Short video operation "routines" and traffic surges!

In the era of mobile Internet, short videos have risen strongly, sparking a nationwide craze for creation, sharing and carnival, and promoting disruptive changes in the mobile video ecosystem.

The short video platform that continues to innovate in gameplay has promoted the arrival of the UGC+ era. Short video UGC+interaction, +location, +social, +e-commerce, etc., bring more possibilities in user experience and unleash the productivity, communication, social and consumption power of the whole people.

The short video market has endless opportunities, and everyone wants to get a piece of the pie. However, at this stage, in the red ocean of competition, it is not easy to operate a new account and make it stand out.

1. The core of the charm of Tik Tok lies in the "algorithm"

The key to Tik Tok’s current success lies in a set of “addictive” algorithms. The traffic distribution of Tik Tok is decentralized. Even if you have no fans at all, no matter the quality of your video is good or bad, it will definitely have playback volume after it is released, ranging from dozens to thousands. This involves the algorithm mechanism of Tik Tok.

The greatest use of algorithms for platforms is to manage user data on their own platforms, and to improve platform functions based on a series of user feedback behaviors, guide the creative direction of content producers, match content producers with accurate users, and match content consumers with content of interest, ultimately enabling the platform to form a recyclable and virtuous ecosystem.

2. Master the platform algorithm and make good use of the recommendation mechanism

A. Double review mechanism: Machine review to check whether there are any violations in the works and texts. If there is any suspected violation, it will be intercepted by the machine; by extracting the pictures and key frames in the video, matching them with the massive works already in the Douyin database to eliminate duplication, the works with duplicate content will be recommended with low traffic or downgraded. Manual review, mainly focusing on video titles, cover screenshots and video key frames. If violations are confirmed, the video will be deleted, the account will be demoted, or the account will be banned.

B. Initial distribution of traffic pool: When a new video is uploaded to Douyin, the Douyin platform will give a certain amount of initial recommended traffic based on the account weight. The new video traffic is mainly distributed based on nearby and followed, and then intelligently distributed with user tags and content tags.

C. Superimposed recommendation: If the new video has a high completion rate and high number of reposts, comments and likes, this video will have a chance to continue to be superimposed recommended. The so-called superimposed recommendation means that new videos will be intelligently distributed with about 100vv playback volume. If the number of reposts reaches 10 (for example), the algorithm will determine it as popular content, automatically weight the content, and superimpose recommendations to you 1000vv; if the number of reposts reaches 100 (for example), the algorithm will continue to superimpose recommendations to 10000vv; if the number of reposts reaches 1000 (for example), the algorithm will continue to superimpose recommendations to 10wvv, and so on. If the feedback is still good, the platform will use big data algorithms combined with manual review mechanisms to measure whether your content can become popular.

Generally speaking, if a video has more than 5,000 views, more than 100 likes, and more than 10 comments within one hour of being released, it will basically be recommended to the next level. Therefore, as soon as the video is released, you should find a way to mobilize all your strength to like, comment, forward, and play it to the end.

D. Delayed “explosion” : Some content has mediocre data on the day, week or even month it is released, but suddenly one day it becomes popular. One situation is "digging up the past", that is, Douyin will re-dig out the "high-quality old content" in the database and give it more exposure; another situation is the "explosive effect", that is, when one of your works gets a lot of exposure, it will bring a huge number of users to your personal homepage to check out your previous works, and the system will put these videos back into the recommendation pool.

3. Indicators for evaluating whether content can be recommended

Douyin will evaluate your performance in the traffic pool based on four criteria: playback volume (completion rate) > likes > comments > reposts. The completion rate refers to the length of time users play videos. The shorter the video playback time, the less popular the video content is, and the platform will naturally not give you too many recommendations. In addition, do not delete video comments at will, as this will also affect video recommendations.

On TikTok, becoming popular depends on quality, not quantity. Many Douyin accounts only post one video, but they have 30,000 to 40,000 followers and tens to hundreds of thousands of likes, or even more. But some accounts have posted dozens of videos and their number of followers does not exceed 1,000.

4. Account weight calculation method

The TikTok traffic pool is divided into low-level traffic pool, medium-level traffic pool and high-level traffic pool. Accounts with different weights will be assigned to different traffic pools and will receive different exposures.

Account weight and data performance are the key. If the number of views of the works released for a week is less than 100, it will be regarded as a low-level or useless account, and the platform will rarely recommend it; if the number of views of the works released for a week is around 300, the account is the lowest weighted account and will only be assigned to the low-level traffic pool. If the number of views does not exceed 300 after a month, it will also be regarded as a zombie account.

Therefore, if the traffic of the account has not increased, you can consider applying for a new account to play, because the system has labeled the account as "invalid".

In addition, improve your own information, the more complete the better, including avatar, nickname, mobile phone number, Weibo, WeChat, headlines, etc.

5. You need to maintain an account in the early stage to increase the account weight

When you just register an account, the first thing you do is to maintain the account: watch videos every day, follow others, repost, comment and like other people’s content, and watch live broadcasts for at least half an hour every day. The account should be maintained for at least 3 days, preferably a week. It is best to keep updating your content every day. If you create better content every day, the system will detect that you are an active and high-quality account, so the platform will not downgrade your rights.

6. Content creation, focus on skills

A: Clarify the account’s personality: Some creators post a lot of very miscellaneous content right from the start. This practice is actually very inefficient and can easily make their accounts dead. If you are not sure about the positioning at the beginning, it is recommended to create several accounts with different positioning until you try out the best positioning direction. The more vertical the content is, the easier it is to be tagged by the system, thereby increasing its recommendation rate.

B. Four principles for topic selection: relevance, the content of the topic should be consistent with the account positioning; popularity, choose the most popular topics, commonly known as riding on the trend; freshness, scarcity, rare in life; sense of personality, consistent with the IP personality positioning of this Douyin account.

C. Popular content routines: unexpected twists, foreshadowing + jokes, hot spot contrast; interchange, exaggeration, cuteness; personal experience to arouse sympathy and resonance; perspective transformation, multiple perspectives, empathy, and innovation in form; adaptation of popular plots; interactive co-production; real people appearing on screen, and their appearance is good.

D. Don’t overestimate user patience, start with the golden three seconds: Although the content of Douyin is already short videos, don’t overestimate user patience. Every time users see a video, they need to get information quickly. If the video fails to impress them in the first three seconds, they will swipe away. Therefore, the beginning of the video is extremely important.

E. Create a comment atmosphere to encourage collection, forwarding, and downloading: It is not enough to just read the content, you also need to guide users to continue to spread it for a second time. Therefore, in the content, creators need to guide users to comment, collect, forward, download, etc. This can not only improve the recommendation weight, but also acquire new users through user forwarding.

F. An alluring ending to attract users’ long-term attention: To maximize the value of every video, the ending is very important. An episode with exciting content but leaving suspense is also a good way to attract users' attention, thus encouraging users to add the homepage and follow the account, thereby accumulating fans and private domain traffic.

G. Background music: Music is an important element of Douyin content. There are two main criteria for selecting music. The first is that it should perfectly match the video content, which is the best. If this is not possible, then choose music that is more recognized by users.

H: Vertical screen shooting: When the Tik Tok product was designed, it was mainly based on vertical screen. Users are also accustomed to watching videos in vertical screen, so the playback rate of vertical screen will be higher than that of horizontal screen.

I: Participate in challenges: Especially those initiated by the official, the purpose is to guide users to publish such videos, so we will provide certain support. Currently, there are three entrances to access Douyin’s content. The first is recommendation, the second is following, and the third is challenge.

7. Things to note when creating content to avoid pitfalls

There must be no hard advertising. There must be no improper operations, such as the appearance of weapons, shots and images that should not appear. The video must not have watermarks, blurred image quality and other problems. Do not inflate the volume. If the completion rate is low but the number of likes is huge, after comprehensively monitoring various indicators, the algorithm will monitor based on the abnormalities of your data. Frequently switch accounts and have more than a dozen accounts under the same IP.

8. Release optimization to increase playback rate

A: Time: Released between 12:00~2:00 and 18:00~23:00. Many people are taking a break during these time periods, and many people are just browsing Douyin. It should be noted that it is best to publish 10 minutes in advance, because the platform will have a review time, which can be as fast as one or two minutes or as slow as more than ten minutes.

B: Location positioning: Publish in crowded places. Douyin has a mechanism that prioritizes recommendations to nearby people.

C. Video title: One is for users to see and attract them to click in and watch; the other is for the platform to see and get platform recommendations. You can use positioning, keywords, industry-specific vocabulary, hot topic tags, @ friends or official assistants. Keyword layout: The video introduction is about 15 words, including keywords + guidance + interaction + curiosity, etc.

D. Cover: If the cover is well made, users will be more eager to read it.

E. Participating in topics: can increase exposure.

F. Reply to comments: Try to reply to every comment, interact with fans, increase fan stickiness, and interacting with fans represents the activity of the video.

9. Use advertising products and external promotion tools

10. Pay attention to the summary and review of regular data

Author: CM360 Content Center

Source: Coal 360

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