Operational skills and ideas for playing short videos

In recent years, short videos have occupied the leisure and entertainment time of many people. Short videos have also allowed many people to find another opportunity and platform to showcase themselves. We can see that Douyin gets hundreds of thousands or even millions of likes every day. Here, whether it is for individual or team growth, there are complete and formed operation plans. Today, let’s share how to operate short videos, how to operate, and what skills and ideas are there.

1. Complete content operation plan

Why are short videos so popular? Because there is a complete set of operating plans behind short videos. Of course, we do not rule out the short videos that suddenly become popular. Let’s talk about most of them:

1. Purpose of the Program

What is the purpose of creating this short video account or account matrix? This needs to be combined with specific products or services. If you have products and services that can be monetized, you need to highlight the products or services that need to be converted in the operation of the short video account.

Compared with graphic and text-based self-media content, the path to monetization of short video content is shorter and more direct. There was a special discussion on Zhihu about the content monetization path. The general idea was that those foodie anchors you look down on can make more money and faster than you can by writing articles hard.

The purpose of the plan should be unique, specific and pure. Making money and passion are generally in conflict, and you have to make a choice.

2. Target user groups and account content positioning

This part needs to make it clear who the content is for and what needs of the target user group the content meets. This can be achieved by analyzing competitor accounts and conducting in-depth interviews with typical target users.

It doesn't happen in one step and may require multiple adjustments. However, there must be a direction at the beginning to avoid being aimless. Repeated trial and error is only valuable if it is iterated on a certain basis. Trial and error without direction is just blind.

How to analyze a competitor's account, infer the size of the content team, production process, topic selection, characteristics of the target user group, monetization and conversion, fan operation, etc. This requires more practice. By filling in the blanks of a complete short video operation plan, you can restore the other party's operation ideas.

Of course, you can also directly search for relevant information, ask the other party’s operations staff, consult industry insiders, etc.

3. Account decoration and content production

This part is the key point. For account decoration, you can refer to the overall decoration ideas of personal WeChat account, or you can refer to the decoration ideas of QQ space, avatar, nickname, homepage cover, personal signature/introduction, etc.

4. Fans Operation

Increasing the number of followers is a task indicator. Specific strategies for increasing followers are divided into within the platform and outside the platform. There are many specific methods and routines within the platform, such as interaction in the comment area, which is a very important point.

Outside the platform, it connects short video accounts, other self-media platforms, communities, pre-sales customer service, after-sales service, offline activities, etc.

2. Specific content operation of short videos

When it comes to the content of short video operations, it can be broken down into four major aspects:

1. Channel operation;

2. Content operation;

3. User operation;

4. Community operation;

First: Short video channel operation

This mainly refers to channel cooperation including domestic and foreign mainstream short video platforms and short video content distribution operations. Externally, it is generally a TOB cooperation method, while internally, it requires feedback from channels to collect data, which can then feed back into the iteration of content products and achieve user operations.

However, it can be said that the channel operations of short videos in China and abroad have completely different operational thinking and methods. As long as you have a good grasp of several major video and social content platforms abroad, there will basically be no problem. However, the situation in China is more complicated. It can be said that so far, there is no single dominant player.

At the same time, the content of each channel, as well as the tone of users and content positioning are obviously different. When we are working on vertical and other segmented content, we must carefully understand the content needs of each channel platform and the user preferences of this platform before we can do a good job in the subsequent operations.

Second: Short video content operation

Content can also be understood as content planning and production, and then there is a film review stage, which are all part of the traditional program production process. However, considering the current purpose of short video operations, when planning content production, more consideration should be given to serving growth.

Therefore, in the process of producing content, it is necessary to closely integrate channel operations and user operations, and then combine them with the collection and organization of big data to form a more comprehensive and refined process.

Here, I would like to emphasize that you should not have "author's thinking". The main purpose of screenwriting is to make the video look good, and even some logic can be sacrificed for this. So, here we also need to add "thinking from the user's perspective." Otherwise, all content production is nothing but "self-entertainment" and "self-admiration", and is completely useless.

Third: Short video user operation

Second: Short video content operation

Content can also be understood as content planning and production, and then there is a film review stage, which are all part of the traditional program production process. However, considering the current purpose of short video operations, when planning content production, more consideration should be given to serving growth.

Therefore, in the process of producing content, it is necessary to closely integrate channel operations and user operations, and then combine them with the collection and organization of big data to form a more comprehensive and refined process.

Here, I would like to emphasize that you should not have "author's thinking". The main purpose of screenwriting is to make the video look good, and even some logic can be sacrificed for this. So, here we also need to add "thinking from the user's perspective." Otherwise, all content production is nothing but "self-entertainment" and "self-admiration", and is completely useless.

Third: Short video user operation

3. Operational strategy of short videos

For the strategic plan, we use Li Jiaqi, the top internet celebrity, as an example to make it more intuitive.

Strategy 1: Platform Differentiation Operation

High-quality content is the prerequisite for attracting users.

For example, when Li Jiaqi is doing Taobao live broadcasts, the duration is usually 4-6 hours, and his speaking speed is very fast. During the live broadcast, he tried the product in front of the camera while introducing the product's functions, design, and how it felt on the face. At the same time, fans will be reminded how to use and match the products, and fans' messages will be answered one-on-one.

After switching to the Douyin platform, Li Jiaqi's team adopted a completely different operating strategy based on the characteristics of Douyin short videos.

First, Li Jiaqi’s team compressed the Taobao live video, extracted the selling points of the products, and directly displayed the effect feedback, so that each video of dozens of seconds is both interesting and has Li Jiaqi’s personal style.

Secondly, Li Jiaqi’s team added the name of the swatched product and the brand name to the cover of each video. This not only ensures the uniformity of the video style, but also makes it convenient for users to choose content to watch.

Strategy 3: Brand labeling

Labeling is a way for users to quickly remember the brand

This problem is easy to solve: just follow the most basic logic in marketing, "raise a question - analyze the problem - solve the problem"

Strategy 4: Benefits Explanation

From the user's perspective, find the key points that can most impress the user. It not only attracts users' attention, but also makes them interested in the product and subsequently purchase it.

Strategy 2: Vertical field entry

There are many bloggers who make beauty videos, but there are very few bloggers who focus on a specific field. Li Jiaqi’s popularity is related to his precise positioning as a “professional lipstick reviewer”.

Among the Douyin videos posted by Li Jiaqi, lipstick videos account for more than 70%.

In addition, he also pinned a video on Douyin in which he competed with Jack Ma in selling lipsticks and challenged the Guinness record of applying lipstick in 30 seconds. The promotional slogan is "The No. 1 lipstick brand who defeated Jack Ma", and it has successfully used the endorsement of Internet celebrities to make the label of "No. 1 lipstick brand" more popular.

Compared with other bloggers, what other characteristics does Li Jiaqi have?

1) Characteristic performances

Generally speaking, beauty bloggers are mostly women. As a boy born in the 1990s, Li Jiaqi puts on different colored lipsticks and pouts his lips for you to see every day. His unique style is very eye-catching. Coupled with the classic lines, the whole work seems very magical and brainwashing.

2) Make the content more refined

Most of the Tik Tok videos about lipstick focus on whether the color looks good and what the effect is.

In addition to describing the color of the lipstick, Li Jiaqi also gives a comprehensive introduction from the aspects of packaging, appearance, texture, taste, etc., so that users can have a more comprehensive understanding of the product and increase conversions.

IV. Summary of the Problem

There are always some problems that need to be solved when making videos. Let’s summarize our experience in making videos.

1. Continuous output

The video must either be informative, interesting or good-looking. Being interesting requires a joke script and good actors, which is difficult; being good-looking requires actors with high looks, which is difficult to reconcile. I have seen many videos related to themselves, and the shooting is very rough, but the number of likes is very high; and many accounts shoot simple content, but have posted many videos and accumulated tens of thousands of fans. I am optimistic that as long as we persevere and continuously output content, we can also accumulate fans.

Therefore, the accounts I benchmarked against were all small V accounts, not big ones, and I did not hold myself to high standards; "learn from the best and you will get something average; learn from the average and you will get something below average." The quality of the videos we output was not high, our fans did not increase, and our team morale was low.

2. The higher the image quality, the better

Everyone may have noticed, why the clear picture when shooting becomes a blurry picture after editing and shaking? Why are other people’s Tik Tok videos so clear?

The clarity of Tik Tok videos is required to be as high as possible. If the equipment is insufficient, technology can be used to make up for it.

1) "Restoration" can ensure authenticity . You can achieve the best viewing effect by using the same pixel as the one you shot. However, if you shoot at 2.7K or 4K but export it at 1080P, it will inevitably be distorted. TikTok does not support uploading 1080P videos, and uploaded videos will be compressed. You can know this by downloading its files. Generally, a 40s video is only 7M in size.

2) When compressing Tik Tok, the degree of compression of 9:16 (wide screen) is much smaller than that of 16:9 (vertical screen), which means it can be clearer; the principle is that the large area of ​​9:16 is a black screen, and only the middle area is the picture content. If you keep shrinking a picture, you will feel that it is much clearer than enlarging it.

3) Professional parameter adjustment, adjusting saturation and sharpening can make the page look clearer.

4) Pay attention to focus when shooting to ensure picture clarity and to make sure that the effective depth of field of the camera lens is fully utilized.