Although I have been working in new media, I have never been involved in short video operations , so I can be considered a novice. The Douyin project has been operating for 4 months since March 2020.

During the operation, no marketing promotion was carried out and no additional investment was made. The biggest expense was probably that I once tried to buy DOU+ for 100 yuan. I just use my spare time at work, following the company's instructions, and simply try to create content. The highest number of views so far is only tens of thousands. Unfortunately, it is not the million-dollar hit that everyone imagined.

I always believe that a hit product is the result of long-term accumulation, rather than luck from scratch. So today, I will not tell you any shortcuts or successful experiences, but I will share some of my experiences from daily practice.

Label Crossover

When we are working on new media, we will have many preference labels when dividing content to extract the highlights of the content, such as interesting, useful, informative, curious, etc. The same is true for Douyin.

In the process of operating Douyin, we found that a single label is no longer sufficient to support the dissemination of content, but more and more cross-labels, even three-pronged labels, can attract a certain amount of attention.

We have produced two pieces of content. One is about the phenomenon of urban commercial cities in the early stage of resumption of work. There are two labels here: hot spots + curiosity. The epidemic was still a hot topic in early March, and everyone was very curious about when the business would open. Seeing what the usually bustling commercial streets looked like became a point of curiosity in the minds of users. This content was the first released on our Douyin platform. Despite having zero fans, it received nearly 30,000 views.

One is that ducks went to war. At that time, there happened to be a hot topic, which was a locust plague in a foreign country, so Chinese ducks went to war. Because it was very regional, I directly used the materials on the Internet to make a short video, which was played more than 20,000 times. The label of this post is hot topic + related honors, and it is also a bit entertaining.

At the beginning, we thought that starting from zero fans would mean tens of thousands of traffic, but the short videos we made later had less than 1,000 views. When we reviewed the situation, we analyzed that label cross-talk is still very important. Only focusing on hot topics, only focusing on single tags such as interesting ones, etc. will not lead to sufficient dissemination.

Finding the Triple Rhythm

In order to quickly master the skills of Douyin short video operations, we have opened more than one platform and given them different positioning. When publishing content and summarizing data, we found that we need to find three rhythms to operate Douyin:

Fan Rhythm

Tik Tok has soothing and fast-paced rhythms. In the recommendation chain, which rhythm do your fans prefer? We have tried posting short videos and found that the same content, with different rhythms, will get different results. As far as our fans are concerned, the fast-paced ones are more popular. The first level of rhythm is to grasp the user's frequency and find a suitable rhythm.

Platform rhythm

On the Douyin platform, in addition to being familiar with the recommendation mechanism, you also need to study the platform's active peak rhythm and hot spot rhythm. I didn't think the time of posting had much impact before, but after experiments, I found that finding a posting rhythm that matches the platform is still somewhat useful. Grasping the platform's active rhythm and content rhythm is the second rhythm.

(Active time distribution of TikTok users, source: QuestMobile)

IP rhythm

The so-called IP rhythm is the rhythm of one's own operation. The frequency, level, and style of production: We found that when the style and level of video production are inconsistent, the recommendation changes will be obvious, and in many cases, it will be a downward trend. Add my own production rhythm and style rhythm, this is the third rhythm.

Building IP image

Nowadays, many products are IP-based. Douyin short videos can also be IP-based. They do not need to be comprehensive, but have their own characteristics, mainly in two aspects:

Commonly referred to as positioning. In the TV series "Twenty Do Not Understand", Duan Jiabao pointed out that Liang Shuang's biggest flaw as a beauty blogger is that she has no recognizability, and also positioned her as a grumpy beauty blogger.

Similarly, the operation of Douyin short videos also needs positioning. I think it can be done by using the method of adjective + field. Attributives can be nouns, adjectives, or verbs. For example, cool is made up of grumpy (adjective) + beauty; we are story (noun) + information; and walking (verb) + food.

What is commonly referred to as personality. In fact, users always have some imagination about operators, so we use this curiosity to create space for imagination.

Here are three ways:

When our short videos were at a low point, we decided to use the method of character appearance to create the image of a simple boy, so that users could associate the content with the character.

Production skills: In addition to expressing the character itself, the character can also be expressed through production skills, such as rigorous or careless;

When it comes to copywriting style, we often say that the handwriting reflects the person. Sometimes, the copywriting is also like the person. When we see beautiful copywriting, we imagine a gentle woman, and when we see violent copywriting, we imagine a tomboy.

(An example of a hit that uses a fixed format, music, and editing)

I think that if there is no imagination about the IP, there will be a lack of attention, so it is important to shape the IP image.

Learn to design in a pleasing way

During the four months of operation, I found that some pleasing designs can also bring certain traffic. for example:

Creativity. There is a video that shows a father giving his only noodles to his son, but the son spits it out because it is tasteless. Everyone thought it was a heartwarming episode, but there was a twist: the father took out a roasted chicken from under the table and started eating it. The content has no logic and no meaning, but it gets a high amount of spread. This is the power of creativity.

An unexpected reversal. Just like the brain teasers we played as children, the short video is more about the reversal of emotions, from anger at the son to being in tears and laughter at the father.

The suspense comes to an abrupt end. When I was a kid, I would always ask to continue watching TV series tomorrow at the climax. Therefore, compared to pictures and texts, short videos have the advantage of ending abruptly.

Mouth-watering colors. Looking at various short videos, I found that as long as they are beautiful enough and the content is beautiful enough, they will drive traffic. This is true whether it’s about travel, food, or even stories.

Therefore, I think it is possible to increase the number of views by using some small tricks. These techniques are not restricted by any field and can be used regardless of your position.

Finding a sense of existence

Although he operates TikTok, he is not used to seeking presence for his TikTok on the platform. It’s just that sometimes when I leave comments and like posts on other Douyin accounts, I can always “attract” a few fans, and then I feel that maybe it is necessary to find a sense of existence.

Find a sense of presence through comment interaction. The operators of Douyin also pay attention to data. Every time there is a new message reminder, they will think that the content released has more likes, but many times, it is actually users who like the comments. As time went by, diverting users from the comment section became a new possibility.

Find a sense of presence through topic interaction. Another thing is to participate in the topics of Douyin. At the beginning, I felt that many topics did not match the positioning and were not suitable, but occasionally participating in them did have an effect.

It is easy for us to fall into a misunderstanding in our operations, that is, to guard our own platform and leave more traces on other platforms to increase our presence, which will bring unexpected gains.

Summarize

I believe that when pursuing a hit product, one must pursue its stability, and the stability of a hit product lies in the base and activity of fans. An accidental hit product cannot play a big role and instead becomes a flash in the pan. I am a novice in short video operations, but I always believe that the underlying ability to polish good content is the basis for quantitative change to qualitative change.

Use label cross-method, rhythm method, IP image method, pleasing design method, and sense of presence method to help create content. Although it does not necessarily guarantee results, it can at least exercise your basic abilities so that you will not lose your mind due to a temporary hit.

Author: Flowery Little Master

Source: Huahua Xiaomengzhu

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