What should you do to plan an event that will go viral on WeChat Moments?

How to create an event that will go viral on WeChat Moments ? Have you ever thought about this question? The article shares some ideas and entry points on how to create such activities. Let’s take a look.

Since I started working, I often see other companies come up with some big events that go viral, from the early event marketing activities to the H5 in the past two years. All of them have left a deep impression on us. While we marvel at these excellent ideas, our bosses will almost 100% say, "Look at them..."

Well, there is an activity called other people’s activities.

"Wu Yifan is about to join the army? ! 》

" Xue Zhiqian didn't write jokes for 2 months, and ended up with a big trick"

Almost every time such a hot event, topic or activity is brought out for analysis and discussion in the industry, it is not that we do not have the resources, nor is there a high threshold for technology. The key point still lies in ideas and creativity, so designing a good theme becomes particularly important.

Theme is a relatively abstract concept. In a broad sense, it refers to positioning, strategy, and self-propagation. In a narrow sense, it refers to title , copywriting , and slogan.

For many user acquisition and brand marketing activities, what we are actually fighting is a war for user attention. On this basis, we also expect users to help us with secondary dissemination, and then obtain the most word-of-mouth and traffic .

In today's society, each of us faces countless information shocks, and the brain's ability to process information is limited. In order to protect the brain from being overloaded, there must be something like a filter. The scientific name of this filter is "hippocampus", which is mainly responsible for cognition, memory and filtering invalid information .

If we want more people to pay attention to what we want to express, we must fight against this filter and strive to make the theme of our activity penetrate the brain filter and reach the "user attention area", thus completing the first step, that is, "being discovered by users."

So how to complete the second step of "spread by users"? There is no reason for users to do things for you without any reason. You must provide benefits to users. Of course, wealthy companies with deep pockets will design things like forwarding lotteries. Let's not talk about the cost issue for now. Under the premise that users simply disdain large-scale lottery fraud today, if the trust issue cannot be solved, the communication effect will inevitably be affected. Even if you let users share on social media , do you believe that they will delete it the next second after receiving the reward?

Therefore, the way to play on the Internet is to provide people with "social currency" instead of providing them with RMB.

So what is the "user focus area" and what is the "spreading social currency"?

The user focus area, in layman's terms, is the content area that the user is interested in.

Spreading social currency can be simply explained as topics of conversation, personal expression, image building and common topics.

First ask yourself, under what circumstances will we be attracted and motivated to share?

The easiest way to find the answers to these two questions is to look at Weibo and Moments . After all, these two social media are the main battlefields for marketing today. They are also information sharing places where a large number of users gather. Businesses of all sizes are competing for users' attention in these two places. By looking at what you pay attention to and what you often click to repost, comment and leave messages on, you can know where your attention area is.

The same applies to sharing. When other people are sharing content, first guess their motivation for sharing, and then talk to them. You can also look through your past Weibo posts and Moments to figure out why you shared them in the first place. Please note that it is a voluntary and proactive sharing behavior, and not for work or social needs.

Everyone’s focus areas and motivations for sharing are different. Don’t you think this is nonsense? This is not nonsense. This is a scientific way of learning. If you pay special attention and keep thinking about it, you will be able to summarize the common features after seeing more. The marketing sense is established by shifting from "paying attention to yourself" to "paying attention to users".

In summary, the design theme must meet two requirements: 1. Being discovered by users, 2. Being spread by users . Being discovered by users is already excellent. If it can meet these two conditions at the same time, it must be a wonderful theme.

After summarizing by countless senior experts in the marketing industry, I collected and sorted them out and summarized them into six major routines.

1. Popular Information

Commonly known as gossip, there will be different popular information in different time periods, such as sports events (World Cup, Champions League, NBA Finals), popular TV series (Empresses in the Palace, Nirvana in Fire, In the Name of People ), social hot spots (SARS, Under the Dome, Apple conference), various festivals (traditional ones such as Spring Festival, National Day and artificial ones such as Tmall Double 11 , JD 618, and the anniversary of a certain event). Everything that is going on at the moment will break through the filter and reach the user's attention area.

Popular information is naturally contagious, and people's focus is essentially on pursuing a sense of security. If everyone knows it and you don't, it means that you will be out of touch socially. Imagine when everyone is having a heated discussion about something at a gathering and you can't get a word in at all, it must be very embarrassing. People are motivated to share because they want something to talk about, and popular information naturally becomes a social currency for dissemination.

How to get popular information? Weibo Moments is only a part of it. The real data speaks for itself in Baidu, WeChat Index , hot words, Weibo hot list, etc. These are important tools to help us understand current hot information. Many self-media big Vs are desperately trying to take advantage of the trend and get twice the result with half the effort if they do a good job.

2. Long-term interests

Beauty, money and food are the three most human elements. They have long occupied an important position in the public mind. Many businesses use these three elements to design posters and copywriting. On this basis, users can be further divided into many categories according to different dimensions. We are young and strong, so we don’t pay attention to health care, but our parents are flocking to it. Boys pay more attention to sports events, while girls pay more attention to entertainment gossip. By understanding the composition and preferences of our user groups, we can reach the users' attention areas.

Long-term interests may not be effective in terms of dissemination. Not everyone will display these on social media, causing people to misunderstand them as lustful, money-loving, and greedy. It’s okay for some points to attract people, but there may be problems with their dissemination. On the contrary, they are easier to flow in some private scenes (you know).

Some hobbies that can help users shape a positive image of themselves are more suitable to appear on social media, such as: fitness, reading, and learning. Attraction is the first step, and dissemination is the second step. If you want to implement the second step, you must help users create a positive image.

How to gain the long-term interest of your user base?

• First, look at the data, a large amount of user portraits and market report data.
• The second is to turn yourself into a typical user, and your own needs become the needs of a part of the user group.
• The third is to understand and interview typical user groups to obtain more valuable information.

All three points need to be implemented. Using only one method is often not comprehensive enough. Whether it is operation or marketing, it is a competition of who understands the preferences of their target user groups better and then designs the content in a targeted manner.

3. Benefits

Interests and benefits can be consistent, but when it comes to motivation, the starting points are different. Some people really like it (for example: fitness, reading, writing articles), while some people have to do it because of various needs (for example: drinking with others, taking medicine, doing research). In many scenarios, we often spend a lot of energy doing things we are not interested in in order to do things well.

Personal interests are often time-sensitive, some are long-term and some are short-term. Job seekers are writing resumes, buying masks on smoggy days, scrambling for tickets during the Spring Festival travel rush, students are applying for college entrance exams, office workers are checking traffic before going out, and farmers are paying attention to the weather forecast...there are so many scenarios.

If we can grasp the users' ever-changing interests, we will naturally be able to enter the users' attention areas. I vaguely remember that the first promotion of Cheetah Browser was using a train ticket grabbing plug-in, which used technical means to solve the problem of buying tickets during the Spring Festival travel rush, and thus received a large number of downloads.

At the communication level, it depends on the user's identity and value demands. For example, if I discovered a secret to making money, I would not share it publicly if I could do it. Many things that involve one's own interests are often only spread within one's own interest circle.

Employees will publicly share that “ineffective overtime 996 is harmful to efficiency” and “talent is the core competitiveness”, and managers will publicly share “hardworking and dedicated to their jobs” and “please give me results”. If we want users to help us spread our content, we need to consider whether our content can be tied to the users’ vital interests.

Some sharing behaviors have obstacles. If we can find the obstacles and clear them, we can cleverly give them social currency for sharing. I have seen a business case where, when baby diapers were first introduced to the market, the main slogan of the advertisement was “convenient and saves trouble”, but housewives were under pressure and would not forward the advertisement. The reason is simple: they are worried that others will think they are lazy, which will leave a bad impression in the family. Later, diapers changed their marketing positioning, focusing on "clean and hygienic", and housewives were willing to forward them. I buy diapers to protect my baby's skin, not to be lazy.

Finding obstacles requires insight, and clearing them requires skills, both of which can be trained through daily behavior.

The users' vital interests are there. We need to understand the composition and interest structure of our target user groups and choose the method that will work best.

4. Emotional belonging

A lot of content is produced every day. Behind the attention paid to these contents, there must be some point that can hit the hearts of a certain user group. One type is emotional output, such as don’t bully the poor young people, the CTO being fired, and the human trafficker being sentenced to death; the other type is a sense of belonging, such as school, (former) company, region, fan group, etc. The expression of strong emotions (joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, fear, and surprise) brings with it attention (why is this person like this, what happened); the sense of belonging brings with it the attention of the corresponding group; you only need to hit the points of a group of users to enter their attention zone.

Once the user's emotions are aroused, the spread of the content is a natural thing. Behind all the popular content, there is often a big topic that has been hit, such as Mimi Meng 's "To the Bitch". Most people are naturally often troubled by bitches in their lives, while those who automatically identify themselves as "bitches" will not spread the content.

There are also some with narrower scopes, such as "The War on Internet Addiction", which moved me to tears and I forwarded it while writing a long emotional paragraph. However, those people who are indifferent are definitely not demons! beast! Play! Home!

Those who can stir up people's emotions are naturally masters. Emotions naturally attract attention. Users with a sense of belonging will spread them, while users without a sense of belonging will simply ignore them.

5. Social comparison

Where there are people, there are comparisons, comparisons of appearance, figure, talent, IQ... All those who are outstanding will inevitably attract attention, such as beautiful women, men with six-pack abs, artists, and the child next door who got 100 points in the exam. Extraordinary things in the crowd always bring their own traffic.

Comparison will also form two camps and a chain of contempt. The most common one is the dispute between the salty party and the sweet party. As long as there is comparison, it can be upgraded to confrontation. Whether it is actively taking sides or just watching the fun, these things can easily enter the user's attention area.

Traditional e-commerce can completely use this kind of confrontation between camps to generate sales behavior. Of course, there are naturally people in the gaming circle who have done similar activities.

When it comes to communication and sharing, everyone has the desire to express themselves and shape their social image, especially those who stand out from the crowd, who post and show off their images all day long.

In order to make users appear "outstanding", we naturally have to provide them with opportunities for comparison. For example, many small games are about seeing who can persist longer, such as testing who you are in "The Legend of Zhen Huan", or how many episodes you can survive... Many things are very boring to play alone, but once comparison is added, they can cause a lot of dissemination. Comparison is the natural social currency of communication.

Pursuing a relatively comprehensive theme event will most test the planner's skills and resources. Skills lie in insight, and resources are the costs you have to spend to start this event.

6. Contrasting content

UC's shocking department made a grand appearance, and the headline parties celebrated their debut. Of course, that was a very low-level strategy. Almost everyone knows that “man bites dog is news”, and this kind of contrasting content naturally attracts attention. The question is how to make it?

Content has four quadrants, with familiarity and unfamiliarity at the two ends of the X-axis and normal and contrast at the two ends of the Y-axis. Users don’t care about unfamiliar things. Whether it is normal or contrast, it will not enter the attention area. Users are more concerned about familiar things, and once contrasting information can be created, it can gain attention. Whenever possible, use familiar things to create contrasting results.

In short, as long as we can make something unexpected, unpredictable, and inconsistent with expectations, then we have achieved our goal. Just pick a title like "How did he, a high school graduate, successfully buy a house in Beijing after working hard for five years after graduation" - this kind of title will induce strong suspense.

Suspense induction can win clicks and enter the user's attention area. However, in order to complete forwarding and dissemination, it is necessary to give users social currency for dissemination. Jokes and memes are one way, but this is more likely to be superficial. For example, he seriously describes how he worked hard and twisted for the past five years, and finally got together 100,000 yuan and bought a house with the 4.9 million yuan given by his parents. This kind of joke is not sophisticated, just laugh it off and there will be no more.

The advanced approach is to provide "cognitive refresh", that is, after the user finishes reading, he or she thinks about it and feels "Wow, that makes so much sense!".

A unique insight and idea often has this kind of reward effect. For example, Mr. Li Xiaolai’s “Redefine” series often refreshes user cognition. After reading this kind of content, users are very excited and get reading rewards, and social currency is naturally formed by spreading it.

Low-level contrasting content can easily become vulgar and may have statistical effects, but it may damage the brand image. High-level content production is more difficult, but it can often enhance the brand image.

In summary, popular information, long-term interests, benefit needs, emotional belonging, social comparison, and contrasting content generally have their own attention. It is not difficult to enter the user's attention zone, but it takes some thought to complete the dissemination.

Over the years, we have come across many activities that are very interesting at a glance.

• For example, a beer company invited the Chinese men's football team to watch a game in Rio de Janeiro, and the event took place during the World Cup.
• For example, Xin Shixiang ’s “Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou” campaign took place just after housing prices skyrocketed.
• For example, Chai Jing's "Under the Dome" was set in a year when the smog was the most severe.

A careful analysis of the themes behind these fanatical activities reveals that their content basically hits on many of the points listed above.

Before any communication begins, you must consider the issue from the user's perspective. Don't rush to sell your products. Start from the areas that users are concerned about. Before making any plans, you must assume that users don't care about you and have no intention of spreading the word. Only in this way can you do a good job of planning.

At the same time, the six points listed in the article can also be used as a self-checklist to check whether an activity theme is excellent. When we design the theme of an event with the attitude of creating content, we should prioritize attention and then think about how to increase its dissemination.

Of course, traditional wealthy companies can appeal to interests in everything, spend money to buy traffic to ensure information delivery, and forward and draw prizes to ensure information dissemination; but this kind of competition strategy is a resource-crushing type, just like the advertisers who desperately auctioned off CCTV's prime time, and it does not contain any intellectual content.

Another possible result is that forcibly appearing next to users and desperately emphasizing how important you are may be more likely to cause the opposite example. An extreme case is that when we see a bad advertisement, we will change the channel and even develop brand aversion. For example, when there was the Hengyuanxiang 12 zodiac advertisement, I swore that I would never consume these products that have harassed me in my life.

Many things are easy to explain in a simple way, but very difficult to explain in a deep way. The above six points are just the author’s summary at present, and there is still a lot of room for upgrading and iteration in the future. Some knowledge points and cases come from Li Jiaoshou ’s articles and marketing books such as "Go Viral", "Social Currency", and "Making Creativity Stickier".

As the opening of the activity series, marketing knowledge is madly instilled in the dimension of theme.

At the same time, the subsequent modules such as rewards, rules, publicity, costs, risks, data, execution, and review will also be produced in the form of a series of articles. Here is a preview that the length of each module is roughly the same as this article.

As a practitioner who pursues the ultimate in business, what I have always pursued is to solve various problems by building the most advanced knowledge system and designing methodology no matter how the environment, scenarios, carriers, and forms of expression change.

You should not only look at anything, but also try to practice it deliberately so that it can become your own.

So, no matter what industry you are in, you might as well do this exercise:

1. Collect the hottest activities in the industry that have dominated the screen in the past;
2. Analyze how the corresponding user groups are attracted and how willing they are to complete the communication behavior;
3. Try to summarize some commonalities and see if they can be used by you.
4. Create routines and tools that can be used by the team;