How did Tik Tok short video achieve rapid growth?

The core of user operation is to manage users in a refined manner, while also doing a good job in fan operations and interaction. Pay great attention to the interaction with fans, but don't try to please them. Stick to your own unified style and treat your fans as your friends. Fans don’t just help you forward, comment and like posts. What’s more important is how to have fun with your fans on Douyin . This way you can form your own “community” and gather a group of friends who share the same values ​​and can help you grow.

01

Since 2020, many practitioners have said that “it’s hard to create a new Douyin account now!

“If you want to do your work well, you must first sharpen your tools.”

The initial team must have three roles, namely: actors, directors, and post-production.

Of course, if there is enough operating cost budget, the professional team including directors, screenwriters, planners, actors, photographers, editors, operators and other roles can specialize in their own fields.

But no matter what the configuration is, "net sense" and "video thinking" are very important. Whether or not the team can grasp the hot topics of Douyin is directly related to whether it can do a good job on Douyin.

Determine the content vertical: choose what you are good at first

The most direct and simple way to choose a vertical field is to choose a field that you are good at and understand. For example, those who know cars can work on the automotive field, those who are good at singing can work on the music field, and those who know pets can work on the cute pet field...

If it is not possible to directly determine the vertical field, operators can also refer to the hot-selling products in Douyin, or try to create content in the blue ocean field.

Douyin's blue ocean areas such as maternal and child care, automobiles, education and training, medical science, and legal knowledge have very broad prospects; and the red ocean areas such as evaluation, food, and beauty, as long as they have sufficiently novel forms, are still very worthwhile to invest in because of the good prospects for advertising monetization.

02

The most important hidden step in short video operation: account maintenance. "Maintaining an account" and "weight" are terms that are not recognized by the official Douyin, but this does not mean that you can post content after registering an account, because it is easy to be judged as a machine or marketing account.

If the content is of high quality, even if it is judged by the system, it still has a chance to become a hit later. There is no fixed rule for weight.

What exactly is “account maintenance”?

The first thing to do is to do a good job of "account decoration", that is, any customizable places such as name, introduction, avatar, cover, etc., can all be opportunities to increase conversions.

Many rules have been summarized on the Internet, such as "brush up on vertical content for 30 minutes every morning, noon and evening", "follow at least X competitor accounts and comment on XX videos of interest", etc.

But these rules actually vary from team to team and account to account. You can indeed maintain an account by following, liking and commenting on the same type of content, while attracting fans to visit your homepage and follow you. The specific number only needs to be like that of a normal active user.

If you want to gain fans on TikTok, the ability to continuously produce high-quality content is the key!

[Playback volume, dwell time, completion rate, replay rate, comment rate and like rate] These dimensions are all used by Tik Tok to predict the popularity of videos.

Under the TikTok short video algorithm, the first few seconds are what really determine life or death. If a product is not liked by users, it will be directly removed, and after a long time it will be difficult to get recommendations. Creators need to eliminate useless information and guide the audience to the core content as soon as possible.

There are traces of popular content

Tik Tok’s recommendation algorithm continuously pushes “content that users like” to them, but the essence behind the popular content is still users’ love for high-quality content.

There is no shortage of homogeneous content on Douyin. If you want to be noticed in such a huge pool of content, there are two ways:

• It is necessary to create content in a form that is different from and better than the top accounts in the same field.
• Second, operators can look for popular activities on the platform that have few participants, quickly follow up and create some interesting content, which will give them a chance to be recommended by the algorithm.

Focus on fan interaction and create "fine" operations

Short video practitioners must learn to give users some stimulation in multiple dimensions and discuss with users, such as small tasks or small rewards, such as "Please give me a heart, and I will show you what I will record in the next video"; or "Please forward it for me, and I will give you a gift" and so on. Every user comment should be responded to seriously, especially the interesting comments. If no one replies, grab the spot yourself and don’t let your video have 0 comments.

Consciously guiding user comments and interactions when publishing content is an important part of Douyin's refined operations.

Many practitioners will occasionally deliberately leave some flaws in the plot of short videos in order to provide users with topics to discuss in the comment area.

In short, short video practitioners need to interact with users through titles and comments to attract users' continued attention to your content.

Appropriate update frequency to grasp the peak traffic points

When posting short videos, we recommend that you post 2 to 3 times a week as a basic frequency, and then conduct refined operations to maintain the activity of the videos and make each video as popular as possible. As for the release time, in order to let your work be seen by more people and become popular faster, you must choose to release it when there are many Douyin fans online.

According to statistics, the time periods when the most Douyin short video users are watching are before meals and before bedtime, with 62% of users watching Douyin during this time period; 10.9% of users watch Douyin in fragmented time, such as when going to the bathroom or on the way to work. Especially before going to bed, on weekends, and holidays, the user activity of Tik Tok short videos is very high. It is recommended that the release time be controlled within the following three time periods:

The same effect will definitely be different if it is released at different time periods. Because there are many people during peak traffic periods, your work is likely to be seen by more people. If a user records several videos at one time, they should never be released at the same time. It is best to leave at least 2 hours between each video release.

In addition, the release time also needs to be combined with the time of your target customer group. Due to different occupations, different nature of work, different industry segments and different content attributes, the release time nodes are also different. Therefore, users should consider the content attributes and target audience to choose the best time to publish content.

The most important point is to publish when there are many people around, so that you can get much more exposure and recommendations.

Rapid and effective external boost

Tik Tok's algorithm is a multi-level recommendation model. If the data such as forwarding, comments, likes, and completion rate are high within a short period of time after release, there is a chance that the algorithm will throw it into a larger traffic pool.

Therefore, for accounts in the initial stage, using social networks to mobilize more people to complete the repost, comment and like together as soon as possible will be more beneficial for the cold start of the account. Many WeChat groups for mutual promotion and likes of Douyin have also emerged.

However, this kind of boost is not 100% effective. If you want to achieve good results, there are very high requirements for the mutual promotion group. If the group is not active enough, a dozen more likes are meaningless.

Respond to fans’ comments actively

When operating Douyin short videos, many people only regard themselves as content producers. They only do what they like, but do not do what users like. Therefore, after these people increase their fan base to a certain extent through high-quality content, they will encounter bottlenecks, and the rate of fan growth will become very slow.

In other words, some operators are very arrogant because they never reply to anyone's message, which makes fans feel that they are not valued, so they will not watch her works in the future.

Therefore, we must do a good job in user operations of short videos from the aspects of content, private messages and comments.

Actively set interactive topics

Topics have a good guiding and diverting effect. For example, the topic "#JDAirConditioningStayHomeAndHaveFun" launched by the Douyin account "JDAddInInformationOfficer" not only achieved more than 5.3 million views, but also allowed a large number of users to participate in video interaction, increasing user stickiness and activity. As shown in the figure:

There are four main ways to participate in the Douyin short video topic challenge:

If you want your short video works to get a lot of exposure, it is essential to add topics when publishing. The specific operation methods are introduced below.

(1) Go to the Douyin homepage and click the “+” sign at the bottom.

(2) Jump to the video shooting page, where you can click the red button to shoot a short video, or click the "Upload" button to upload the short video you have shot.

(3) After executing the operation, you can upload the video file and enter the editing interface, select the appropriate video range as needed, add props and special effects as needed, set the cover and background music, etc.

(4) Enter the publishing interface, enter the title in the title text box, then click the "#topic" button and enter keywords to participate.

Many users have participated in challenges on TikTok and played a lot of “hot memes”. The videos are all original and produced with great care, but why do they not get recommendations from the system and get very few likes?

If a video wants to become popular on TikTok, in addition to "the right time, the right place, and the right people", there are two other important secrets: first, it must have new and creative ideas that are attractive enough, and second, the content must be rich. To achieve these two points, the easiest way is to keep a close eye on the official hot topics, which not only have rich content forms, but also a large number of new and creative ways to play.

There will be different challenges on Douyin short videos every day. Users can add a challenge topic when posting videos, so that excellent videos will be recommended to the homepage, which will make your video more exposed and attract more likes and attention from the same enthusiasts. Users can analyze the characteristics of these highly recommended video contents through the selected videos of "Tik Tok Assistant", learn their strengths, and improve their own shortcomings.

DOU+: small amounts and multiple investments

DOU+ is the official promotion method within the platform, which can bring a certain degree of exposure and traffic growth to the content. However, for accounts in the early stages of operation, launching DOU+ is a decision that needs to be made with extreme caution.

DOU+ delivery is helpful for videos with a certain growth trend and can add icing on the cake, but it is difficult to provide timely assistance to videos with very poor natural traffic. In this case, excessive delivery is not recommended.

Author: Lao Feng Product Manager

Source: Lao Feng Product Management