10 tips for short video operation and promotion!

This is an article for short video newcomers!

But if your focus is on the first half of the title, you might get a little lost in the content of the article.

If your focus is on the second half of the title, thank you very much for your trust in me and I hope it can bring you some benefits.

As a newcomer to short videos, I will share my experiences with you from a unique operational perspective.

Are you ready? Start now!

As an in-depth practitioner in the Internet industry, the author came into contact with TikTok short videos around the end of 2016 (before graduation).

However, I have little interest in this type of entertainment and addictive product, so I have never tried it.

I even wrote a few pessimistic articles when TikTok started the internal testing of medium and long videos.

Now that short videos have upgraded and evolved to the second stage: live streaming with goods (monetization), the author finally couldn’t help but give it a try.

The main reason is that the company has this demand recently and is exploring the way forward in advance.

So I spent one day during the May 1 holiday studying theoretical techniques, and then released the first short video on May 5th.

As of last night (May 8), in four days, the number of views of a single video exceeded 1 million.

I have also worked on Douyin and Kuaishou. The data of Douyin is not ideal, so I won’t post the pictures.

So, this is not a clickbait article, and you can continue reading with confidence.

Back to the beginning of the article: "But if your focus is on the first half of the title, the content of the article may make you a little lost."

What does it mean?

There are now a lot of courses on the Internet that teach you how to make Douyin and Kuaishou, and the titles are more frightening than each other.

For example: "10,000 followers in 7 days", "100,000 followers in a month", "100,000 Douyin monetization in a month"

Bottom line: probably 90% of these courses are scams or ineffective.

01. Big names are very busy. The real Douyin big names with millions of fans are busy with various commercial activities. Who has the time to teach you a course at a bargain price of 9.9?

02. If he really knows how to quickly increase followers and make quick money, why would he tell you? Is it possible for a person to feel that the money he earns is too much?

03. Most of the courses you bought are the most basic theoretical knowledge. It cannot be said that they are completely useless, but this knowledge is actually free of charge.

There are official free video tutorials in the creator centers of Douyin and Kuaishou. In addition, you can buy hundreds of GB of video courses for a few dollars on Taobao Xianyu.

04. Even if you skip the previous items, and there is indeed a short video celebrity who is kind enough to give you free tutoring, what do you think are the chances that you can accomplish it?

His account has 10 million followers, and any of his videos may get 50,000 likes and 10,000 comments. That’s because his account weight/attributes/base are there.

If you were a newbie who just started, even if you followed his instructions and posted the same type of videos, do you think you would have a chance to reach that level?

Note that your starting points are different.

So, in the future, whenever you encounter a teacher who says how awesome he is, he can just post a video and get millions of views, likes and tens of thousands of comments.

OK, these data simply represent that his existing accounts are very successful.

But if you want to charge for teaching your skills, just use a newly registered account and let him try it.

A true master must be proficient in mental skills and will not be affected by objective factors such as the environment.

If he is still that awesome, please recommend him to me, thank you.

Should I choose "Tik Tok" or "Kuaishou"?

Many friends who have just entered the market may have such doubts (manually excluding other short video products such as Weishi).

Only primary school students do multiple-choice questions, while adults choose all of them.

Doing it at the same time gives you two opportunities to trial and error and to perform well. After all, without trying, no one can figure out which users prefer your content.

For example, the author’s previous plan focused on Douyin, but Kuaishou unexpectedly became popular.

As for the difference between Douyin and Kuaishou, you can actually see it from the slogans of their official products.

Tik Tok: Recording a Beautiful Life

Kuaishou: See every kind of life

I have marked the key parts in bold, which is also the underlying design logic of the two products.

That is, Douyin focuses on content, while Kuaishou focuses on personality.

Therefore, what we often see on the Douyin recommendation page are beautiful young ladies with long legs, while Kuaishou recommends more silly people (with personal characteristics) from all over the country.

Those friends who casually comment that Douyin videos are of good quality and Kuaishou videos are vulgar actually don’t understand.

From this we can see that Douyin pays more attention to the quality of content, while Kuaishou pays more attention to the diversity of content.

01. If you want to make Tik Tok, you must ensure that the quality of your videos can meet the "good" standard, otherwise try Kuaishou.

02. If you want to be a fast-moving video creator, you must ensure the authenticity of your video. If you want to do flashy and posed videos, please try Douyin.

Of course, in the near future, the content of Douyin and Kuaishou will become more and more similar or even completely converge.

Why?

Because the total number of Internet users in China is so large (about 900 million), the monthly active users of Douyin and Kuaishou have reached 400 million and 300 million respectively (there is some overlap between them).

Next, both parties will inevitably continue to adjust their product attributes in order to compete for each other's existing core users.

But these are all later matters, let’s take care of the present first.

Philip Kotler, the father of marketing, said: Marketing is the process of discovering needs and meeting them.

Don't argue with me and say that there is still manufacturing demand, that should be called awakening demand.

What if this theory is applied to short video operations ?

What are the core needs of consumers when using Douyin and Kuaishou?

Entertainment and leisure to kill time.

OK, if you can understand this sentence, at least you can ensure that you take the right first step in making your short video.

Since the main functional requirement of short videos is entertainment, the demand determines the content, and the content of short videos should be "short and concise".

To break it down, it means “short” and “meaningful”.

In general, academic, professional, and in-depth content is not suitable for short video culture.

So don’t think about using short videos to tell a story that seems profound but is actually long-winded. This does not fit the consumption scenario of short videos.

Even if your content is really in-depth and valuable.

Don't imagine that consumers will take the initiative to learn knowledge and skills on Douyin or Kuaishou, although it is theoretically feasible.

But can you imagine a scene where a person opens the TikTok app to learn English? If you are not careful with your fingers, you will see a group of long-legged girls shouting “Lao Tie 666” on the screen?

Does it sound like Chen Qingquan learning English in a hotel? You taste it, you taste it carefully.

If you really want to learn knowledge, the atmosphere of official accounts, Zhihu, and Bilibili is far more suitable than Douyin and Kuaishou.

In essence, Douyin and Kuaishou are both algorithm-driven products.

The underlying algorithm logic of both parties is similar, that is: using user interests as the main algorithm, adding auxiliary algorithms such as social and local.

Specifically corresponding to the app menu bar are: Recommended Items, Followed Items, and Same City Items.

The only difference lies in the difference in the proportion of each item. Relatively speaking, Kuaishou accounts for a larger proportion in the social relationship chain.

Assuming that you are starting from scratch to make short videos, it will still be mainly driven by interest algorithms.

How to understand the interest algorithm can be roughly divided into the following parts:

Account attributes, content attributes, platform environment, target users

The attributes here are detected and marked by the short video platform and recorded in the algorithm database, but they depend on the personalized settings of the account and the attributes of the published video content.

Generally speaking:

When the attributes of your platform account, video content and target user are highly consistent, your content is likely to become popular.

This also reminds everyone that when you first start making short videos, you must be clear about your positioning. Don’t post funny jokes today and emotional chicken soup tomorrow...

Once the machine algorithm fails to understand you, the only thing it will get is no recommendation.

Why is it not certain, but possible?

Here we also have to consider the current environment of the platform:

For example, the platform generated a large amount of content with A attributes in a short period of time, but the number of users with A attribute labels on the entire platform did not skyrocket in the short term.

Then these similar contents must be sorted out based on their pros and cons before being pushed to the audience.

Accordingly, the initial traffic allocated to each video will be discounted, and may even affect the overall traffic.

So, what determines the overall traffic?

Keep reading!

We all know that after a short video is published, it will not get widespread exposure immediately.

Instead, there is a "push-feedback-push again" model.

Simply put, push your video to a small number of target users first. If these users give good feedback, increase the number of recommendations in the second round... and repeat the process.

On the contrary, if the feedback from these users is poor, the number of recommendations in the second round will be reduced... or even not pushed at all.

So we can get two key points from this:

Target users and feedback from target users

We have already mentioned the target users:

Interested in algorithms (mainly depends on account attributes, content attributes), local people (geographic location), social connections (follow friends)

So let’s focus on the target users’ feedback on the video content.

The author consulted the creator service centers of Douyin and Kuaishou and sorted out 6 feedback indicators, namely:

On-demand rate, like rate, comment rate, sharing rate, attention rate, and completion rate.

Now that we have guided the core indicators of the algorithm, how do we use it correctly?

Keep reading!

Next, we will switch back and forth between the user's perspective and the operator's perspective.

01. On-demand rate

The on-demand rate, as the name suggests, is the probability that a user will click to play after seeing the video push cover.

This indicator is very important. If users don’t click to play, what’s the use of having good content?

Videos on TikTok play automatically while sliding, while videos on Kuaishou are similar to waterfall flow and need to be clicked to play (a large-screen mode has now been added).

Regardless of the model, the cover essentially needs to be able to attract users and make people want to find out more.

In fact, it’s not just short videos. When we write texts for public accounts, don’t we also emphasize that the cover image and title should be attractive?

The cover of a short video mainly contains two parts: background image and text title.

What exactly makes a good cover image?

Title: Arouse curiosity, subvert cognition, strong contrast, related to me, hot topic...

It’s fine to use the same techniques as when writing titles for public accounts. After all, it’s still the same group of netizens over and over again.

By the way, don’t be a clickbait title, because there are several other indicators.

Background image: high definition, consistent with the title, and suitable for each scene (mentioned later).

02. Like rate, comment rate, and share rate

Here, the author classifies these three items into one category, because these three indicators mainly represent:

A user's self-evaluation or statement on the video content after watching the video.

We all know that people are lazy, especially when they are in a state of leisure and relaxation.

So most of the time, users are not willing to like, comment, or share, simply because they are lazy.

So how to improve these three indicators?

It must be that your video content has touched the users, which can be divided into the following four categories:

a. laugh

The core function of short videos is entertainment and relaxation, and laughter is the best way to relax.

If your content can make the audience laugh, then the audience will be happy to like, comment and share it.

For example: accounts such as Chenxiang6:30, Duoyu and Maomaojie.

b. cry

The source of crying is to evoke emotional resonance in users.

For example: rural children cannot go to school, children squat in the vegetable market to study, sanitation workers squat on the roadside eating steamed buns and pickled vegetables...

These images may evoke the user's memories of a certain moment and make them empathize with the video, or even make them regard themselves as the protagonist in the video.

c. Surprise

Why surprised? That is beyond the user's imagination.

For example: the neatly arranged troops of the National Day military parade, the long-legged lady with beauty filters, the 50-pound Australian lobster…

Users watch these contents more with an appreciative attitude when the video content far exceeds their original psychological expectations.

It’s natural to let out exclamations and “666”.

The content of the author's account is positioned as "magic twist advertisement".

d. Complaint

Tucao is a reverse technique, which is to deliberately express things contrary to the audience's thoughts in order to trick the audience into making a bunch of Tucao comments.

For example: The video "The Next Wave" that was all over the Internet some time ago received unanimous praise, but some people said that this video was too fake and could not represent the real Next Wave. (Whether the view is correct or not is not discussed here)

This rebellious statement immediately "stood out" from the crowd of praises and attracted a large number of viewers to leave comments.

03. Attention rate

Friends who have worked in self-media must have encountered this phenomenon:

The number of readings, likes, shares, and comments on a certain piece of your content (pictures, texts, videos, etc.) is very high, but the number of new followers it brings is very low.

Why is this?

We can think about this: What is the user’s motivation for choosing to follow a certain author?

Continue to get more valuable content.

So how do users judge whether they can continue to obtain valuable content from this account/author?

There is only one answer.

Observe other content that the account/author has created in the past.

If these contents are of similar style and good quality, then it’s probably a good choice to follow them.

On the contrary, if you look through the account’s past content, you will find that its positioning is unclear and the quality of the content is uneven, so naturally you will stop paying attention to it.

Therefore, the follow rate is more of a reflection of the entire account, not just one video.

04. Completion rate

In the past, completion rate has always been easily overlooked by operators.

On the one hand, it is because the traditional Internet emphasizes PV and UV indicators. On the other hand, the original short video was set to only 15 seconds, so it is not very meaningful to discuss the completion rate.

What is the completion rate?

Refers to the probability of watching the video to its entirety.

For example, if 100 people saw your video, but only 70 of them watched it from beginning to end, then the completion rate of this video is 70%.

There is also a similar concept in the background of WeChat official accounts, the bounce/still reading ratio, which is more detailed.

So how to improve the completion rate of short videos?

Research data shows that:

For a certain content, the audience usually determines whether the content suits their appetite within just 3 seconds, and then decides whether to continue reading or leave.

Therefore, it is recommended that you place a blockbuster at the beginning of the video to quickly hook users.

Theoretically speaking, the effect of slow-burning content will definitely not be as good as that of a video that starts off with a bang.

Of course, in addition to the beginning of the video, remember to hide the punchlines in the video. You can refer to the "Peak-End Rule" for specific operations.

Next, let’s talk about detail optimization.

Although the ancients said: "Don't be too particular about details when doing great things", I prefer to believe that "details determine success or failure."

However, since the author has just tried it, the following content is only an unverified opinion.

01. Account decoration

Account decorations mainly include: avatar, name, account, profile, tag, background image

There is only one requirement: the style should be unified and consistent with the attribute positioning.

Just to mention one point of knowledge: Douyin and Kuaishou have quite severe crackdowns on outward traffic.

However, there are still many students who inform the audience of their contact information in the introduction column, background image, comment area, and private messages.

In fact, Douyin accounts and Kuaishou accounts can be customized, so why not set them directly as WeChat accounts?

Then give some further guidance in the introduction area, which is efficient and has low risk.

02. Personal homepage video thumbnail

The size of the video playback page is fixed, but when you click on the author's personal homepage, the video cover will be compressed.

Many friends don't pay attention to this at all, which will cause a very eye-catching effect, such as:

Suppose you see a very good video on this account and want to continue to learn more and follow it, but when you click on the personal homepage and see something like this, you will automatically be discouraged by 50%.

Of course, there are also some good accounts, such as:

In addition, the compression degree of the video covers on the personal homepages of Douyin and Kuaishou is different.

If you want to post a video on two platforms at the same time, it is recommended that you adjust the layout of the cover in advance.

For example, I drew a layout in PR, where blue represents Douyin thumbnails and green represents Kuaishou thumbnails.

03. Video clarity

The clearer the video is, the better. If you can do 1080P, don't use 720P. If you can do 4K, don't use 1080P.

Many students like to transfer videos through WeChat. Please let WeChat compress the video quality by default. Isn’t it inconvenient to use a data cable?

In addition, 1080P and 4K videos posted directly on the TikTok app will also be compressed by the TikTok system.

It is recommended that you publish directly through the Tik Tok or Kuaishou Creator Center on your computer, which saves the trouble of transferring between computers and mobile phones.

The core of short videos lies in content, not technology.

It is recommended that students who want to try but are always hesitant read this sentence several times.

Many students always think that making short videos is very difficult, and they have to learn photography and editing, which is very difficult.

This shows that you have completely misunderstood the meaning of short videos.

Short videos are definitely not created by photography and editing techniques. If that were the case, then the photography companies and film post-production companies would definitely be the most popular ones now.

In fact, when we evaluate a short video, we mainly look at its content.

For example: Daigula K’s dance, Maomao Sister’s acting skills, a video of the National Day military parade, and Chengdu Xiao Tiantian’s words “It’s nice if you can take me out for dinner”.

Photo editing techniques are just the icing on the cake, but most people treat them as the core.

Otherwise, you will never understand how a simple road video surveillance video can get millions of likes.

In the 2020 WeChat Open Class Pro, Zhang Xiaolong defined Video Account (Tencent’s short video product) as:

A platform where everyone can record and create.

Since everyone can create, the bosses have also determined that short videos are really not a product that relies on photography and editing technology as its core.

In addition, even if we have to emphasize photography and editing techniques.

Nowadays, mobile phone camera technology is not bad. Do you know about Huawei's 50x zoom and Xiaomi's 100 million pixels?

In terms of editing, both Douyin's Jiantou and Kuaishou's Kuaishou are excellent, and they even have functions such as automatic matching of subtitles and online addition of background music.

Remember, technology can never be a stumbling block.

In order to make up a total of 10 shares, the author specially found two topics that received a lot of attention online?

01. Is it better to watch short videos in horizontal or vertical screen?

The horizontal screen is a product of the PC era. Our TVs, computers, tablets, and various monitors are mostly horizontal.

However, short videos are products of the mobile Internet era. Their main battlefield is mobile phones, and horizontal screen content will produce disgusting large black borders.

Under the same circumstances, of course, vertical screen shooting is the first choice.

In addition, vertical screen content gives people a sense of intimacy, while horizontal screen content will make the audience feel distant from the content, especially when real people appear.

02. What style of video should I choose?

There are many different video formats available on short videos, such as:

Real-person narration, situational drama, video transfer, picture dubbing, cartoon comics...

Which one you choose depends entirely on your own strength.

Of course, if it is possible to appear in person, it is recommended to do so.

Because compared to content without emotion, the audience would definitely prefer to see an author with a distinct personality and attitude.

At the same time, if you are considering live streaming to sell goods in the future, it is better to appear early.

———————– End of sharing ———————–

The author has just tried it for less than a week, and has analyzed it from the perspective of a short video novice, as well as thinking from the perspective of an Internet operator.

The full text mainly shares my own understanding of short videos, and can be used as a literacy article for novices.

As for hot topics such as how to choose a popular topic, the author is currently unable to answer them.

If this article is useful to you, please like/share it to show your support.

Author: Zhuoshui Creek

Source: Operation Expert (ID:yyzj19)