Summary of content community product operation methodology

Content operation refers to the complete operation process in which operators use new media channels to present corporate information to users in a friendly manner in the form of text, pictures or videos, and stimulate user participation, sharing and dissemination.

Summary of this issue:

1. Production and consumption of content

2. Key Points of Content Operation

1. What is the content (positioning)

1. Classification by content type

2. Classification by content category

3. Three elements of good content

2. Where does the content come from (cost)

1. Means of production

2. Producers

3. Production costs

3. Who will see the content? (Audience)

1. Who are the users?

2. What are the user's needs?

3. Content distribution scenarios or channels

When it comes to content operations in this issue, let’s first take a look at how Baidu explains it:

Content operation refers to the complete operation process in which operators use new media channels to present corporate information to users in a friendly manner in the form of text, pictures or videos, and stimulate user participation, sharing and dissemination.

The concept here tends to be content operation in a narrow sense, which is closer to what we now call "new media operation".

And depending on the actual work content and the business scope of the company, the specific work may be very different.

Therefore, this article attempts to combine relevant theoretical knowledge with front-line operational experience, and use a more down-to-earth description to talk about content operations.

1. Content Production and Consumption

A bar of soap, from means of production to a commodity on the shelf, needs to go through production, packaging, wholesale, and retail .

Similarly, from writing to being read and consumed, an article needs to go through the stages of editing, typesetting, publishing, and distribution ;

At present, most production and creation platforms, such as WeChat public accounts, Toutiao accounts, and Douyin short videos, are actually equivalent to a large content wholesale market .

Creators write/shoot, format/edit their own content and then publish it on these platforms.

The platform then distributes these contents to different consumers through algorithms.

In the end, creators earn income, consumers pay time or money to obtain content, and platforms earn user traffic.

Let’s make an analogy with real life: every day, vegetable farmers harvest their vegetables from the fields and sell them to buyers, who then wholesale the vegetables to major farmers’ markets and finally retail them to consumers.

The above is the general process from content production to consumption .

So you can see that the author here is actually equivalent to the content supplier ; the platform is equivalent to the content acquirer and wholesaler .

2. Key Points of Content Operation

After we have a brief understanding of the above content-related production and consumption logic, we can further break it down by adding the operation dimension.

When we create and operate our content from 0-1, we usually need to consider three questions: what is the content, where does the content come from, and who is the content for.

1. What is the content?

The question here is about positioning .

For example, if you are planning to start a business now, then what industry do you want to be engaged in, what products do you want to make, what are the competitors in the market, what are the characteristics or differentiations of your products, what are your value orientations, etc.

There is a famous saying in ancient Greece: "The beginning determines everything", the importance of positioning is self-evident.

1. Classification by content type : usually includes four forms: video, audio, picture, and text, plus three sizes: long, medium, and short.

(You can compare it to a milk tea shop that has four flavors of milk tea, with three sizes to choose from: large, medium, and small)

So let’s take a look at the top players in the market by randomly combining them:

Long videos: Tencent Video, Youku, iQiyi, Mango Video, etc.

Short videos: Bilibili, Xigua Video, etc.

Short videos: Tik Tok, Kuaishou, etc.

Long pictures and texts: WeChat public accounts, self-media (Toutiao, Dayu, Baijia), many comics apps, etc.

Short pictures and texts: Weibo, Douban, Tieba, Xiaohongshu, etc.

Audio: Lizhi APP, Himalaya, Qingting FM, Kugou, QQ Music, NetEase Cloud Music, etc.

Text: WeChat Reading, Palm Reading, etc.

The above is just a rough distinction based on the main content-carrying types of the products . In fact, there are overlapping parts.

Different products have their own content positioning as entry points in the early stages.

For example, in its early days, Douyin avoided the highly competitive long video field and chose to enter the less noticed short video field.

2. Classification by content category : Top players usually cover a wide range of categories. Here we mainly look at which players cover the sub-categories:

Humor and comedy categories: such as Zuiyou, Pipixia, and Neihan Duanzi, etc.

Sneakers and trendy toys: such as Dewu, Shihuo, etc.

Sports vertical categories: such as Dongqiudi, Hupu, etc.

Beauty and skin care products: such as Xiaohongshu, etc.

All of the above players entered the market with a certain vertical category in the early stage, and after successfully occupying the minds of users in the target group, they expanded their content boundaries, enriched content categories, and gradually grew into unicorn players.

For example, Xiaohongshu started out as a platform for overseas shopping, but later gradually transformed into a community for sharing lifestyle content.

3. Three elements of good content

If a piece of content wants to be widely disseminated, it usually needs to have the following three elements: speak human language, have substantive content, and resonate with people;

To put it in more written terms, it means: readability, value, and emotionality.

(1) Readability: In this era of information explosion, if a piece of content wants to be spread, it must first be readable by others, right?

Imagine commuting on the subway in the early morning, opening a notification message, only to find that it is entirely written in classical Chinese. I believe that few people can finish reading it.

Therefore, making the language as easy to understand as possible and beautifying the structure of the article can enhance the readability of the content.

Converted into data indicators, it is usually expressed as reading volume, reading time , etc.

(2) Value: After reading an article or taking an online course, readers can learn certain skills or gain some inspiration, which are the actual value of the content.

Such as professional skills, industry knowledge, personal growth, establishing correct value guidance, etc., can all reflect the value contained in the content.

In terms of data indicators, it is usually expressed as the number of collections , etc.

(3) Emotionality: This is one of the conditions that makes it easiest for content to be widely disseminated. There have been many representative works in the field of social psychology, such as "The Crowd".

There is a world of difference between group psychology and individual psychology. This is one of the reasons why many articles that rely on creating controversy and selling social hot spots can become popular.

However, if a piece of content simply incites emotions and sells anxiety without any substantive value, it is very likely to become a piece of toxic chicken soup.

Emotional factors are usually reflected in data indicators such as the number of likes and reposts ;

2. Where does the content come from?

1. Means of production

Cooking requires buying groceries, and content creation also requires materials.

For creators, personal insights into society and industry, work experience and life experience, and capture of current hot topics can all become creative material.

The core thing that creators need to focus on here is to establish their own sustainable content production system .

Because it is inevitable that you will talk endlessly when inspiration comes, but you will not know where to start when there is no inspiration.

Therefore, when it comes to the first part [Content Positioning], it is particularly important to choose the field in which you are good at to output content.

2. Producers

As an individual producer or studio, content production is a labor that combines mental and physical labor.

If it is produced in the form of pictures and texts, it would be fine. The production of videos usually involves more personnel (director, shooting, filming, editing) and scenes (indoors, outdoors), etc.

As a platform, content is mainly acquired through technical crawling, user transfer, user original creation, and official self-production .

(1) Technical crawling: Platforms such as Baidu and Toutiao need to use crawlers to crawl content from other platforms or individual webmasters every day, screen out irrelevant information through review, and then distribute it to users on their own terminals;

(2) User transfer: This mainly refers to downloading content from platform A and then publishing it to platform B. Its essence is to take advantage of information asymmetry. However, nowadays, all major platforms will suppress the weight of such content to curb the unhealthy profiteering of the black market.

(3) User-generated content: This is the most efficient way for a platform to establish its own content ecosystem (typically, the original content capabilities of users of Bilibili and Zhihu are both at a relatively high level in the industry). The official forms a clustering effect by signing or supporting its own top creators, thereby gradually improving the platform's original content capabilities.

The creators of the platform can usually be divided into UGC, PGC, PUGC, etc. according to the professionalism of their content , and can be divided into top Vs, KOLs, KOCs, etc. from top to bottom according to the scope of their influence .

It seems to have nothing to do with my KFC

(4) Official self-production: In recent years, platforms such as iQiyi and Youku have launched their own variety shows and web series to reduce the cost of acquiring content. After all, purchasing content copyrights is also a huge expense.

3. Production costs

For individual producers, it is mainly the cost of creating content, such as time cost, shooting props cost, etc.

The author’s profit = actual income – (time cost of creation + equipment cost, etc.)

For the platform, the main cost is the cost of acquiring content, signing contracts with media organizations and MCN organizations, introducing top V influencers, and paying commissions to creators all require costs; producing content and purchasing copyrights are also a considerable expense.

Two points need to be added here:

First, the threshold for content creation : the lower the threshold, the higher the user's enthusiasm for creation, but the more serious the homogeneity (for example, Douyin provides users with one-stop shooting templates, tools, materials, etc., which greatly lowers the threshold for content creation, but the homogeneity is very serious)

Second, content monetization channels : the greater the incentive, the higher the user's enthusiasm. Incentives include material incentives and spiritual incentives (spiritual incentives are difficult to form but irreplaceable, while material incentives are easy to form but highly replaceable)

For small platforms that have not yet formed a complete monetization ecosystem, they usually use spiritual incentives (such as medals, levels, special permissions, etc.) to encourage UGC users to publish content;

For large platforms, live streaming, soft advertising, traffic monetization, knowledge payment and other channels are relatively complete, and platforms usually compete for top Vs, which is common on live streaming platforms.

3. Who will see the content?

1. Who are the users : gender, age group, region, occupation, income, activity level, new and old users, etc. (user portraits and user levels are divided based on the two dimensions of user consumption TGI and user RFM)

2. What are user needs : basic needs, personalized needs, etc. (At different stages of the user life cycle, needs will change accordingly, and the AARRR model is often used for analysis: attracting new users, promoting activation, retaining users, converting users, and fissioning users)

3. Content distribution scenarios : information flow, community recommendation page, category channel, PUSH, popular list, topic circle, etc. Each module scenario involves multiple dimensions such as products, operations, algorithms, and the joint operation of multiple business departments.

Author: Deep Operation

Source: Deep Operation