Three major trends in new media operations in 2017

On November 16, 2017, Penguin Think Tank and Tencent News jointly released the "2017 China New Media Trend Report".

Mobile Internet has brought about changes in user consumption habits and the popularization of content creation throughout society. Professional institutional media and booming self-media have built a new content boundary. These changes have had a huge impact on the new media industry, and the operating methodologies in the future will also be iterated accordingly.

The 68-page "2017 China New Media Trends Report" (hereinafter referred to as the "Report"), which surveyed 90,000 people, revealed new trends in future operations from three perspectives: users, content and technology.

According to the report data, 76.5% of netizens obtain news information mainly from news websites/apps, 51% from social applications, television accounts for 33.6%, and newspapers and magazines account for only 11.9%.

The deep penetration of the Internet , smart phones, and various mobile terminals in people's lives and the fast pace of life in modern society have changed people's reading habits. Compared with the past, news information and social apps on mobile phones help people obtain information more conveniently, efficiently, easily, and without time and space restrictions. The massive amount of information on the small screen can fill fragmented time at any time, giving people a sense of satisfaction in making full use of their time.

The usage rate of more than half of social applications also means that the media attributes of social networks in information dissemination are increasing. Various social applications are no longer just tools for communication and establishing interpersonal relationships, but have also become an important channel for obtaining daily information content.

The report points out that the new generation of users is a brand-new species. Their interest-oriented content consumption, social accompaniment, fully mobile daily life, and weak purpose reading, combined with consumption upgrades, will lead to more content needs and scenarios. This consumption trend will also expand to all age groups.

The weak purpose of user information reading just illustrates the importance of user operation and content operation . What you see is what others want you to see. In the future, through operations focusing on "social + interest", we can "perfectly" control the "personalized" information flow that users see and achieve accurate content delivery.

According to the report, 71.9% of users will browse comments when reading content, and when looking at content forwarded by others, 65.1% of users are more willing to open content forwarded by users with the same interests or tastes.

This is another strong proof that users rely on "social + interest" to determine whether to obtain information. People are often willing to share information shared by people they identify with, and move in that direction in building their personal image. This type of identity connection based on interest tags may lead to the formation of groups of users who share a certain identity.

For operators, how to embrace the "social + interest" operation to enable users to obtain the content of their interest conveniently, quickly and without obstacles, and generate recognition of shared identity through consumption of content and participation in community behaviors such as sharing and forwarding, is the focus of future user operations.

This can be seen from the current machine-based algorithmic content recommendations of Toutiao based on people's interests, to the success of NetEase News and NetEase Cloud Music's "attitude" strategy of building social interaction and recognition through comments, which provides a glimpse of future development trends.

Future operations will inevitably be centered on the brand, with "social + interest" as the breakthrough point, obvious interest tags, unique language style, content tone, and community building to enhance user identity and participation, and gather core users.

In the past year, many apps and self-media have added live short videos and AR+VR content. According to the report, the penetration rate of video content consumption among Chinese netizens is as high as 61.8%, and 41.5% of netizens said that live broadcast content and video materials would make them believe in the authenticity of the content.

The presence of content created through live broadcast and the use of VR+AR technology have greatly increased the user's sense of immersion. In this fast-paced and fragmented era, it has prolonged people's dwelling time on content and gained more attention.

Pear Video, an information short video platform that emerged at the end of 2016, completed a Pre-A round of financing of 167 million yuan invested by People's Daily Online Fund in the past year. Toutiao's actions in the short video field have expanded from the domestic " Huoshan Video " to the full acquisition of musical.ly, which ranks third on the US short video app list, and has initially realized a global layout.

Therefore, at the content operation level, we need to embrace new technologies and, based on in-depth text content, diversify and develop content in the direction of video, audio, and even live broadcast, VR+AR, in a high-quality manner. We conduct in-depth research on the convenience, comfort, sense of presence and immersion of users in obtaining content, and meet users' increasingly high content demands through high-quality content operations that combine content and technology, thus gaining an advantage in future content operations.

One of the biggest highlights of the "2017 Tencent Media+ Summit" on November 16 was that three AI robot products, Tencent WeChat Zhiling, Tencent Translator and robot writing tool Dreamwriter, provided real-time content and reporting services to the audience on site, showing off their simultaneous interpretation and writing skills.

During the Rio Olympics, Toutiao's AI reporter Xiaomingbot connected to the IOC's database information to write news articles in real time and published them almost simultaneously with the live TV broadcasts, completing a total of more than 400 articles covering various types of events.

It is said that in the future AI writing robots will completely replace traditional editors and reporters. Saying that your writing is like that of a human would actually be a compliment.

In the future, AI writing robots will be deeply used in data-based news fields such as finance and sports to solve the problems of content production in terms of timeliness and accuracy of news. At the same time, in terms of content that is deep, unique, flexible and imaginative, human-machine collaboration is needed to complete content production. Machines help people with boring and time-consuming work of collecting and organizing information, while humans provide in-depth thinking, interviews and content mining.

To a certain extent, artificial intelligence has liberated the productivity of excellent content producers and can improve content production efficiency through human-machine collaboration. In this context of human-machine collaborative writing, operators need to improve their ability to produce in-depth content, as well as higher-dimensional creative production and creative exploration in topic selection, creativity, planning, interviews, etc., based on the current mechanized information collection for content production. Create your own content style and creative thinking, become irreplaceable by machines, complete content production tasks that require advanced intelligence, and adapt to the future new media world of human-machine integration.

The above are the new operational trends we believe may emerge in the future new media era:

❶ The operation centered on "social + interest" will focus on building the brand core and labeling content as a breakthrough point, reduce the cost for users to obtain content, gather core users through "social + interest", and generate value conversion.

❷ Embrace new technologies in content operations, integrate live broadcasts and short videos, which are more popular with users and are vivid and realistic, with VR+AR technology to create a sense of presence and immersion in the content, increase user dwell time, and gain user attention.

❸ In the era of human-machine integration, the productivity of content producers is liberated, allowing humans to focus more on higher-dimensional creative production and creative mining.

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

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