The correct approach for content operations to conduct topic planning!

In fact, I have wanted to write an article about topic planning for a long time, but I have been procrastinating. It just so happened that the online course sharing task prompted me to turn this idea into concrete text.

I want to talk about this topic mainly after communicating with some operations partners about topic operations and experiencing some Internet product topic planning activities. It is generally found that there are certain errors in everyone's understanding of topic planning. In particular, many startups believe that topic planning can help them better create content and introduce new users, or some regard topics as content in the product. When there is such a wrong perception, operations are often prone to pitfalls.

Frankly speaking, compared to how to go viral on WeChat Moments, this theme of "The Correct Way to Plan Topics in Operations" will be much less attractive to you, but the more articles focus on niche details, the more readable they will be.

1. Topic planning from the perspective of operations

Topic planning itself is not a new subject. I’m sure everyone is familiar with this subject and should have had experience in participating in or planning topics. For example, people who work in the Internet industry should all know that on August 27, 2014, there was an incident known as the first fight in the history of the Internet, which caused a sensation on the Internet. Luo Yonghao and Wang Ziru had a fight in Chaoyang Park over various performance issues of the Hammer phone.

I mentioned this incident at the beginning of the article not to relive with you how Lao Luo beat Wang Ziru, but to reveal that Youku used the planning of the simultaneous online live broadcast (topic PK) of this fight in the history of the Internet to obtain very considerable traffic and interaction. A total of 2.5 million people logged in to watch the fight, and more than 300,000 people watched online at the same time, setting a live broadcast record and refreshing the Internet video live broadcast data. This is also the reason why everyone is obsessed with the topic planning operation method.

There are so many high-quality topic planning cases on the Internet that it would take an entire article to list them all. Tracing back to the source, what is topic planning!

When faced with a new concept, I usually study cases and then give a sufficiently general definition based on my own practical experience. I searched for the keyword "topic planning" using a search engine. There is currently no explanation of topic planning on the Internet. Let's just regard the following definition of topic planning as the first of its kind.

Topic planning: Operations are centered around hot, controversial, and in-depth topics, with scenario-based packaging planning and dissemination in the form of discussions /pk/ bullet screens, etc., to achieve the operational goals of attracting new customers, retaining existing customers, promoting activation, conversion, and branding.

When it comes to topic planning for e-commerce companies , a common approach is to conduct event marketing and offer gifts for posting purchases on social media platforms. Among them, the online video live broadcast (topic) of the war between Luo Yonghao and Wang Ziru on Youku mentioned at the beginning of the article was a rare and successful planning that achieved multiple operational objectives at the same time.

The focus of this article is on community (content-based) products, because among various types of applications, community products (sections) use topic planning operations most frequently, and it is regarded by operators as a very effective means to increase product interaction. For example, the following four community apps (community function modules) with a very large number of users have carried out topic planning during the European Cup to complete the user content contribution (activation).

Regarding how to carry out topic planning, let's not talk about the specific process first. Operations need to know the basic principles before doing anything to prevent the problem that topic planning is very successful but has little value to product operations :

1) The planned topics need to have exclusive community characteristics

2) The planned topics need to allow users to share useful information

3) The planned topics need to be converted into content units

In order to correct everyone's understanding of the correct approach to topic planning, here is a negative example: a certain women's clothing guide application, the topic planning carried out in its community section is to allow users to use tools to choose different styles of clothing and shoes according to different clothing style requirements, and share their own clothing preferences.

After experiencing the entire community and topic activities, I found two problems. One is that this community only has topic planning, and if you scroll down a few screens on the homepage, you will see past topics that have been removed from the shelves; the second is that the content generated by users' participation in the topics is not of reference for girls' outfits. The tools are used to facilitate everyone's participation in the topics, but the outfits shared by male users like me are actually a harm to the purity of the product content.

Therefore, when operators do topic planning, especially for the purpose of improving community content, they must ensure that the content generated by users in topic interactions can itself become the basic content unit in the product, just like the content shared by users of Xiaohongshu ’s topic planning can be added to the notes of the information flow . After everyone knows the core points of topic planning, we will explain how operators can carry out topic planning according to different stages of the product.

2. Topic planning for products in the initial stage

For early stage products, don’t expect to achieve massive user growth through topic discussions (except for phenomenal products). At this stage, increasing the amount of content in the product is the primary operational priority.

Only when the product has 100,000 users and the daily content output is above 100, can weekly topic planning in the community improve the effect of content volume. At this time, there are two tips for topic planning that I would like to share with you: Pay attention to the user behavior cycle of the product itself, and see which day the user interaction is large. Different products will definitely be different. Useful communities are active on weekdays, and entertainment or shopping communities will be active on weekends. Sometimes, in order to increase the amount of interaction, you can appropriately set up some small gifts and rank them according to the number of shares and likes.

For new products with less than 40,000 daily active users and less than 100+ effective content interactions per day, it is not a wise choice for operators to increase the interaction volume through topic planning (it is purely digging a hole for themselves). You will face product issues where no one participates in the topic and the lack of community content is exposed to users. Think about it, when a new product is just launched, there is not much content. If you classify it by topic, how much can be under each topic?

But the boss is pushing us hard! what to do?

If you are an operator of a startup company, in order to make the topic appear more engaging, it is recommended to use a community to bring together active users to ensure the timeliness of information communication, and then promote the topic in the group in advance. This will also contribute a lot of good content to the community, but the frequency of topic planning should not be high, and it is best to plan once a week. For example, the communication community "Operation Research Society" that I created for operation practitioners now has less than 200 UVs per day. We can still use topic discussions to complete effective content output and sedimentation of operation-related knowledge, because we have a community and our core users actually discuss in the community.

3. Topic planning for mature products

When a product no longer worries about the amount of content, it can start considering using topic planning to attract users. When it comes to user introduction (attracting new users), what everyone probably wants to know most is how to plan event marketing topics that will make a splash in the Internet industry. Let’s take the live video broadcast of the quarrel between Luo Yonghao and Wang Ziru in Chaoyang Park planned by Youku as an example to sort out the process of planning this kind of event topic.

1) Found a hot topic on Weibo, Luo Yonghao and Wang Ziru quarreled with each other;

2) Youku, a media company, followed up and amplified the topic, creating a live video debate scene;

3) Luo Yonghao and Wang Ziru expressed their intention to confront each other on the same stage on Weibo;

4) Follow-up reports by print and online media;

5) Self-media and opinion leaders began to voice their opinions, and the crowds of spectators who were eager to watch the fun began to gather;

6) Youku provides live video streaming services, where users can choose which side to support and then express their opinions.

7) In the follow-up reports afterwards, everyone discussed the winners and losers.

If the whole process is summarized, it can be like this: create (discover) hot topics - study the connection between product and user discussion of topics) - purchase media to speak out - induce other media to spread - purchase KOL to speak out - introduce users to the product to participate in topic discussions.

This is a very successful topic planning by Youku. But the reality is that planning event marketing topics to attract users often has disappointing results. For brands, media coverage is enough for event marketing topic planning, but for operations, having media coverage without substantial data improvement is just self-satisfaction.

Here is an example of an event marketing case in which I once participated. In 2013, we helped promote a sanitary napkin brand. We organized four female college students on campus to stick QR codes on their inner thighs for people to scan and follow our official account (creating a topic). On the day of the event, we had a reporter from Chutian Metropolis Daily take photos and report the event. The official account run by the college students reposted the event, and the next day other media in Wuhan followed up with reports. At the same time, campus marketing accounts on Weibo in Wuhan began to comment on the event... This later sparked heated discussions among netizens about whether it was healthy for female college students to rent out their thighs. Then the event was very hot, and people didn’t seem to care about my product itself, let alone the core goal of increasing the number of followers of the official account.

Regarding how to plan topics for the operation of mature products, I personally prefer the method introduced below.

The operator independently develops or reuses a topic discussion tool. In the community, the more common topic discussion tools include barrage, topic posts, PK posts, and live broadcast posts. The operator chooses one task from them and plans topics based on predictable hot spots. Hot spots such as the quarrel between Luo Yonghao and Wang Ziru are unpredictable (but if the tool is mature, it can be kept up with). The Spring Festival, Valentine's Day, the Olympics, and company dynamics are predictable hot spots.

After the topic planning and preparation work is completed, it is necessary to carry out pre-promotion and warm-up in advance to let the target audience know about the topic and prepare opinions or pay attention to this hot topic in advance. In order to increase the participation in the topic, after the topic discussion begins, in addition to setting prizes as rewards, the operator can also make a special display of the user's posting frame. I guess everyone has seen this a lot on Weibo. Every year Weibo plans activities such as "Travel with Weibo". Then, as long as the user participates in this topic, his Weibo will have a special display in the information flow.

Speaking of this, I would like to give an example of the Spring Festival topic planning case on Tieba. Based on the characteristics of sharp comments from netizens on Tieba, Tieba will plan topics for the Spring Festival Gala every year during the Spring Festival. In the early preparation of the entire topic planning, Tieba will do three things:

The first is the product design of the site itself, including posting frame features, barrage comment scene construction, comment volunteer recruitment (due to the basic amount of interaction and high-quality comments), and server stress testing;

The second is off-site cooperation, such as looking for iQiyi to introduce Spring Festival Gala videos, introducing Spring Festival search keywords, and other related cross-industry cooperation and sponsorship;

The third thing is promotional materials in the form of videos, audios, h5, pictures, and soft articles, which are mainly used to attract traffic in advance to achieve the highest level of interaction on the day of the Spring Festival Gala. It is inconvenient to disclose the data, but the overall trend is that the amount of interaction is getting better year by year, especially with the introduction of barrage gameplay, netizens' willingness to participate in topics has increased a lot. By the way, topic planning is used to attract traffic. In addition to the introduction before the topic starts, it also involves subsequent data analysis, interpretation, dissemination and PR.

4. The ultimate evolution of topic discussion

When you have been in operation for a long time, you will have the same feeling as I do, that is, how to turn repetitive work into process or functionalization, and how to make your work have a real impact on the product.

It can be said that if you can make topic planning as large as the Spring Festival Gala Tucao Conference on Tieba, it will be difficult to increase the scale of the event. At this time, operations can try to think in these three directions.

First, if the data proves that topic interaction is helpful in improving product data, then we can turn it into a fixed scenario and develop a background that can quickly configure topics; second, we can plan more topic interaction tools instead of repeatedly using the same interactive tool to plan topic activities; third, like the topic functions of Weibo and Zhihu, it can become a content sedimentation and recommendation mechanism to guide user participation by displaying real product hot topics and content. I regard the latter as the ultimate evolution of topic planning at this stage, and perhaps there will be newer ways of playing in the future.

Finally, let me say one more thing. Topic planning itself is not complicated. It is a common method used by content operators to increase product interaction. However, I have found at work that many people regard it as product content or use it to attract new users. I hope this article can help everyone re-examine their understanding of topic planning and specific operations.