Uncover the secrets of user growth from Weibo product details

The motivation for writing this article was the doubling of Weibo’s stock price in 2016, from $12.3 on February 11, 2016 to the current price of $53.9. The overall trend has been basically on the rise, with the stock price increasing nearly five times.

For Internet products, what supports the rise in stock prices is of course the rapid growth of specific indicators such as the number of users, user activity, user usage time and payment status.

From a macro perspective, the usage habits of mobile users matured in 2016, and the explosion of short videos and live broadcasts became the absolute reasons for the explosion of Weibo users and the increase in user usage time. At the same time, Weibo itself has also made a lot of optimizations in advertising based on short videos and precise segmentation based on user data.

In addition, this article would like to talk about my exploration of Weibo product details to discover the micro reasons for growth. A small detail can reveal a big picture. Any product, after completing its positioning and confirming its goals, needs to achieve growth by refining product details. At the same time, details also reflect the design ideas of the product. Whether choosing experience or growth, you can get a glimpse of these points.

Video: Related recommendations + continuous playback

On the Weibo app, if you click on a video in any post, after you finish watching one, the next similar video will start playing automatically. This association is usually based on the content theme. For example: funny videos, dance videos and so on. And this operation is extremely simple. Just keep swiping upwards and video content on the same topic will continue to play.

This type of short video with related recommendations and continuous playback meets the users' needs for aimless entertainment on Weibo. Unconsciously, you will spend a lot of time watching videos, and you can't stop at all.

At the same time, this kind of related recommendation can increase the exposure of video content for some users who have a small number of fans and not much communication ability, and can also bring more fans and continuously generate attention.

Knowledge value: payment + reward + follow the author

If you read some articles written by big Vs on Weibo PC, you will also find some little tricks on the products. There are two most representative ones:

First: paid Q&A, 1 yuan to watch.

As for paid Q&A, the current Fenda seems to be more professional and focused, but in terms of the number of fans and celebrity effect, Weibo has inherent advantages, so the launch of this feature by Weibo can only be said to be very appropriate. For knowledge-based big Vs, it is indeed a very natural way to monetize.

Weibo has integrated the platform, fans, knowledge, communication, and payment into a question-and-answer format for content sales business model . Within the existing ecosystem, it neither disturbs others nor allows knowledge to generate wealth, while increasing platform profits. In the future, when paying for knowledge becomes more and more the norm, if Weibo can operate more intelligently in this regard, this point should become a very large growth point.

Second: rewarding articles and providing content incentives.

Rewards have become a standard feature of article content. Whether it is an article on a WeChat public account or a content creation platform such as Jianshu and 36Kr , all have a reward function. This feature of Weibo is not original, but one thing you need to note is that the default reward amount for Weibo articles is 9.9 yuan, which is higher than other platforms. At the same time, I tried many times to set the random amount, which was between 5 and 20 yuan. Although the number of users who give rewards is not high, the higher price alone will provide a certain incentive for the author. According to data provided by Weibo, the number of rewards in the third quarter of 2016 exceeded 2 million. Assuming the average reward for a piece of content is 5, this is equivalent to 400,000 articles being rewarded and about 50,000 to 100,000 authors being motivated. This is growth brought about by a product point in content.

Third: Follow the author and read the full text.

If you are reading a forwarded article and do not follow the author, there will be a prompt at the bottom of the article: "There is XX% more exciting content, follow the author and read the full text." Usually users will click and continue reading the article. At this time, they are assumed to follow the author and become a fan. This is terrifying when you think about it. Unconsciously, the number of accounts I follow keeps increasing as I read articles.

During the Spring Festival, due to constant browsing of Weibo, I gained dozens of new followers every day. This method provides a huge fan growth effect for text content creators. Once a big V forwards an article, it is possible to bring in tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands or millions of fans. This positive incentive effect and the invisible provision of more content to users are both invisible means of increasing user stickiness and relevance.

Advertisement: Vertical influencer + video placement + #topic creation#

Vertical influencers are now more prominent in cosmetics, clothing and travel. By utilizing the live broadcast platform , Weibo directly directs traffic to stores through the “live broadcast + internet celebrity + e-commerce method”, forming a new internet celebrity advertising model. For example: In July 2016, Yizhibo achieved sales of more than twice that of Double Eleven 2015 in less than 2 hours by directing traffic to Midea’s store on JD.com through Weibo.

As for video ads, Weibo cooperates with some video providers to adopt the pre-video roll model . For example, by cooperating with the official Weibo accounts of sports and entertainment programs, Weibo provides live broadcast tools , and the platform shares the revenue based on the number of ad views. Achieve a win-win situation for the media, Weibo platform and advertisers.

Another product point that cannot be ignored is the topic. Through the two # signs, a topic with label characteristics and spreadability is formed, which brings together relevant users and fans to spread the topic . Advertisers can create topics and conduct primary and secondary dissemination on the Weibo platform through careful planning. These have provided Weibo with a large amount of advertising revenue.

From the above product details, we can see that Weibo's growth is due to both its grasp of the general trend of short videos, live broadcasts, and internet celebrities, as well as the growth support from product details. Both are indispensable.

From the perspective of growth, Weibo products still have room for improvement. According to Cao Guowei's prediction, reaching 400 million active users in 2018 should be considered a relatively reasonable estimate.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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