Now is the era of information explosion, and the thing that is least lacking is content. It is really difficult to get 100,000+ views by just writing unilaterally. Hot spots are big pools of traffic, and media people make a living from traffic. Without traffic, they will starve.

As long as the hot spots are used well, it can often have a multiplier effect. I once used the Wang Baoqiang incident to obtain hundreds of thousands of traffic for the company. Therefore, knowing how to leverage hot spots is a must for media people.

The following is my many years of operating experience, share with you ~

1. What is a hotspot?

There are two types of hotspots: fixed hotspots and sudden hotspots.

1. So what is a fixed hotspot?

For example, major festivals, anniversaries, celebrity events, etc., such as Chinese Valentine's Day, Double Eleven, the World Cup, etc., these are all things that will definitely happen in due time and are foreseeable, and we can have sufficient time to prepare.

2. What is a sudden hotspot?

These are the events on the hot list that become popular overnight, such as what happened to so-and-so, XX cheated, Trump announced XX again, etc. These types of events tend to become popular overnight and fade away overnight, which doesn’t leave you much time to prepare.

2. How to take advantage of these hot spots?

1. Find the hot spots

How to find hot spots?

There are many fixed hot spots in the market, and you can find a lot of marketing calendars by searching on Baidu.

As for sudden hot topics, there are a lot of ready-made tools, such as: Baidu Index, Baidu Hot Search, Weibo Hot Search, Zhihu Hot Search, Bilibili Hot Search, Toutiao Hot Search...

Major Internet companies have already provided us with big data. If you don’t know these things, you must be a fake media person. I won’t go into details here.

2. Analyze hot spots

It is not enough to know where to find hot spots. You also need to have a pair of discerning eyes to pick out the truly valuable hot spots from a pile of garbage. There are too many events on the Internet. Some events are very topical, while others are as calm as still water and do not cause any waves. So how do you judge and analyze which events will become popular?

Whether an event can become popular or a hot topic depends on the attributes of the event itself, namely the explosion point.

3. What is the breaking point?

The so-called explosive point is to grab the attention of the spectators, arouse their interest and sense of presence, and satisfy the psychological needs of the spectators.

The explosion point is composed of three dimensions:

1. Hotspot objects

The first of the three elements of a hot spot is people, KOLs in the field, big Vs, celebrities, etc. They have their own influence and traffic. If they are the protagonists of an event, it is easiest to form a hot spot.

Nowadays, even a celebrity’s fart can become a hot topic, but if you, a slut repairman, die, no one will even know. So it is very, very important to know who did XX and caused XX result. If the participant in the incident is a celebrity or a big V, you can basically be sure of it.

2. Event topicality

The second element of the hot topic is the topicality of the event. It is not enough to have only the characters. The event also needs to be worth discussing by the public. A good topic is the easiest to become popular. Because of its topicality, all major paparazzi will follow up and continue to hype the event, such as

Related to national affairs, such as the trade war, China and the United States, Huawei, etc.

Related to the spectators themselves: policy introduction, COVID-19, etc.

Social issues: such as the Didi incident, the Hangzhou wife-killing case, etc.

…

3. Dramatic Events

The third element of a hot topic is dramatic suspense. As long as it is bloody and dramatic enough, it can easily become popular on the entire Internet and will arouse the desire of a large number of people to show their presence. People tend to watch the fun and do not mind the trouble, while those who do not care about it will turn a blind eye.

You can use these three dimensions to analyze any hot topic on the Internet, and you can basically not escape this formula. Whether an event can become popular does not necessarily require all three. For example, the hot topic object is not necessarily a celebrity or a big V, such as the Jiang Ge incident, etc. As long as the latter two are met, it can still set off the entire network. The formula only gives you a handle for judgment. The most important thing is that you have to find the explosive point that is eye-catching and attention-grabbing.

Feeling that the above is abstract, what about the last two cases?

Dongge Incident

Hot topics: Dong Ge, Milk Tea and the heroine (very explosive)

Topicality: Dong Ge was arrested in the United States for rape. It turned out that the well-known entrepreneur was so well-dressed and polite.

Drama: Is Brother Dong suspected of being set up? Will Brother Dong be sentenced? Dong Ge and Milk Tea’s marriage, what is Milk Tea’s attitude towards it?

The Goose Injustice Case

Hot topics: Tencent and the national goddess Lao Gan Ma

Topicality: Tencent is Nanshan Pizza Hut and has never lost a lawsuit, but this time it was defeated by Lao Gan Ma.

Drama: Tencent suffered a huge loss, was defrauded of 16 million yuan, and also gave Lao Gan Ma free advertising. Tencent, such a big company, actually fell into the hands of three small hooligans.

There are simply too many cases like this to count…

3. Fit the hot spots

If you stand in the right place, even a pig can fly. ——Lei Jun.

After you have enough understanding of a hot spot through the above analysis, you can start to stick to it. A big hot spot is equivalent to a big wind outlet. If we don’t stand on the wind outlet, in this era of information explosion, as a pig, it is really difficult for you to fly.

So how do you paste it?

This requires analyzing the relationship between hot topics and our products. Hot topics may be far away from your products, or even completely irrelevant, but any matter can have countless angles and viewpoints. In short, no matter how far away it is from the hot topic, as long as you want to attach it to your product, you can find a way to attach it to your product.

For example: If you are working in the knowledge field, you can use hot topics to write a technical analysis article, such as why this hot topic is so popular and what sociological, psychological and other principles are behind it.

If you are dealing with emotions, for example, in the Dong Ge incident mentioned above, you can write an article and use their incident to talk about emotions. One of my media friends used this incident to write three emotional articles, each with over 100,000 views.

Another friend of mine was even more bizarre. He was an insurance salesman and followed Li XL's cheating incident closely, and got tens of thousands of traffic...

There are too many of them. When you encounter a hot topic, you must try every possible way to post it desperately. There is no shortcut to learning how to post hot topics. You can only watch more, imitate more, and study more. I suggest you learn from Durex, a company that sells condoms. You will find that there are almost no hot spots that they cannot cover. The more you look at them, the more you will develop a sense of the Internet.

Next, let’s talk about what to pay attention to when posting hot spots.

4. Three points to note when selecting hot topics

1. The periodicity of hot spots

The rise of a hot spot is nothing more than four stages: hot spot explosion, fermentation, popularity, and decline

From the perspective of communication, the time period of a hot topic generally does not exceed 3 days, and the audience will enter a period of fatigue. Unless the hot topic is explosive enough, with twists and turns, and the suspense left is deep enough, the media will be motivated to hype it, such as the Mercedes-Benz incident, the Didi incident, the Wang Baoqiang incident, and the Liu Qiangdong incident. And the recent Li Guoqing incident.

How to determine the cycle?

① The index rises or falls sharply

Weibo is known as the base for the fermentation of public opinion. This can be used as the primary reference for our judgment of the rise of hot spots. Whether it is Weibo or Baidu Index, Toutiao Index, etc., there will be hot search indexes, through which we can conduct analysis and observation.

For example, the Baidu Index of Tencent Lao Gan Ma incident:

For example, the hot topic of "Qixi Festival" can be seen clearly from the data.

To judge these, we have ready-made tools for us to use, so we must always pay attention to the data. This is our magic weapon for judging public opinion. Through indexes and public opinion analysis, we can roughly understand the portrait of the crowd, as well as their views and emotional tendencies.

Through data analysis, we can determine the periodicity of hot spots. In addition, there is another factor that affects the periodicity of hot spots.

② Another hot spot emerges

People's attention span is very limited. Once they focus on event A, it becomes difficult to pay attention to event B. When another major event breaks out, the former often quickly fades away.

For example, the incident involving Bao Yuming and his adopted daughter a while ago was hot for a few days, but quickly cooled down. If you find that the heat of an event is dispersed by another hot spot, adjust your strategy immediately. Remember not to get up early and arrive late.

For example, after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, you found that some of the hot topics about celebrities could not even come to the fore. Basically, the entire Internet and even the entire nation were discussing the COVID-19 pandemic. Any other topics that were normally popular were lost in the vast flow of information.

2. Hot spot reversal

The melodramatic things on the Internet are so magical that all the weird things you can't imagine can happen. The plot is often that victim A exposes victim B, and public opinion is all focused on victim B. Then victim B reveals more information, and it turns out that it was victim A who was crying thief, while you had previously sung a song of victory for victim A, but ended up being slapped in the face and your image was damaged.

As media professionals, we must have a sense of systems. A major event that is widely known and widely discussed is definitely not as simple as the information provided on the surface. If we write rashly without a clear understanding of the ins and outs of the matter, we may end up shooting ourselves in the foot.

3. Avoid legal disputes

Everyone knows that, especially when it comes to official events, one must be extremely cautious. Losing the lawsuit would not be worth the loss. Therefore, before writing, one must have a clear understanding in the mind of what melons can be eaten and what cannot be eaten.

I hope the above can help everyone. It is not easy to be a media person. They are not paparazzi, but they are forced to become paparazzi by the situation. Although it is hard to pay attention to those boring things all day long, creating performance and money is also a very fulfilling thing. I wish all media people can have 100,000+ articles.

Author: Chang Qing

Source: Evergreen