly, the author does not recommend that all content that users see after entering the product is personalized recommendations. It is recommended that some modules in the product have personalized recommendations, while also having other content recommendations. Because if all recommendations are personalized, users will not be able to discover many new and good topics or content, and it will eventually become a vicious circle - the content users see is always what they like to see, and there is always a limit to the amount of content they can see. Even the personalized information products that are popular nowadays are not all based on user interests. Some new content or content with higher weight is also interspersed in the user's reading list through algorithms. When the user is interested in the recommended content, this part of the content will become part of the personalized recommendation. So, don't be superstitious about personalized recommendations.

To summarize the first three points: the operation of content-based products requires finding good content, then packaging this content, and understanding what types of users are best to recommend this content to.

4. Operation mode: disassembly, combination and packaging

When operating content-based products, the most common tasks are content operation , event operation , and user operation . Content operation is the basic job. You must find good content, dig it out, and then recommend it to users in a brand new way, giving users more choices and ways to play.

When recommending content to users, there are many different ways of operating, such as using activities to recommend content, disassembling the original content, recombining it, or packaging the content, etc. Skillfully designing and applying these methods will be of great help to operations.

Activities: This is a common method used by major content products at present. If it is free content, it is generally discussed, voted on, or shared in a new form after packaging, etc. The main purpose is to increase user activity or promote products. If it is paid content , they will generally take advantage of hot spots, create a gimmick, and then give users discounts. Basically, this behavior has some effect on price-sensitive users and is a simple and crude approach. I don't really recommend this approach, but for the sake of sales, I have to do it occasionally.

Special topics/albums: The special topics mentioned here are more of the ones that are thought out by content operations colleagues. They compile strongly related content into special topics and recommend them to users. Generally, topics are combined with hot topics, or with the recommended ideas of operations, using hot topics to hype up a topic and push related content. There are also similar albums in some products, but the content of these albums is mainly generated by user UGC. Users will integrate the content they think is good into albums in a certain theme and share them within the product, such as playlists and book lists of certain products.

Column: When many content-based products grow bigger, in order to give users a certain sense of freshness and excitement, the content will be split up or combined and some columns will be planned. A typical example is Baidu Knows, where you will find many interesting small columns, including "Knows Daily", "Truth Question and Answer Machine", "Knows Big Data ", etc., which are all contributed by operations staff or high-end users; another example is iReader, which has also done some interesting columns - "Bookworm Q&A", "Solar Terms", etc., which are all columns edited by iReader operations staff themselves. There are also some information content products that use users' wonderful comments or the language of characters in the information as highlights to recommend columns, which is also a practice of disassembling and repackaging. This type of column plays a relatively long-tail role and will not be of much help in improving the overall product, but it will play a certain role in promoting user reputation and user activity. Personally, I think that if you have the energy, you can create some columns or columns like this to let users experience the depth and richness and diversity of the products. At the same time, such columns tend to have better dissemination.

Content integration: Currently, you can find many audio and video content products, and you can see a lot of text content, such as movie reviews and music reviews; reading products sometimes also have video content. In fact, each form of content has its own unique charm and usage scenarios. A good operator should be able to integrate various contents, learn from each other's strengths and overcome each other's weaknesses, and use appropriate content presentation methods at appropriate times, which will be of great help in improving operations.

Monthly subscription: This monthly membership fee method is already very common for many video users. Operators will set some content as paid content, or add longer advertisements before and after free content. In order to see richer content or have a better viewing experience, users will choose to recharge and purchase membership. For some audio or reading products, the income from monthly memberships has become a large part. At present, in addition to membership, many products have launched super membership monthly packages, which basically re-classify the original membership rights and interests, which is a practice of changing the name but not the substance. Of course, it also reflects to a certain extent the anxiety of operations and products about the revenue from content-based products.

There are also some other operating methods, such as various game -like task mechanisms in live broadcasts; barrage interactions in videos; content reward mechanisms, etc. These are new tricks that operators have come up with in recent years. All of them are intended to stimulate users to be more active and consume more.

5. Establish connections - users, interactions, and feelings

The author believes that all content products provide information to users and meet certain needs of users; whether it is the need to consume time, or the need to obtain value, etc. At the same time, content creators create content mostly to gain recognition and support from others. Therefore, the operation of content-based products should actually focus more on user psychology.

Speaking of content-based products, Zhihu is actually a really good product. At the same time, it reflects some of people's psychological needs to the extreme, allowing users to express their opinions very conveniently on Zhihu, and to like and follow other users. Therefore, the author believes that Zhihu is almost an evolved version of Douban , and will have relatively strong vitality and later commercial value. Of course, both Zhihu and Douban are very distinctive content-based products, and both hope to connect users through content.

In fact, if content products can allow users to participate in various ways, it will be a very good experience for users. According to a survey, half of the online literature readers born after 1995 are willing to participate in the plot design of online literature. These readers are also happy to see their ideas being adopted by the authors, and are more willing to support the authors' creations. This shows the urgency for the younger generation to be able to participate in the interaction of content-based products. There are also some very interesting practices, such as NetEase News . NetEase News originally called itself "news with attitude", but now it has changed to "each with its own attitude". What makes NetEase different from other information websites is that it encourages users to express their opinions and attitudes in the product, and is also happy to see users having heated discussions about a piece of news in the product. If NetEase News can shift the enthusiasm of these users from reading and commenting on information to providing information in the future, and more vigorously expand UGC original content in its products, I believe that with the enthusiasm of NetEase users, it will be able to carve out a place among the numerous information content products.

At the same time, user loyalty of content-based products is higher than that of other types of products, and product features are particularly important. Because users have browsed or downloaded some content on your product, they can view it at any time without having to download several products to view it. In addition, the product will get to know the user better and better and recommend content based on the user's interests. So you will find that many users will install multiple e-commerce apps on their phones to compare prices, but they generally do not install multiple information or content products to view them back and forth. For example, if two products have the same content, what features would make users choose A instead of B? For a new user, it may be a good reading experience, or it may be that A has more content that he or she likes to read, or the comments in A are particularly good and many friends are willing to share their experiences. These are all factors that influence user choices. These are actually the characteristics of each product: user experience, content features, or community interaction. Content-based products must have their own characteristics or feelings in order to attract more users.

As a content-based product, if it can establish connections between users, between users and content, and between users and products, then it must be an extremely attractive product.

As an operator of content-based products, you must understand that all work revolves around user recognition of the content within the product. We mentioned five points of content operation before, and gave a brief introduction from content generation, packaging, recommendation, form to post-production. Once again, all operational work needs to be based on data. Each product has its own differences, and operators must "be bold in experimenting and be careful in collecting evidence."

This article was compiled and published by @陈辉(Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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