How are well-known educational institutions using short videos to make famous teachers famous?

2019-2020 is a period for short video creators in the general knowledge field to fully enjoy the platform traffic dividend. The reason for saying this is that in just over a year, the mainstream short video platforms Douyin and Kuaishou have launched numerous support activities for creators in the education field, seemingly intending to make education a key vertical category of the platform. ByteDance has even openly wanted to enter the education field.

A rough summary of the support activities of Douyin and Kuaishou for educational creators in the past year is shown in the table below:

Practitioners in the short video field in the industry said that Kuaishou started a one-on-one support program for educational creators around the end of 2019. Specific support items include answering daily operational questions, priority notification of on-site activities, and providing traffic support of 100,000 to 400,000 promotion coupons after weekly evaluation. The official mainly assesses the number of accounts settled and the frequency of video updates. The amount of traffic support will be assessed based on the cover click-through rate of a single account and the cost of acquiring fans after the use of promotion coupons. Overall, it is hoped that this will encourage more educational creators to settle in and produce more high-quality video content to maintain the platform's content ecological positive cycle.

Soon after, Douyin also followed suit and began to proactively contact educational institutions and creators on the platform to establish a one-on-one communication and support group. The assessment rules of Douyin are relatively simple. After an account publishes 1-2 videos for operation evaluation, it will be given a minimum of 10,000 to 50,000 traffic support. If the account content is of relatively high quality, the supported traffic can reach 50,000 to 100,000.

Now that the two major short video platform players attach so much importance to educational creators and operate them in a refined manner, it has undoubtedly created a stage where the spotlight is shining for educational institutions/creators. Educational institutions/creators are naturally willing to join in and build their own short video accounts, either to enhance brand influence, sell courses to earn revenue, or acquire customers to reduce costs.

To date, after more than a year of platform support and hard work from educational institutions, which are the famous education teacher accounts that have gained many fans and been successfully pushed to the forefront? This article will take stock of the Douyin or Kuaishou accounts of some well-known educational companies. The main types of accounts counted are teacher persona accounts. The characteristics of this type of account are: a fixed teacher appears in person, lectures on subject knowledge or learning methods, and the account has a certain fan base.

1. TAL Group

1. Xueersi Gold Medal Mathematics Lecturer "Wu Jiuri"

A coffee table, a screen and a white Hanfu give people a refreshing sense of teaching ritual. The simple, generous and fairy-like appearance of the character leaves a deep impression on people at first sight.

According to the third-party data monitoring platform Duanyuer, the account’s first video, "How difficult is the last question in college entrance examination mathematics?", was released on January 23, 2020. As of now, it has received 254,000 likes and its estimated number of views has exceeded 10 million. The timeless hot topic of "College Entrance Examination" is supported by precise case data, which show that "the average score for the final question is 0.31 points" and "every one of the 300,000 people in the province got it right." Finally, the revealing explanation leads to "Don't be dissatisfied, the difficult final question of the college entrance examination was deliberately designed." After reading it, it really satisfied my curiosity greatly.

This hit video was later pinned to the top of the account by the operator. Until shortly before the college entrance examination, there were still many users leaving comments and interacting with it. The long-tail effect of the video was very obvious.

What’s interesting is that after this hit video, the entire content direction of the account did not continue to focus on interesting explanations of college entrance examination-related issues that students were concerned about. Instead, it turned to focus on hard-core math problem-solving knowledge. This exploration lasted for a month. The teacher explained hard-core math knowledge such as "trigonometric function synchronization problems", "image passing through fixed points", "ellipse eccentricity", and "arithmetic sequence". In terms of video format, two methods were tried: the teacher explaining the problems in front of a small blackboard and the teacher holding a pen to record the problem-solving process. The data received average responses.

From February 23 to March 6, the release trajectory of the video on Douyin was basically a combination of soft knowledge and a hard subject question. Judging from the number of likes, the soft knowledge content was obviously better. After a one-month deviation period and a half-month adjustment period, the account operation team seemed to have seen the clues from the data. Starting from March 7, the video topic selection generally gave up the teaching of hard-core math problems and focused on hot topics that students were interested in, such as:

"Which year's college entrance examination math questions were the most difficult?"

"Do you know where the college entrance examination papers come from?"

“What is it like to go to Hengshui No. 1 Middle School?”

"Who is Ge Jun, the math devil of the college entrance examination?"

…

It is definitely a video version of a "Zhihu" column, but users are very receptive to this kind of content, and the number of fans on Douyin is also rising steadily.

At this point, a pan-college entrance examination lecturer has been developed who will focus on the topic of the college entrance examination, extend it to explain efficient learning methods, college entrance examination scores, occasionally add some real college entrance examination questions as a seasoning, and help people look forward to college life.

The update frequency of this account is basically 1-2 updates a day, and this teacher is quite diligent. At a time when the traffic bonus period of Douyin is basically coming to an end, the number of fans in the field of knowledge education has exceeded 200,000 in less than 6 months, which is considered an excellent performance. More importantly, the account is still in the period of increasing fans, and the recently updated videos frequently have more than 10,000 likes, indicating that the videos are performing well. It only needs to continue to polish the selection of topics, and if there are daily small hits, and then a big hit, "good wind will help me soar to the sky" and realize a gorgeous stage show.

2. Xueersi Online School’s Gold Medal Teacher “Mathematics Wang Youli”

Compared with the design-filled Wu Jiuri above, this teacher's style has more of a down-to-earth feel. The teacher is quite distinctive, with a dazed look on his face that is unique to a top student, and he looks very powerful at first glance.

The teacher’s videos are mainly short clips of actual lectures, which eliminates the need for on-site filming and reduces the overall video production cost. If you’ve been a student, you know that in class, teachers will always add some life philosophy and interesting quotes in addition to explaining the questions. The account of math teacher "Wang Youli" is like a collection of highlights from the classroom in terms of content.

The overall content is divided into two categories: one is the explanation of classic math questions and instant-killing techniques, and the other is answering questions around learning-related issues.

The account posted its first video on January 10, 2020. As of the time of writing, 77 videos have been posted on Douyin, with 7 videos receiving more than 10,000 likes. The topic statistics are as follows:

What kind of person dares to choose Peking University as his first choice?

Tips for cheating on exams

Who is the big devil of college entrance examination mathematics?

Cruel second year of high school, a terrible watershed

How difficult is the Shanghai College Entrance Examination English paper?

The most difficult math question in the high school entrance examination in the past decade

How difficult is the last big question in the college entrance examination mathematics?

2. Doushen Education Department

1. Mr. Yang from Doushen Education

Doushin Education-Teacher Yang, formerly known as "Zhuge Academy-Teacher Yang", this account has almost become a benchmark in the field of education. Later, it was also used by Douyin officials as an industry case for external publicity, but do you know? This account did not find the right direction and push Teacher Yang to the forefront so smoothly from the beginning.

It is understood that this account first started operating at least at the end of 2018. The initial video format focused on compiling graphic and text material collections, such as "Tsinghua Affiliated Primary School's latest recommended reading list for elementary school grades 1-6", "Five movies that children must watch during the winter vacation", "A Chinese language learning plan from elementary school to junior high school", etc.

This type of content was explored for nearly a month and a half. Although there were occasional small hits, it was ultimately not the healthy content advocated by the platform. The upstream text and video data was also becoming increasingly deserted. The account then began a month-long exploration in a new direction. During this period, Teacher Yang also went into the studio to shoot short video content specifically, focusing on the explanation of polyphonetic characters in elementary schools. Unfortunately, the data was still very limited. After that, the account even tried to replace the protagonist with other male teachers, but there was still no improvement.

Teacher Yang's early shooting style

It was not until March 2019 that the account directly uploaded the actual scenes of Teacher Yang’s class to Douyin. The first updated video content, "Five-step method for answering elementary school Chinese reading questions", became an instant hit. From the background, it can be seen that the video has received over 170,000 likes and 40,000 reposts, which undoubtedly hit the urgent needs of parents!

Then the second, third, fourth, fifth... each one continued the format of real-life classroom teaching, and all were big hits. "Do you know the world through the eyes of children?" received over one million likes. The successive hit videos verified users' pursuit and love for this type of original classroom video format. "Realism" defeated the past "deliberateness". After finding the right direction, Zhuge Academy continued to update the classroom teaching style steadily for nearly a year, and almost led the trend of educational institutions directly cutting and moving teachers' teaching videos to their accounts.

It is worth mentioning that Zhuge Xuetang-Teacher Yang’s Kuaishou account started late, and only released the first video in May this year. The video was also a simultaneous copy of the early videos on Douyin. Even so, the data performance on Kuaishou is still relatively excellent. Currently, 144 videos have been updated, and the accumulated fans have reached 790,000.

Even though traditional classroom lectures are not sophisticated in video format, they still impressed more than 8 million users with their simple way of imparting knowledge.

2. Teacher Meiying from Doushen Education

Teacher Meiying's account and Teacher Yang's account started to be operated at almost the same time. After all, they came from the same educational institution. Before finding the right account personality positioning, they basically went through a similar exploration cycle as Teacher Yang. At the beginning, it was information and text content, and then it moved to the direction of popular videos on the small blackboard, and then to using real classroom teaching records to attract the target user group, which once again verified the feasibility of classroom teaching videos on Douyin.

The initial video format

The direction of popular videos that were successfully explored in the early stage

Other accounts incubated by Doshin Education during the same period that still have a relatively large number of fans include Doshin Education-Teacher Fu Qiang (431,000) and Doshin Education-Teacher Dou Xin (1.1 million), which I will not go into detail here.

It is worth mentioning that at a time when the traffic of Douyin is gradually being diluted, the accounts of Doushen Education-Teacher Yang and Doushen Education-Teacher Meiying have both shown negative growth, with the number of fans decreasing by more than 5,000 per week. Since April this year, Doshin Education has gradually started to synchronize video content on Kuaishou, and the number of fans on Kuaishou is growing rapidly. After the Douyin platform, Kuaishou is undoubtedly becoming the second pole of Doshin Education's growth process.

3. New Oriental

As an old educational institution, New Oriental seems to be rather casual and belated in its reaction speed and involvement in short videos. Although it has also set up some Douyin accounts, the video content is mostly reposted from past speeches by Yu Minhong or internal staff. It does not seem to have much intention to push well-known internal teachers to the forefront of short videos (it may also be that I have not discovered them yet). The only account found to establish a teacher's IP is called "Teacher Zhenzhen teaches Chinese."

According to information on New Oriental’s official website, Teacher Zhenzhen’s original name was Liu Zhen. She was awarded the honorary title of China National Radio’s Star Teacher in 2019. The New Oriental course introduction page describes her as “a dramatic teacher who embodies beauty and wisdom.” Perhaps it is precisely this characteristic of “drama queen” that makes Teacher Zhenzhen’s “debut” on the short video account seem so natural.

The big account "Teacher Zhenzhen teaches Chinese" started operating at the end of April this year. In the early stage, it mainly explained obscure and unpopular idioms. After updating a few issues, the response was sparse. Kuaishou also tried to explain historical figures and classic masterpieces in an interesting way, such as "The only person who has eaten Tang Monk's flesh in Journey to the West", gossip "Lu You married his cousin and was forced to divorce his wife by his mother", "Li Bai is a tour guide, these are all evidence", etc. These videos were hidden or deleted one after another after finding the most suitable account positioning.

It took only one month for Teacher Zhenzhen's account to go from exploring the initial direction to determining the content and turning to the writing field that the teacher is familiar with. This account can be regarded as a model of an account in the industry that found the direction relatively quickly.

By finding the right direction and making every video hit the user's needs, Teacher Zhenzhen ushered in an explosive period of fan growth for her account. New Oriental's operators centered around this popular teacher and immediately opened small accounts on Douyin and Kuaishou with teacher Liu Zhen as the core, such as Zhenzhen Chinese Score Improvement Database and Zhenzhen Chinese Classroom. Although teacher Liu Zhen's face has never appeared in any of the videos on Zhenzhen's Chinese language score improvement database, this marketing account is still producing popular videos under the name of teacher Zhenzhen, with the highest number of views for a single video reaching 560,000.

This is probably the first teacher from New Oriental, besides Mr. Yu Minhong, to be promoted to Kuaishou short video platform and gain a certain number of fans.

4. Yuanfudao Series

Also a math teacher for college entrance examination students, Yuanfudao's ace math teacher "Trick" has a different style on Douyin from Xueersi's gold medal math teacher "Wu Jiuri". Teacher Trick's main slogan is "I'll accompany you in your college entrance examination", and his camera language is very natural and provocative. Sometimes he debunks the highly praised topic on Zhihu "How to only sleep 6 hours a day and still stay energetic all day long", sometimes he turns into a caring senior who teaches college entrance examination students to "quit mobile phones and study hard", and sometimes he turns into a plot player to perform a funny story of counterattacking Tsinghua University, making the character's personality more three-dimensional.

Different from most teachers who record their videos indoors, Teacher Kang’s videos are mostly shot outdoors. The overall picture quality and clarity of the videos are very high, and the real scenes make the videos more lifelike.

The account started operating in April this year and has released 45 videos so far, including 8 hit videos of varying sizes. The overall content operation does not encounter many pitfalls. The characters are accurate, the videos are high-quality, and the topics are relevant to the target audience. I believe the team must have done detailed account planning and positioning in advance.

5. Who to learn series

Wu Xiaoyun's Chinese classroom started operating in early January this year. It adopts the left and right dual-screen video format that was very popular at the time, one ancient and one modern, focusing on general Chinese knowledge. The topics are very diverse and interesting, and the content is interspersed with some variety show-like gameplay such as "guessing ancient poems from pictures" and "knowledge competitions", which improves the viewability of the account. Judging from the data, the results are quite good and many popular products have emerged.

It seems that the real identity of the girl appearing on the video is not a teacher, but the account's ability to quickly increase its followers through popular videos is still worth learning from.

In the process of collecting famous teachers' accounts, it can be clearly felt that the investment intensity and target styles of various educational institutions in creating short video accounts are very different. For example, Xueersi is almost sparing no effort to make famous teachers famous, casting a wide net to open accounts, and the content is rich and diverse. It has tried many types of attempts such as drama, teaching, mother and baby, family classroom, personal IP, etc. Some accounts that mainly feature teachers can still maintain a relatively active update frequency.

As a whole, New Oriental and Yuanfudao do not seem to have much intention of pushing teachers to the front line. The accounts on Douyin or Kuaishou are mainly used for brand promotion. Although New Oriental's Douyin series accounts have a certain number of fans, the content is mostly edited or reposted, and there is basically no stable teacher personality. The teachers at Yuanfudao are more like those who are trying out short videos for the first time. There are almost no large accounts that have really gained a lot of volume. The high quality of the video content means that the production cost is also high. Once they do not get positive feedback on the growth of fans, they will most likely stop updating halfway.

For example, the account "Beijing-style Mathematics Sun Mingjie" features a teacher who is Yuanfudao's top math teacher for the college entrance examination. He was once invited to participate in the "Ace vs. Ace" program, but the account focuses on operations on Douyin. The video format focuses more on the plot and takes into account fun. The teacher mostly uses performances to show the daily funny plots between teachers and students. There is less serious math lecture content, which is conducive to shaping the teacher's personalized side overall. The fan growth data has not yet achieved a major breakthrough. It started operating at the end of April and ended in mid-June, with a total of 31 videos released. Since then, the account has not been updated and the number of fans has remained at 5,883. There is also Yuanfudao’s Chinese language account “Lina’s Chinese Language World”, but the positioning of its video content has always been rather vague, and it has been slow to gain rapid fan growth.

On the other hand, what do those famous teacher IP accounts that have successfully achieved fan growth have in common?

6. Commonalities of Famous Teachers’ IP Accounts with Increased Followers

1. Topic Content

Targeting the urgent needs of the student group, how do you find the urgent needs of your target group? Here’s a tip for you: list keywords.

For example, if the target audience you want to attract when creating an account is high school students, then what keywords can be used around high school students? For example, the keywords that can be listed include: college entrance examination, university, study methods, etc. The keyword "college entrance examination" can be broken down into preparation methods, analysis of college entrance examination questions, instant score-raising techniques, college entrance examination admission rates, major provinces for college entrance examinations, etc.; topics surrounding universities can be broken down into college entrance examination application forms, selection of majors, universities, university life, etc.; by unraveling the issues layer by layer, you will find out what the target audience's concerns are. By testing around these key contents, you will find that a certain type of content is almost an everlasting hit.

For example, the topic "How difficult is the last question of college entrance examination xx (subject)" received 249,000 likes on the account of Wu Jiuri, a mathematics professor, 271,000 likes on the account of Wang Youli, a mathematics professor, 61,000 likes on the account of Wan Neng Zhang, a physics professor, and 433,000 likes on the account of the Tsinghua University Mathematics Department teacher. This is definitely a traffic-generating topic that has been verified repeatedly, so it is certainly worth a try for your IP teacher.

2. Video format

For teachers of the same subject, the knowledge points they teach are actually similar. The reason why some teachers gain followers quickly while others gain followers slowly lies in differentiation.

What is differentiation? For example, normally math teachers explain problems in front of the blackboard, so your teacher can go for the ancient style of the school; for another example, most teachers set the scene indoors, so your teacher can try to go outdoors; or other teachers all teach in a serious manner, so your teacher can try a sharp and cool style.

In short, give the audience enough memory points so that they can remember this teacher in a short time. For example, I may not remember the specific content of the video about the Tsinghua University Mathematics Department teacher who was cheating, but the sentence he must say in every video, "I will accompany you in your college entrance examination," has become an anchor of memory and remains in my mind.

3. The teacher’s hard power

Except for general knowledge accounts that focus on form, such as Chinese, which can try to use operations to replace teachers, the best characters for other subjects should be the expressive teachers themselves. After all, only teachers know best what key knowledge points students need to master and what form of explanation will make it easier for students to accept. Teachers themselves also have the most professional teaching experience to provide shaping support.

4. Practical skills are important, but knowledge should be light

The two accounts under Yuanfudao, "Beijing-style Mathematics Sun Mingjie" and "Lina's Chinese Language World", are actually quite unique in terms of the format of the videos, but they only focus on the plot and are relatively weak in the dry knowledge content of the subject. For students or parents who go to Douyin to seek entertainment content, they may lack some sense of value.

Why is it so easy for Chinese language subject accounts to create high-follower accounts or popular videos even without famous teachers appearing on the screen? Because the knowledge points of Chinese language are light enough, ancient and modern Chinese and foreign literature, history and culture can all be used as a resource library for videos. Although users can find this type of content by searching on Baidu, when it is told by real people on Douyin, users will still feel a sense of surprise that they have "increased knowledge" and "learned something" when they first hear it. Whoever impresses users first at that moment will win their favor and attention.

Accounts like mathematics and physics focus purely on subject knowledge. The content is too hard-core and can easily cause psychological discomfort, making users feel tired and bored. If such accounts want to gain a rapid increase in fans, it would be more effective to intersperse content with learning methods and motivational quotes.

5. Persistence is victory

The essence of updating the content of a short video account is to create a hit. Only hit videos can help an account increase followers quickly. Only stable and continuous updates can guarantee the probability of the account becoming a hit and allow users who follow you to have the possibility of seeing you a second time. Many people fail in their account creation not because of poor content, but because they fail to persist until the day when a hit product comes. If you decide that short videos are the way to go, then it is necessary to ensure continuous updates.

The essence of education is to impart knowledge and answer questions. The two most important points in creating a famous teacher account are: one is to shape the teacher's personality and characteristics, and the other is to convey practical knowledge value. If you blindly pursue popular forms and eye-catching anecdotes, the content will deviate from the core value of education. Even if you can gain traffic at the time, the ceiling of the account will easily be reached and it will be difficult to sustain.

At present, we see that Zhuzuo Yebang, Yuanfudao, New Oriental, and GSX have all entered the market to try to build the influence of famous teachers. The battle for traffic and users has never stopped. Famous teachers are a good signboard, but how each company will make this signboard famous in the early stage remains to be seen.

Official account: Operator’s Notes, focusing on consolidating short video operation methodology and short video + education industry observations.