Kuaishou Search for Hidden Traffic Opportunities

When users' content consumption needs extend from the entertainment level to the level of practical information and skill acquisition, a new content consumption scenario is fully activated, which is search.

For most creators, search is often an overlooked traffic bonus . Compared to a sophisticated title; a cover with a clear composition that hits the point; or a description with a strong topic tag that can inspire user interaction and comments, creators may be more willing to spend time polishing each frame of the video in order to grab the popular traffic under the "recommendation mechanism" rather than the long-tail traffic in the search scenario.

But is search traffic really long-tail and can be ignored? Not at all.

At the Kuaishou Photosynthesis Creator Conference, Li Yan, head of Kuaishou Search, shared a set of data with us: Recently, the monthly active users of Kuaishou Search have exceeded 250 million, accounting for more than half of the monthly active users of the main APP, and the daily video search volume has also exceeded 250 million times, which has doubled compared to last year.

The huge demand for video searches reminds our creators to pay attention to traffic from search scenarios. As a traffic scenario that complements recommendations, search is more friendly to the distribution of mid- and lower-tier videos and can help these contents realize their value more sustainably.

Especially at the moment, Kuaishou officially made the decision to "open the warehouse and release grain", and launched the "Kuaishou Search Creator Plan", deciding to provide 50 billion exposure resources to support more than 2,000 creators in 10 fields, helping them to speed up their exposure in search scenarios, increase fans, and improve their monetization capabilities in search scenarios. Among them , general knowledge search is one of the key areas of focus this year, in order to increase the value barrier of video search and optimize the user content consumption experience.

01 New Scene

What can Kuaishou search bring to creators?

According to the "Content Ecology Search Trend Research Report" released by Aurora Big Data, the rapid development of mobile Internet has changed the information environment and user needs, but the essence of search has not changed. It is still about obtaining content. It is just that users' search habits have changed. They will search wherever there is content.

The survey shows that every day, users search for information on 3.84 platforms, and 41.7% of users choose the appropriate search platform based on different search needs and content requirements. Among them, short video platforms performed well and have become the second most used platform. 68.7% of users will search for the content they want through short video platforms.

Here, we no longer need to elaborate on the unique value of search: as an active expression of demand , whether it is looking for people, content, or products, the search scenario matches user needs better than other scenarios. Therefore, the content seen in the search results will have higher user recognition and usage rate.

So, in addition to this inherent advantage, what other features does the search scenario that Kuaishou is committed to creating?

Li Yan mentioned: At present, search has become one of the most efficient scenarios for increasing fans through video playback within Kuaishou, and this is also due to the accuracy of search needs. Every day, users search on Kuaishou in more than 40 fields of all sizes. Among them, the search demand for top content categories such as movies, celebrities, games, and food is the strongest. Secondly, mid- and low-level practical content including life tips, financial knowledge, agriculture, rural areas, and tutorials are also the focus of users' frequent searches, and have gained an increasingly high traffic distribution in search scenarios.

Of course, the diversification of search needs and the increase in search volume have also brought more challenges to Kuaishou Search. The core of this is how to optimize the algorithm to provide users with richer and more accurate content matches.

The technical level should be left to Kuaishou, while the content level needs to be built by creators to jointly build an ecosystem. This is precisely where the opportunity lies for creators - those content types that are difficult to reach the top categories under the recommendation mechanism are expected to gain more continuous exposure and dissemination under search distribution; those vertical, segmented, and niche content can also find a more precise audience with the help of search distribution. At the same time, whether it is the works of top authors or ordinary authors, they have the opportunity to coexist on the results page of the same keyword, gaining exposure and opportunities to increase fans. For some phenomenal and trend-setting topics, the keyword popularity can even remain unchanged for 2-3 months.

The reason is not difficult to understand: the problems that users search for are mostly general and common problems in life, so the content that solves the problems will be consumed repeatedly, which greatly prolongs the time period for a video to gain traffic and fans; in addition, when the problems in the user's life are met by using the search function, then his dependence on the creator will be established, and once this dependence is established, if he encounters similar scenarios in his future life, he will be more inclined to seek help from the creator.

Li Yan also said at the Kuaishou Photosynthesis Creator Conference that the fans gained by creators in the search scenario will have higher frequency of interaction with them, higher live broadcast rewards and e-commerce transactions in subsequent behaviors than in other scenarios .

It is worth mentioning that the optimization of search results not only brings improvements in user content experience, but also has important significance for the platform's ecological construction. When the platform can better meet user needs and provide users with richer value, users' stickiness and dependence on the platform, the length of time they stay on the platform, and the length of time they consume content will all become higher. From this perspective, it is also necessary for Kuaishou to increase its investment in search scenarios.

The platform’s attention is also an opportunity for creators.

02 New Opportunities

How do creators gain traffic in search scenarios?

As another major traffic pool besides recommendations, the value of search to creators is self-evident. So, how should creators seize the opportunities of search? Which creators should pay more attention to search?

Before answering this question, we need to be familiar with the working principle of Kuaishou's search recommendation algorithm.

It is not difficult to see from the above that to win the exposure of the search recommendation algorithm, creators must do these three things:

1) Ensure that the video content is rich and popular .

If the content is dry and the video is not clear and of high quality, the system will be confused when identifying it. Only when the information of the video itself is rich enough can it be effectively retrieved and identified by the system.

2) Design excellent covers and titles for your work. This will not only help the system understand the content, but also allow users to more clearly judge whether the content is what they need, allowing the video to get higher click exposure on the search results page . So what makes a great cover title? The answer given by Kuaishou search is: it should be strongly related to the video content, have beautiful composition, and be able to express the theme truthfully, clearly and intuitively, but avoid using clickbait titles;

3) Take good care of the details of the video.

For example, creators can use a unified style, fixed words and content segments to create a series of videos or video collections. This will create more expectations for your content among users, leading to clicks and attention.

Although the Kuaishou Search Creator Plan was officially launched at the Photosynthesis Creation Conference on the 22nd, in the early days, Kuaishou Search had invited hundreds of creators to test it through in-site messages and provided them with simple creation optimization suggestions. During the testing phase, Kuaishou search found that some "small and beautiful" creative fields performed particularly well. For example, creators in the three vertical categories of fitness, talent, and driving tests saw their number of fans double in the search scenario.

At the event, Li Yan shared two cases of creators:

One is a newcomer in the field of Kuaishou creation, @徐楚晨在努力, who joined Kuaishou in June last year. Her video content mainly updates some basketball videos. She gained the first batch of fans through Kuaishou’s search support during her novice period, of which search contributed more than 60% to the increase in fans. The other is a mature account @暴走园子酱 which already has millions of fans. Her content mainly focuses on sharing yoga and fitness knowledge. After search support, her number of fans in the search channel increased 10 times year-on-year.

03 Required

What other creative capabilities does Kuaishou Search provide?

Real cases from creators also let us see the surging creative dividends in the search scenario. The "Kuaishou Search Creator Plan" launched by Kuaishou is undoubtedly an effort to empower creators to grow faster in search scenarios by increasing cash and traffic.

It is understood that according to the plan, Kuaishou Search will teach creators to understand Kuaishou Search step by step through course training, offline salons, white paper releases, and other methods, combined with cases of high-quality creators, so as to obtain higher traffic in the search scenario. In addition, Kuaishou Search will also use open data services to allow creators to better understand the changes in the popularity of search terms among users on the site and the distribution of their own works in search scenarios, thereby helping creators optimize topic design and create video content that better meets user needs.

Empowering creators to grow is one aspect. On the other hand, as mentioned above, Kuaishou will also invest 50 billion exposure resources to give to outstanding creators. At the same time, it will also give cash and honorary rewards to creators whose content is widely recognized, further helping creators increase their influence on the platform. In the future, we will consider recommending high-quality producers in user queries in related fields, and provide more prominent information prompts when this producer appears in the search results.

Official information from Kuaishou shows that this year, the "Kuaishou Search Creator Plan" will cover 15-20 creative fields, and currently eight creative fields have been opened, including financial management, digital technology, vocational education, photography skills, automotive knowledge, talent painting, law and fitness. At present, Kuaishou Search has sent out active invitations to some creators whose past works have performed well in search distribution. Creators who have not received invitations can search for "Kuaishou Search Creator Program" on Kuaishou to actively sign up.

Here, I would like to "biasedly" remind creators of knowledge and tutorials to seize this opportunity of official support from Kuaishou. In addition to being popular, your content also needs a space to continue to ferment, and search is exactly the traffic "back garden" that you are desperately looking for.