5 minutes to understand the rules of Zhihu

Zhihu's traffic ranks 28th among domestic websites, with 17 million users and an average of nearly 100 million UVs per month. Many friends around me said that now they no longer use search engines to search for anything but go to Zhihu to search, because the high-quality answers on Zhihu are more professional, so answers that can provide high-quality content are very popular. This also shows that Zhihu is a very suitable channel for knowledge marketing .

But why do some people’s answers on Zhihu always have no effect, while others can continuously obtain accurate traffic? In fact, it is because I don’t have a basic understanding of Zhihu’s rules.

Today's article will introduce you to Zhihu's rules, including Zhihu's dynamic ranking mechanism, message mechanism and Zhihu's anti-cheating mechanism. As long as you clearly understand these rules, you can triple your results.

1. Dynamic ranking mechanism of Zhihu answers

We often see on Zhihu that some answers with tens of thousands of likes are ranked behind answers with only a few hundred likes. This is the special mechanism of Zhihu that distinguishes it from traditional forums and BBSs that simply rank based on posting time or number of likes. This mechanism gives high-quality answers that are posted later more opportunities to be exposed. So how is Zhihu's ranking algorithm calculated? This algorithm is called the Wilson algorithm. The formula is too complicated to explain here. I will just explain how it works.

Let’s first take a look at what Huang Tao, a product designer at Zhihu, said in his product column:

For example, if there is a new answer, you can get a good ranking in a short time by getting your friends to like it. However, if the quality is not very good and new users do not buy your answer and click on "dislike", the ranking of this answer will be recalculated and it may return to a lower position.

In addition, more complex experience weights based on the topics that users are good at are added. For example, Zhang Jun is good at Internet topics and there are multiple high-quality answers under this topic. Then the weight of his vote in the Internet topic is higher than the vote of ordinary users like Mantou. Maybe his one vote is equivalent to 100 votes of Mantou (this data is made up by me, just for the convenience of understanding, don't take it seriously). Therefore, if you have the chance on Zhihu, it would be very helpful to hook up with the big V and have a chance to ask him to like your answer, which will increase the exposure of your answer.

Therefore, in the future we will see that newly created content that is more popular with users will have the opportunity to get more likes and quickly get ranked higher, while low-quality content will remain at the bottom for a long time. Factors that affect the ranking include likes and dislikes. Not all answers will eventually receive a lot of votes. Generally speaking, answers with a larger total number of votes will still be ranked ahead of answers with fewer votes. Therefore, if you want to do a good job in Zhihu marketing, you must first ensure that your content is liked by users, so that you will have more exposure opportunities.

2. Zhihu message mechanism

Zhihu news is divided into 4 categories: new answers to people I follow, questions and columns; new people who follow me; likes and thanks I receive; and private messages. Other Zhihu EDM emails, daily selections, etc. are not discussed here.

Zhihu’s following mechanism, under normal circumstances, the default setting for Zhihu messages is: receive messages from everyone. It allows users to pay attention to new answers to questions that interest them, and also gives new answers more exposure opportunities.

1. People, questions and columns you follow : New answers to people, questions or columns you follow will appear in your message list. This is actually a permitted message notification that pushes content that the user is interested in. The opening rate of this type of message is relatively high. What I want to say here is that the updates that people you follow give to other people will appear in the information flow on the homepage.
2. New followers : All new followers will receive message notifications. If you feel there are too many messages, you can choose to block them.
3. Likes and thanks received : This means that your answers or comments have received new likes or thanks. The thanks here have no effect on the ranking.
4. Private messages : This includes system messages and private messages within the site. Private messages within the site are used for some system notifications of Zhihu, or private messages between users. Zhihu separates it out to prevent important information from being drowned out by other information.

In order to reduce the inconvenience caused by push notifications to users due to low-quality answers that users don't like, Zhihu also has a mechanism similar to grayscale testing. Simply put, when there is a new answer under a question, not all people who choose to follow this question will receive the notification immediately. Instead, a small number of people will receive the notification first, and the decision whether to push the message to more people will be based on the votes of this small number of people. If the small number of people who receive the notification first think that the answer is great and more people choose to like it, the system will push the message of this answer to other people. If the small number of people who receive the notification first think that the answer is poor and more people choose to ignore or oppose it, the message of this answer will not be pushed to more people.

For example, a classmate answered the question "How to introduce yourself during an interview" on July 24. No one liked his answer at that time, so I did not receive any message notification.

In the next 1-2 days, his answer was seen by the people who received the message reminder and chose to like it, then it would be pushed to more people, so I received a reminder of his answer on July 25th.

Well, we see that even if you choose to follow answers to more questions, if the content is not liked by users, your answer will not be pushed to everyone. Therefore, when answering questions, you need to be able to attract their interest within a few seconds, make them want to read on, and finally choose to like your answer to get more exposure opportunities. For example, this answer attracted the readers' attention and gained their approval within a few sentences, and then it gained a more prominent position, attracted more readers' attention, and gained more approval.

I won’t go into detail in today’s article, but will write an article to provide additional explanation later.

If you think the information is unimportant, you can selectively block it in Personal Settings - Messages and Emails. We can see that all the messages pushed by Zhihu are customized by users themselves, and they choose the content they are interested in for message push. This message model can obtain very vertical user traffic when answering related questions. Therefore, when selecting a topic, we must carefully analyze the status and scenario of the people who pay attention to this issue.

For example, let’s analyze the Zhihu question “How did you change your career? Is it easy to change careers? 》What types of people pay attention to this question? There are ① those who have already changed their careers and have experience in changing careers ② those who want to change careers but are hesitant. For those who want to change their careers, they may read every answer to this question one by one. They will read all the news about this question, which will increase the exposure of your answer. Therefore, understanding Zhihu's messaging mechanism can give your answers several times or even dozens of times more exposure opportunities, allowing you to obtain more vertical traffic and carry out low-cost, high-quality knowledge marketing.

3. Zhihu’s anti-cheating mechanism

Zhihu's anti-cheating mechanism is a means of purifying the community, designed to prevent someone from using the same account to answer questions in the Zhihu community within a short period of time, thereby lowering the quality of Zhihu answers. So if we want to market through Zhihu, we must understand this mechanism to avoid being blocked by the system.

① Under what circumstances will the anti-cheating mechanism be activated?

If you copy and paste the answer from somewhere else and then click on the answer directly, you will find that your account has been blocked by the anti-cheating mechanism after a while.

Another situation is that if you post answers intensively in a short period of time, for example, if you answer 3 questions in a row within 10 minutes, you will also be blocked by the anti-cheating mechanism.

② How to avoid being blocked by anti-cheating mechanisms

For the first case, Zhihu's anti-cheating mechanism is calculated based on the length of time the page is viewed. If the page stay time is too short and only one question is answered, it will easily trigger the anti-cheating mechanism; if you copied it from somewhere else, it is recommended that the page stay time be more than 30 minutes. I call it the "page stay principle."

For the second situation, you should answer at different times. For example, if you want to answer 3 questions in one day, you can choose to post them in the morning, afternoon and evening. This will not easily trigger the system's anti-cheating mechanism. Of course, you must also follow the page stay principle while staggering the times.

③What should I do if my account is blocked by the anti-cheating mechanism?

If your account is accidentally "harmed" by the anti-cheating mechanism, you can follow the method in the picture and send a text message to unblock your account. However, there is a high possibility that the questions you answered before will be deleted, and the mobile phone number used to send the text message will be bound to this Zhihu account by default. You must be more careful when posting later, because the first punishment is only a temporary ban, which will be lifted by sending a text message. The second punishment will ban your answering rights for 24 hours, and the third time may result in a permanent ban.

In order to prevent your account from being permanently blocked, you need to bind your mobile phone number and some social accounts, such as Weibo, WeChat and QQ. Completing the information can increase the system's trust in you and raise the upper limit of tolerance.

If your answer is unfortunately deleted due to the effectiveness of the anti-cheating mechanism, you need to contact the Zhihu butler, explain the situation and let the butler solve it for you. This is when it comes to luck. Try all the means you can, including acting cute, coercion, inducement, etc., but don't make the housekeeper angry, because the chance of success is only about 50%.

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The author of this article @踏浪100 compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!