Short video operation topic selection guide

When operating short videos, topic selection, direction, and positioning are often the first problems a team faces. The choice of methods or approaches often determines the output direction of a team and the subsequent monetization direction, etc., conveying your team's views and the account's position, and making adequate preparations for subsequent monetization. All plans have a layout, and only with a good layout can you make money. To have traffic.

1. Principles for selecting topics for short videos

When choosing topics for short videos, you must master three principles of topic selection:

1. Keep close to the ground. The content selection should be user-oriented and based on the needs of user fans. It cannot be separated from user fans. If you want to have a good number of views, you should first consider the preferences and pain points of user fans. Often, the content that is closer to user fans is more likely to be recognized by them, triggering a higher completion rate for the video.

2. Valuable. The content of the selected topics should be valuable and have substantive content. The output content should be valuable to user fans, meet the needs of user fans, and solve the pain points of user fans. Only in this way can user fans have the desire to spread the content and trigger user behaviors such as likes, comments, and forwarding, thereby achieving the fission spread of content.

3. To match. The content of the topics should be related and matched with our positioning, and have verticality, so as to enhance our influence in the professional field and better shape the IP. Only in this way can we attract accurate user fans and also improve the continuous following and stickiness of user fans.

Consider the dimensions of the topic

1. Heat

Only topics that attract a lot of user attention can generate more views.

Therefore, when choosing a topic, you should consider whether the content can gain high-frequency attention, that is, whether your topic is a topic that the general public will pay attention to.

2. Difficulty

If you are creating alone and do not have solid shooting and editing skills and creative planning, then can you produce something new for difficult topics?

For example, when shooting a video in which one person plays multiple roles, can your acting skills control each role like Mao Guangguang?

Therefore, try to choose a topic based on the difficulty level that your creative team can bear.

3. Difference

In the popular short video track, there are more competitors, and many fields have already developed top Vs. Can your topic be distinguished from the characteristics of the top Vs?

For example, although both of them are men dressed as women, the Douyin celebrity "Duoyu and Maomao Jie" focuses on trivial matters in life. "Mao Guangguang", as a "rising star" of Douyin, created completely different content centered on the beauty counter, and gained 4 million followers in one month.

4. Action Cost

The action cost here refers to whether users can understand and learn the content conveyed by our topics at a glance.

For example, if you want to make a "green tea" video, after watching it, can the user immediately receive the message of what "green tea" is?

2. Notes on short video topic selection

1. Stay away from sensitive words

Short video platforms all have some restrictions on sensitive words. For example, a video may have a high number of views on a certain platform, but no views on another platform. Pay more attention to the developments of each platform, understand some official notifications released by the platform, and avoid illegal account blocking and banning on the platform.

2. Avoid blindly following hot topics

Many hot and popular contents will involve news, current affairs, political policies and other contents. These hot contents have always been sensitive topics and should be avoided if possible. If the scale of opinions and content is not well controlled, it is easy to fall into the vortex. Improper operation will not only fail to bring traffic, but may even bring the risk of being banned or blocked due to violations.

3. The title description should be reasonable

The number of words in the title should be moderate. On some platforms, the title will be automatically folded and hidden if it exceeds a certain number of words. The format should be standard, use Arabic numerals for numbers, and use Chinese as much as possible, avoiding uncommon characters and Internet vocabulary to facilitate machine algorithms to obtain and recognize them. The sentence structure should be reasonable. Many short video platforms generally require the title to have a three-paragraph structure, with clear expression and avoidance of exaggerated phrases.

I will only tell a story if it is good.

Whether we stand from the user's perspective, or learn from popular products and pay attention to peers to gain experience and inspiration, using storytelling as a way to select topics can convey the opinions and values ​​we want to express to users. Storytelling means looking at the world and communicating with the world with story thinking. It is an important thinking ability that helps us win the future.

After we obtain creative direction and inspiration through various channels, we can apply this question: Can we express it in the form of storytelling? Can users accept and recognize it better? When we use storytelling thinking to tell a topic, it will bring a different presentation effect.

There is a creator of educational videos who shares knowledge about children's education and growth, and each time he provides solutions to the problems children encounter in their growth. The initial presentation method was for real people to appear on camera to interpret the questions and then give answers, but it has always been lukewarm. Afterwards, he changed his creative ideas: he used storytelling as the entry point for topic selection every time . Not only did the number of views soar, but the number of likes and shares also increased day by day. Therefore, every time the creator chooses a topic, in addition to referring to conventional hot spots, needs and other dimensions, the most important selection criterion is story thinking.

When we use story thinking as a topic selection method, we should pay attention to the following two points.

First, the story topic needs to use specific characters and scenes. When we use story thinking as the entry point for topic selection, we cannot just tell stories that are vague, without basis and source, but should have specific scenes, events, and characters, and increase the persuasiveness of the views through detailed and real stories.

Second, the story selection adheres to the principle of one near and one far, and has a cognitive basis. One is the near one, which is to use the stories of our family, friends, colleagues, etc. around us as the entry point; the other is the far one, which is to use historical events that have happened, celebrity anecdotes, etc. as the entry point. Both of these points must follow the principle that users have a certain cognitive basis, that is, the general public knows them, and they are not unrelated, otherwise the introduction of the story would be meaningless.

Talk about feelings

Feelings refer to a person's state of mind or emotions. External influences or internal psychological activities will have an impact on our emotions. Simply put, sentiment is the expression of emotion. When we choose a topic, we can ask ourselves in advance: What kind of emotional atmosphere can this topic help users create? Is it possible to make users resonate with the content by creating emotions? By talking about emotions as a starting point, we can find the power to touch users deep in their hearts and build trust with them through content.

A music video creator often publishes his works in the form of "music + real people". Although the subject matter each time is currently popular or well-known music, the overall effect is not very good.

When he used talking about feelings as the entry point for the topic, changed the music to classic hits that were once widely circulated, and matched it with the video style of the old era, it awakened many people's memories of the past and won everyone's love.

Talking about feelings means thinking about our topics from a different perspective, to see if they can be substituted in an emotional way and become the main direction of creation.

Create suspense

Creating suspense means that after we find a topic, we tell the story by setting up suspense, rather than giving the answer directly in a straightforward manner. This method of topic selection is to ask yourself in advance when facing a topic: Can it be told to users in a suspenseful way? Is it possible to use flashback method to reveal the secret layer by layer?

There is a creator who shoots Vlogs to record daily life. He usually prepares some topics about daily life in advance. He often records them in the first person, or executes them around a goal. Relatives and friends may also appear in the middle. Afterwards, he adopted the method of creating suspense. Every time he would ask himself in advance whether this topic could create suspense first and then attract users to watch.

For example, the theme of one episode was to record one's first experience as a tutor. The content first showed a shot of several parents surrounding oneself, without telling the truth. The real person then came on camera and said that his first experience as a tutor brought him a lot of insights. As the content of the video unfolded layer by layer, the truth was finally revealed. It turned out that the children particularly liked his teaching method, and the children's families wanted him to continue to be a tutor, but the creator had other arrangements, and the other party thought there were other problems, so the scene at the beginning with a group of people surrounding him appeared, which made people think a lot.

1. Choose a topic with high pain points

Whether the subject is hurt and how painful it is determines the video’s open rate.

However, the degree of pain points of a topic should not be based solely on the subjective judgment of the operator, but should be considered from the user's perspective, and ask yourself more:

Do users of the TikTok platform care about this topic? What interests or emotional connections do the audiences I want to influence have?

For example. The following two video programs:

One is "A man and a woman are arguing. Why is the wife so angry while the husband is already asleep?"

The second one is "90% of the brain is not yet developed?"

Now, testing it out starting with just the headlines, which topic are you more interested in?

Probably most people prefer the former.

Because "marital quarrels" are something that everyone will experience, is experiencing, or has experienced, this topic has a high pain point and is more likely to resonate emotionally with users.

Let’s look at the “mind development” theme again. Is it too far away from users' lives and not "grounded" enough?

From this comparison, you should understand:

When choosing themes, you should do more themes with "high pain point" and fewer themes with "no pain or itching".

2. Choose a topic that has a wide audience

Every topic has a specific audience, and the bigger the audience for the topic, the greater the chances of it becoming a trending topic.

Let’s continue with the first two examples. From the video title, we can see:

The audience for the “brain development” topic is typically males who are curious about science. The audience of the theme "Feelings between Men and Women" covers almost all users on Douyin.

Let's look at the data again: the former has 222 points and the latter has 85 points.

This shows that in the early stages of the Douyin campaign, correctly choosing topics that are more inclined to the public's "taste" is conducive to quickly gaining a group of seed users.

But there is still a problem, which is:

While such videos have high traffic and the ability to attract followers, accordingly, if the followers brought by the emotional video cannot see more similar content on your platform, they will quickly unfollow, if not unfollow at all. The likelihood of conversion will also be relatively low.

Therefore, it is recommended that after accumulating a large number of fans, you can slow down appropriately and select more content that is truly valuable to users, so as to screen out truly accurate users and increase conversion rates.

3. Repeatedly improve and optimize the theme selection

A three-foot-thick ice does not form overnight, and a good theme selection requires repeated polishing.

Before deciding on a topic, it is best to find some like-minded friends to brainstorm. Let everyone express their opinions and pool their wisdom, which is much better than just guessing blindly behind closed doors.

When you look at each directional content from different angles, you will always find different things. The same is true for topic selection. One person's opinion is always one-sided. If you can gather the opinions of more people, the topic will be much richer.

Here are some tips to share with you:

1. Inventory and sorting

For example, if there is a hot topic now, you can collect all the key information of the event in the shortest time, and then present the event according to the timeline or main story line to make a latest and hottest short video.

2. Find the core angle of the topic

For example, one of the gossips of this year was "Luo Zhixiang cheating on his wife". As soon as the news came out, netizens quickly extracted the core key information from Zhou Yangqing's copy: group sports, time management, etc. For a time, all kinds of emoticons and funny jokes were flying all over the place, and people's attention continued to increase.

Many short videos that take advantage of this hot topic are frequently recommended to the homepage.

3. See the big picture from the small

Focus your content on a small point contained in a topic. It can be a small perspective, a small phenomenon, or a small scene.

Let’s still take “Mao Guangguang” as an example. All the stories revolve around the “beauty counter” scene, telling the different stories of each customer, or the salesgirl’s own story.

Each story can be extended from a certain product, with both selling points and highlights, making people unable to help but watch one after another.

5. Create a topic database

The purpose of establishing a topic bank is to help us continuously produce high-quality content.

The topic bank can be divided into three types: popular topic bank, regular topic bank and event topic bank.

1. Popular topic database

Pay attention to major popular lists, such as Douyin hot searches, Weibo hot searches, Toutiao index, Baidu index, and various popularity lists of third-party platforms.

Understand hot topics, be familiar with popular content, and choose the right angle for topic creation and content production. The more popular the content topic, the more likely it is to arouse users' interest in watching.

2. Regular topic database

The regular topic bank relies on accumulation over time. Whether it is the people, things, and objects around you, or the external information you receive every day, you can organize them into your own regular topic bank through value screening.

3. Activity topic library

Topics for holiday activities can be planned in advance, such as Mid-Autumn Festival, National Day, Spring Festival, Valentine's Day and other holiday topics that the public cares about.

Another source of activity topics comes from various short video platforms. The official platforms will launch a series of topic activities from time to time, such as the habitual national style power, the big fish's quark knowledge, etc. By participating in the platform's topic activities according to your own situation, you can get traffic support and cash rewards.

Finally, I want to say that creativity is a topic. We have many ways to choose a topic. The above are just reference plans. The most effective method is to learn and apply it flexibly and use different forms to find a topic that suits you. Traffic is still in its bonus period. I hope to make more attempts to have the opportunity to gain traffic. The most important thing is to build user trust, a sense of involvement, and attract fans in order to achieve ultimate monetization.

Author: Qinghao

Source: Kuoyi Culture Media