Bilibili Operations: How to grow from 0 to millions of followers?

With the explosive growth of the video industry, ordinary people also have the possibility to become internet celebrities. Among all the platforms, Bilibili (B Station) has attracted young Chinese users with its unique two-dimensional culture and original self-made content. 2 million content creators are active on the platform, covering more than 7,000 interest circles, creating a unique UGC community and attracting more young people who want to start content businesses to join. So, what kind of community is Bilibili and how is it different from other platforms? How can content creators build accounts with millions of followers based on their personal interests? How can up-hosts with fans explore commercial models and realize content monetization? In order to answer these questions, Chaos invited three B station up masters with millions of fans:

Speedy Partner: With over 10 million fans across the entire network, he focuses on automotive video content. He is one of the top 100 UP hosts on Bilibili and the only one in the top 100 UP host in the automotive section. Jacky and Da Yuzhou appeared on the same stage. Luxury cars have a price, but feelings are priceless.

Interview with Beijing Youth x Ryoko: The number of fans on Bilibili is close to one million, and the number of fans on the entire network is over 8 million. He records the lives of young people of this era, interviews hundreds of people in half a year, and his solid interviewing ability and skillful documentary techniques have made his number of fans continue to rise.

Shiba Inu Laowanzi: A Bilibili UP host with more than 1.3 million fans. He mainly provides content related to food and lifestyle. A bowl of late-night instant noodles has healed the souls of countless people. Fans commented that not only does she have a nice voice, she’s also good-looking!

The three up hosts will share their experiences in the process of video entrepreneurship to help you solve your doubts.

01 What is video content entrepreneurship?

Shiba Inu Laowanzi: I think video content entrepreneurship is simply about using high-quality video content to attract audiences and realize commercial value. When most people hear the term “high-quality content,” they think we need to create some original content. But I don’t think so. Sometimes, secondary processing of some content may also become high-quality content. From a business perspective, both original and non-original creations can be developed. In the later stage, the routes of the two are different. In the long run, the benefits of original creation will be greater and more lasting, the threshold will be higher, and the moat will be deeper, but the chance of failure in the early stage will also be greater.

Speedy Partner: I don’t think we need to deify content entrepreneurship. Content entrepreneurship has actually existed since ancient times, from books to radio, television, and movies...it’s just that it used to be a one-way form of communication, but now it is a highly interactive form. Video content creators can receive real-time feedback from comments, barrages, and private messages. They can also find out at which point the audience has the highest bounce rate from the interactive data provided by the video platform, etc., which helps us understand our own content from a multi-dimensional perspective and use audience feedback to help us improve the content.

Ryoko: I think content entrepreneurship is a very good, low-threshold entrepreneurial opportunity provided to us in this era. You can do it part-time, and you don’t have to treat it as a startup project, but just as a hobby. You can choose your favorite track, food, travel, very niche two-dimensional, all areas can be involved.

02 Is there still a chance if I enter the market now?

Shiba Inu Laowanzi: The answer is yes. There has always been a demand for high-quality content, and the price of content traffic has been rising. Although each platform has its own life cycle, from the perspective of the entire industry, the monetization value of content traffic still has a lot of room for growth. Why? Because content creation also conforms to the 80/20 rule, high-quality content is always scarce.

Ryoko: There is definitely a chance.

First, UGC content is the foundation of platforms such as Bilibili and Douyin. Content is the ammunition of video platforms. Compared with PGC content that is produced with money, the massive amount of content generated by UGC is the foundation and core competitiveness of major platforms. Therefore, major platforms have also formulated a lot of incentive policies to help content creators develop and monetize better.

Second, the platform needs more different UGC content. Take Bilibili as an example. In the past 10 years, the content of Bilibili has been relatively niche and its user base is relatively limited. Therefore, it hopes to attract older users or non-urban, more down-to-earth users, so Bilibili is in great need of diverse creators.

Therefore, thirdly, the platform will help these creators develop and monetize.

03 How to choose the platform and track?

How to choose a platform

Shiba Inu Laowanzi: There are currently six mainstream platforms: Weibo, WeChat, Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu. I think Weibo and WeChat may be relatively late. The internal hierarchies of Douyin, Kuaishou, Bilibili, and Xiaohongshu are relatively not solidified yet, and there are still newcomers who are quickly promoted to the top every year, so they are more worthy of choice.

Speed ​​Partner: In fact, the content compatibility between many platforms is already very good. For example, Bilibili has long videos, short videos, live broadcasts, pictures and texts, as well as social functions. From the perspective of creators, many people have already started cross-platform operations. Thereby expanding the influence of creators across platforms.

In 2018, when we just started our business, Bilibili was not our main base. But later we gradually focused our main energy on Bilibili. Why? Because I found a very interesting thing, which is the data.

The data on Bilibili is very real. If you operate multiple platforms at the same time, you will find that the data of some platforms, such as the number of views, interactions, and likes, are inflated to a certain extent. But I found that there is very little water in Bilibili. For example, the number of clicks counted by Bilibili is within 48 hours, and if the same user has multiple devices, only one click is counted. Also, swipes are not counted as clicks.

Real data is very important for creators to understand the quality of their content and help themselves continuously improve.

Shiba Inu Laowanzi: Bilibili has some very unique cultures, such as barrage and coin-operated comments. Audiences communicate with creators through barrages and coins, which allows me to better grasp the quality of my creations and better communicate with the audience. The content on many platforms has high click-through rates, but very little communication, which actually brings very little growth to the up-master.

Ryoko: According to the length of time, the short video track is mainly represented by Douyin and Kuaishou, and the medium video track is represented by Bilibili and Xigua Video. Here I mainly compare Douyin and Bilibili from the following six aspects:

From the table, we can see that although Douyin’s business model is relatively mature and it is relatively easy to reach one million fans, it is still difficult to make money due to the low fan stickiness and more intense competition among bloggers.

Although Bilibili’s platform size is smaller and its business model is less diverse than that of TikTok, its fans are highly sticky, so its UP hosts have stronger stable monetization capabilities. Stability is very important for a startup entrepreneur.

Therefore, before choosing a platform, you can test it on different platforms in advance, find the one that suits you best, and then start to dig deep.

How to choose a track

Shiba Inu Laowanzi: Interest is the best teacher, and persistence is the best witness. I think there are opportunities no matter which vertical track you choose. The key is to choose an area that you are familiar with or interested in. Some people may worry that the chosen field is too vertically segmented and the audience is too small. In fact, you don’t need to consider this issue at the beginning.

My wife Pi Daji and I actually ran a design company before we became up-masters. Because design companies often have a lot of DDL (deadline) pressure, when we stay up late at night to work overtime, we think about going to the kitchen to cook a delicious meal to help us relieve some of the pressure. Later we filmed the cooking process, which became an opportunity for us to start making short videos.

Speed ​​Partner: The essence of content entrepreneurship is to save users time in understanding things, so small and profound content will be easier to break through. On this basis, if there are unique values ​​that can be output to the audience, and then attract all those who agree with this thing, I think the first step is completed.

In fact, before we entered the automotive media industry, there were already many predecessors doing car reviews, and most media were working in this field. However, what we see are more boring pictures and texts or pure review content, so I took the lead in trying to make a video on this subject with a real subjective attitude and opinion to see what happens. After continuous experimentation, we found that our style has become unique and is loved by the audience.

Ryoko: I did a lot of news interviews at Phoenix.com in my early years. Later, I went to ByteDance and truly understood what content operation and algorithm recommendation are. My partner Chen Lei is actually my colleague at Phoenix.com. We hit it off right away because we both like documentaries and are interested in recording the lives of ordinary people.

We rarely see high-quality interviews with amateurs, but there is a market demand for them. Nowadays young people like to express themselves. They have become more conscious. They pay more attention to themselves and people like them, and they are more courageous to express different voices. So based on the above analysis, we felt that the amateur interviews at the time were a blue ocean with no strong players. We were confident that we could obtain traffic from amateur interviews. As long as there was traffic, monetization was possible.

04 How to ensure the continuous growth of fans?

Shiba Inu Laowanzi: If we use a quantitative indicator, such as the number of fans, to roughly divide the stages, we should have these steps.

The first stage is the starting point, when the number of fans increases from 0 to 10,000. This stage is equivalent to a nursery period, and many accounts will die during this period. During this period, we have to accomplish two things: 1. Select the districts. Whether it is food, digital or fashion. 2. Segmentation. We are all making delicious food, what characteristics should I make?

After we have completed content segmentation, we generally need to pass the 10,000 fans level. In this process, we need a small hit with more than 50,000 views. A small hit generally has to be above average in terms of story telling, topic selection, and cover title.

The second stage is the process from 10,000 to 50,000, which we call continuous and stable output and steady climb. After the first phase of trial, general creators already know what kind of videos are relatively more popular with the public, so the second phase is to continue to accumulate high-quality content in this direction.

The third stage, from 50,000 to 250,000, is when our audience has become relatively stable. At this time, our topic selection must not only take into account the requirements of the original fans, but also keep up with hot topics. We need to create some content with medium-explosive playback volume to ensure that the fan growth maintains a good growth slope and form a fan group.

The fourth stage, from 250,000 to 1 million, is when we try to make sure every punch hits the target. At this time, every video needs to reach a stable number of views in order to achieve a stable growth in fans. If the average number of views is around 200,000, then when selecting topics, 200,000 is a passing line, and you have to meet standards like 300,000 or 400,000. Otherwise, the video will only be played among fans and the number of fans cannot be increased.

The fifth stage, from 1 million to 3 million, requires creators to have very distinct personal characteristics, that is, memorable points. At the same time, they must maintain sensitivity to the topic and continuously output high-level content. Because many people are idol-chasing fans, and Bilibili also has a fan culture, it is time to further break the circle and attract more people.

Speed ​​Partner: According to traffic, it can be divided into three stages.

The first stage, the starting stage, has a traffic volume of 0 to 10,000. At this stage, I suggest that you make more low-cost attempts and observe what kind of content the audience actually likes to watch. So in the initial stage, in addition to figuring out what we want to do, we need to understand more about what the audience wants to see.

The second stage is the diversified trial stage, with traffic ranging from 10,000 to 100,000. At this stage, you already have a basic audience, but this audience may deviate from the entire market. There is a high chance that you will mistakenly assume that the preferences of this audience are the preferences of all audiences in the market.

At this point, you need to make some diversification attempts by abandoning your original audience until you find that the number of fans starts to increase. During this stage, you need to constantly make choices to find out which piece of the market you should eat. When the traffic reaches 100,000, you will find that the original 10,000 traffic was brought by "fake" fans.

In the third stage, the traffic stabilized at more than 100,000. At this time, if your number of fans is 1 million, but your number of views is only 100,000. The guy next door also has 1 million fans, but the number of views of his videos can reach 300,000 to 500,000. At this time, you need to think about it. Maybe 90% of your fans don’t like the content you shoot. Then you may need to rearrange your plan and decide which part of the content can attract more users and do some content screening.

Ryoko: Taking Bilibili as an example, I think it can be divided into six stages based on the growth of fans.

The first stage, from 0 to 10,000 fans. This stage is called the content and form exploration stage.

The second stage: 50,000 to 100,000 fans. This stage means that you have already created some small hits, and there may be some videos that can instantly increase the number of your fans by a large margin. At this time, you need to find a low-cost and efficient production model that suits you.

The third stage: 100,000 to 300,000 fans. At this point, many hot-selling products have already appeared, and you have gradually figured out a method to mass-produce hot-selling products. But at this time you have to be cautious, read more about the various content on the platform, improve the quality of content and topics, and achieve iteration.

The fourth stage: 400,000 to 500,000. If you don’t upgrade your content at this time, you will likely encounter a bottleneck. Many mid-level creators are stuck here.

The fifth stage: 500,000 to 1 million. At this time, you need to classify the content, which ones are for increasing traffic and which ones are for improving the tone, and you need to roughly grasp the ratio. So that people won’t get tired of you or look down on you.

Stage 6: more than 1 million. At this point, mid-range hits have become a daily occurrence. What is needed next is to strengthen quality, enhance cooperation, improve the ability to go beyond the circle and the influence of the account, and consider various forms of monetization.

05 What kind of content do young people like?

Ryoko: If we analyze the target audience based on the young people born after 1995, I personally have three observations.

1. The feeling of powerlessness caused by lack of faith.

A key word here is "involution". The single social evaluation system forces every young person to be involved in fierce social competition. But at the same time, this is an era of information explosion. We have seen too many inflated material desires, which have caused young people to generally develop an anxious mentality of lack of security. The self-deprecating culture of 996, lying flat, and office animals actually shows that many people are in a state of denying themselves and not finding the meaning of life.

2. Accept diverse values.

People are becoming more and more accepting of the multicultural society, such as those who do not want to get married or those who are DINKs, and are even able to accept lifestyles and values ​​that are completely opposite to their own.

3. Expect self-realization.

Although many young people talk about 996 and working people, in fact many people still have many expectations for their future life. Even if they cannot obtain it now, they still silently hope to realize their ideals.

Based on this understanding, what makes good content? it works. Good content is any content that makes people gain something from reading it, makes them happy, comforted, or relieves their stress.

Speedy Partner: The content that young people like is no different from that of the so-called middle-aged and elderly people. For example, entertaining content, movies, variety shows, or content that meets knowledge needs, such as some shopping reviews or documentaries, talk shows, and programs that can resonate with people, such as "Moving China." In fact, everyone who watches videos is pursuing these three things. I think it has nothing to do with age.

The difference between young people and middle-aged and elderly people may be that what moves them is different. Young people are more self-value oriented and pay more attention to their own thoughts and inner selves.

Shiba Inu Laowanzi: Regarding the likes and dislikes of young people, I can give three examples of things that young people hate.

1. Content that is too commercial. Advertising can be done, but it cannot be too rigid. It is necessary to use the user’s language and convey the content you want to express in a way that they can understand and accept. In fact, after many of our popular videos became popular on Douyin, the most private messages and comments we received in the background were: where can I buy this thing? If you operate Xiaohongshu, you will find that many users actually use Xiaohongshu as a shopping guide. In other words, users don’t really mind if you have advertisements, but they have very high expectations for the quality of advertising content.

2. Dogmatic and rigid content. It is very important to express opinions and knowledge in an interesting and entertaining way. How to make content interesting? For example, we often add some anime remixes into the content, or take the initiative to answer questions in the Q barrage, or tell jokes and the like. In terms of rhythm, it is best to have a hook every 30 seconds. Users' attention is easily distracted. If you cannot draw their attention back every 30 seconds, the bounce rate of the entire video will be very high.

3. There is no “human” content. For example, we have been following many accounts for a long time but we don’t know who the authors behind them are. The audience of Bilibili is actually more concerned about who this up-host is? The up-host needs to build his own personality so that users can feel more touched.

06 How are popular contents created?

Speedy Partner: Some time ago, I saw a very interesting case of public security anti-fraud. The video was called "Let Young and Dangerous do charity? The police are really bold.

The degree of this content is actually very difficult to grasp. If it is not handled well, it will not only fail to resonate with everyone, but may also attract criticism. I think the key point is that the creative team must introduce some very young blood. If the members of the production team are older, they will not be able to conform to the thinking of young people.

Ryoko: Good content may not necessarily become a hit, but a hit is definitely good content. The choice of topic and angle is very important. Secondly, continuously creating good content is a prerequisite for creating a hit product.

I think we need to have a correct attitude. It is difficult for a hit product to appear as the first piece of content you create an account. We often see some self-media accounts suddenly appearing and seem to become popular as soon as the first post is published. Then many people will also think, this doesn’t look difficult, I can do this too. But if you try it, you'll find that there doesn't seem to be any feedback.

This is a misunderstanding. We see that this account seems to have posted its first piece of content, but we don’t know what kind of long adjustment period he went through before creating this account, or what other accounts he had created before. These are things we don’t know.

Furthermore, authors in the entry and exploratory stages should listen to different opinions, read more messages and feedback on the platform, and find their own creative direction.

After reaching the intermediate level, we need to have a certain ability to control the content and have appropriate persistence. Because as the number of fans increases, there will definitely be some critical voices. This voice does not represent everyone. We need to establish our own evaluation system, and then create down-to-earth, feel the needs of the majority of people, or this society, and not be led astray by some emotional negative voices.

After reaching the advanced stage, creators will gradually find the rules of so-called hits, understand them, and consciously create some hits. For example, accounts with more than 300,000 fans on Bilibili and more than 2 million fans on Douyin should have relatively mature operating models. At this time, creators are actually required to balance and classify the content based on their personal experience, such as producing and distributing traffic-driving content and tone-enhancing content in proportion.

07 High-quality content ≠ popular content

Shiba Inu Laowanzi: There are three forms of content with good traffic.

The first type is explosively good, with a very high number of views at the beginning and it goes viral.

The second type is the long-tail type. Although this type of content is not a hot topic, it can be continuously searched and needed. We have seen many food videos with titles like "How to make XXX". After being combined with algorithms and recommendations, this video becomes a tool that is continuously viewed by long-tail users.

The third type is vertical. For example, videos about digital product reviews are destined to have a lower audience than videos about food shows. However, because the content and users are vertical enough, the conversion rate they can bring is also very high. I think this is also a kind of hot product.

So when we want to create a hit product, we might as well first judge what kind of hit product we want to create. Not all hit products need to rely on a title of 100,000+ to attract attention.

At the same time, the cruel thing is that if your video does not have sustained traffic and has not become a hit, there may really be a problem with the content. Don’t comfort yourself by saying that the time has not come yet. Find an expert in the relevant field to help you take a look. Maybe you can find the problem quickly.

Speedy Partner: Popular content does not necessarily mean good content. Good content is content with commercial value, which is reflected in two aspects:

1. Able to bring actual cash benefits.

2. It can actually bring about the effect of increasing fans.

We have seen some popular content that has a lot of traffic but does not bring in actual revenue or increase in followers. In our opinion, this kind of content may not fall under the definition of good content.

Paying attention to events and paying attention to up-masters are two different things. Creators need to continue to produce high-quality content with strong opinions and continue to interact with users in order to convert the traffic of explosive products into their own value.

08 How to choose a commercial monetization model?

Speed ​​Partner: In addition to the platform rewards, there are three main common monetization models.

The first one is brand placement. Just take the advertisement. What needs to be balanced here is how to insert advertisements without affecting credibility. As a KOL, if your opinions are influenced by money, you will actually lose the foundation of your career. Therefore, it is necessary to be very cautious when choosing which brand to cooperate with.

Sticking to your values ​​may result in losing some orders in the early stages, but it is very necessary in the long run. Once, we cooperated with a car company. At the beginning, the other party agreed to our conditions, but as we communicated later, the other party gradually asked for more and more. Finally, when we reviewed the situation, we found that we had already made so many concessions, and it even hit our bottom line in the end.

After weighing the pros and cons, we told the other party directly that we would not do this order. The situation was very embarrassing at the time, and many people were afraid to offend customers, but we still chose the values ​​we believed in and did not compromise. After many people learned about this, they became more accepting of our content. Later, some customers also began to be willing to make concessions to us.

So in many things, you have to make some mistakes first before things go smoothly.

The second type is peripheral products. For a content company, if all your revenue depends on brand placement, it is actually very dangerous, because once the platform's delivery strategy changes, your revenue will be directly affected. Therefore, we also see that many content creators are making peripheral derivatives, such as Liziqi and Yitiao. Some of the peripheral products they have derived have very good sales.

The third type is offline activities. Some of the better ones have created a closed business loop. In the automotive field, there is an account called "Nono who loves cars". They have launched an offline car-hunting business and take customers to see used cars. After buying a used car, they can also help you optimize it and find a professional team to upgrade the used car to what you want. During this process, they can continue to shoot videos and then output them online, finally completing a closed business loop.

09 Some suggestions for content entrepreneurs

Ryoko: You must love it, and you can endure the hardship.

Shiba Inu Laowanzi: To live, you must have output. Only by persisting in output can you have a chance to encounter a hit product. Do it now. Play whatever cards you have.

If you have an idea, do it now, right away. Ren Ke, the lead singer of Wu Tiao Ren, said, we will use whatever musical instruments we have, and if there are plastic buckets, we will use them. What is important? It's the music that matters, not the instrument you use.

The same is true for content entrepreneurship. Our focus is on content, not on other feasibility issues. In the end you will find that compared to content, tool problems are actually the easiest to solve.

Speedy Partners: Content entrepreneurship, or all entrepreneurship, is a kind of practice. It will take all your energy, even all your enthusiasm, to get this thing done.

Data and audience feedback are never wrong.

Don’t feel discouraged if you put a lot of effort into creating some content but no one reads it. I can tell you honestly that if the data is poor, it is really your own problem. You didn't grasp the direction well, and you didn't understand the essence of the content.

Don't follow the trend blindly or say what others say. Good creators are good at creating hot spots rather than following them. There is no second Jacky Cheung in the world. No matter how much you imitate him, you are not him.

Don't just look at the money. Content creation produces things at the value level, not the price level, but an increase in value will naturally lead to an increase in price. The rewards of persistence are often beyond imagination.

Author: Chaos Business Research Team

Source: Hundun University (ID:hundun-university)