Cold start operation skills of Douyin account

“It’s hard to create a new Douyin account now!”

Recently, many Douyin operators have reported that it seems difficult to create a hit with a new account, unless it is an account incubated by a top MCN organization.

It is understood that Douyin does have a cold start-up support plan for new accounts for some MCN organizations. But for more operators who cannot receive official support but want to join Douyin, how can they do a good job of cold starting their account?

To this end, we interviewed several content creators who have been deeply involved in Douyin and summarized a set of "Douyin Account Cold Start Operation Skills".

01 Initial team simplification: three positions are enough

“If you want to do your work well, you must first sharpen your tools.” If you want to operate an account well in the early stages, a reasonable team configuration is essential.

"In the early stage, the team suggested that the staff could be streamlined to only need three positions: actors, directors, and post-production." He Xiangjun, the original content director of Shocking Culture Douyin, mentioned, " Nowadays, many accounts have people who appear on the screen also serve as directors and editors, so try to make full use of the staff. "

"Soul Pawn Shop", which now has more than 7 million fans, has a core team of three people: one is responsible for writing scripts and finding extras; one is responsible for writing storyboards and contacting venues; and there is a post-production person in charge of editing and special effects.

Of course, if there is enough operating cost budget, the professional team including directors, screenwriters, planners, actors, photographers, editors, operators and other roles can specialize in their own fields.

But no matter what the configuration is, "net sense" and "video thinking" are very important . Whether or not the team can grasp the hot topics of Douyin is directly related to whether it can do a good job on Douyin.

02 Determine the content vertical: choose what you are good at first

The most direct and simple way to choose a vertical field is to choose a field that you are good at and understand . For example, those who know cars can create content in the automotive field, those who are good at singing can create content in the music field, and those who know pets can create content in the cute pet field...

If it is not possible to directly determine the vertical field, operators can also refer to the hot-selling products in Douyin, or try to create content in the blue ocean field.

He Xiangjun pointed out: " In the blue ocean fields of Douyin, maternal and child care, automobiles, education and training, medical science, and legal knowledge popularization all have very broad prospects; and in the red ocean fields, evaluation, food, and beauty, as long as they have sufficiently novel forms, they are still very worthwhile to invest in because of the good prospects for advertising monetization."

Murong Jicheng, founder of New Media MCN, believes: " With the current size and user growth rate of Douyin, there are still opportunities in almost all vertical fields. Therefore, the core issue is still the content producers themselves."

Zhang Xiao, a course consultant at New List Academy, mentioned the importance of "monetization" for content positioning: "If you enter the market now, you must think about how to monetize your content, because when it is difficult to become a top account, monetization is more important. "

03 An important hidden step: account maintenance

Zhang Xiao revealed to us: "Account maintenance" and "weight" are terms that are not recognized by the official Douyin , but this does not mean that you can post content after registering an account, because it is easy to be judged as a machine or marketing account.

“If the content is high-quality, even if it is rejected by the system, it still has a chance to become a hit later. There is no fixed rule for weight. ” He shared his actual experience.

So, what exactly is “account maintenance”?

Many people in the industry understand that operators need to "imitate the behavior of normal active users" as much as possible , such as filling out information completely, watching Douyin every day, commenting, liking, etc.

Murong Jicheng calls "completing the information" "account decoration" . He believes that any customizable places such as name, introduction, avatar, cover, etc. are opportunities to increase conversions.

Some rules have been summarized on the Internet, such as: "Browse vertical field content for 30 minutes every morning, noon and evening", "Follow at least X competitor accounts and comment on XX videos of interest", etc.

But these rules actually vary from team to team and account to account. You can indeed maintain an account by following, liking and commenting on the same type of content, while attracting fans to visit your homepage and follow you . The specific number only needs to be like that of a normal active user.

04 Hot content is always the key to increasing Douyin followers

"If you want to gain fans on Douyin, the ability to continuously produce high-quality content is the key," Murong Jicheng emphasized. " The number of views, dwell time, completion rate, replay rate, comment rate and like rate are the dimensions that Douyin uses to predict the popularity of a video."

The first 3 seconds decide life or death

Under the TikTok algorithm, it is the first few seconds that truly determine life or death. If a product is not liked by users, it will be directly removed, and after a long time it will be difficult to get recommendations.

"Tik Tok is often more like a video-based meme," Papitube COO Huo Nifang said in an interview with Xinbang. "Tik Tok counts by the second. If you say something nonsense, you will be swiped away directly."

Therefore, in the content production of Douyin, "subtraction" is more important than "addition" . Creators need to eliminate useless information and guide the audience to the core content as soon as possible.

There are traces of popular content

Tik Tok’s recommendation algorithm continuously pushes “content that users like” to them, but the essence behind the popular content is still users’ love for high-quality content .

He Xiangjun summarized four "followable" principles for popular videos:

Principle 1: Emotional resonance.

It must cause very strong emotional fluctuations in everyone to prompt the behavior of liking.

Principle 2: Innovation in form.

Tik Tok is a platform with extremely fast content iteration, and only the most innovative forms can stand out.

Principle three: hot spot contrast.

Hot topics are always what everyone is concerned about, and an unexpected reversal can double the effect.

Principle 4: Interaction and coordination.

The combination of small and large sizes can attract more traffic. Large and extra large can produce a 1+1＞2 effect.

In addition, differentiating account content and publishing scarce popular content are also important ways to create hits.

There is no shortage of homogeneous content on Douyin. If you want to be noticed in such a huge pool of content, there are two ways:

1) It is necessary to create content that is different from and better than the top accounts in the same field.

2) Operators can look for popular activities on the platform that do not attract many participants, and quickly follow up to create some interesting content , which will give them a chance to be recommended by the algorithm.

Su Xiaoqi, who has been engaged in the batch incubation of Douyin accounts , revealed to us that when incubating accounts quickly from scratch, it is necessary to take advantage of the scarcity of certain popular content on the platform to quickly operate the accounts.

05 “Refined” Operation of Douyin Accounts

High-frequency updates to grasp traffic peaks

Continuous and stable content output can obtain more views and help increase followers. "At least five updates a week," He Xiangjun suggested. The time for daily updates is also quite particular.

Murong Jicheng mentioned that " Tik Tok has three peak visit periods: around 12 noon, before 6 pm, and around 10 pm ." Posting content during these three time periods also has the opportunity to obtain higher traffic.

Encourage fans to participate in interaction

Consciously guiding user comments and interactions when publishing content is an important part of Douyin's refined operations.

“You should respond carefully to every user comment, especially the interesting ones. If no one responds, grab the spot yourself and don’t post videos with 0 comments, ” Murong Jicheng suggested.

One operator revealed that he would occasionally deliberately leave some flaws in the video plot in order to provide users with topics to discuss in the comment section.

"Ling Ye" also said in an interview that his comment section has become a very good interactive area, and now even many video ideas come from the comment section.

Rapid and effective external boost

Tik Tok's algorithm is a multi-level recommendation model. If the data such as forwarding, comments, likes, and completion rate are high within a short period of time after release, there is a chance that the algorithm will throw it into a larger traffic pool.

The picture comes from the Internet

Therefore, for accounts in the initial stage, using social networks to mobilize more people to complete the repost, comment and like together as soon as possible will be more beneficial for the cold start of the account. Many WeChat groups for mutual promotion and likes of Douyin have also emerged .

However, this kind of boost is not 100% effective. If you want to achieve good results, there are very high requirements for the mutual promotion group.

"First of all, the number of people in the group chat should be high, and secondly, the activity level should also be high . It should be able to quickly complete relatively high likes, playback volume, completion rate and comments within a few minutes, and then it will have a chance to enter the initial traffic pool," He Xiangjun believes that " if the group activity level is not high enough, it is meaningless to have three or five likes. "

DOU+: small amounts and multiple investments

DOU+ is the official promotion method within the platform, which can bring a certain degree of exposure and traffic growth to the content. However, for accounts in the early stages of operation, launching DOU+ is a decision that needs to be made with extreme caution.

Several interviewees said that "DOU+ delivery is helpful for videos with a certain growth trend, and it can add icing on the cake, but it is difficult to provide timely assistance for videos with very poor natural traffic. In this case, it is not recommended to deliver too much."

If DOU+ needs to be invested, they recommend following the principles of "small amounts and multiple times" and "small amounts and multiple investments" .

Zhang Xiao said: "We will not invest 1,000 yuan at a time, but choose to invest 10 times 100 yuan, because each time it will be invested in fans with different interest profiles, which can cover more people ."

For accounts that sell products through pure grass, Zhang Xiao’s team will evaluate the conversion rate of the campaign. If they spend a normal amount of money but still see no conversion, they will set the video to be visible only to themselves and stop the delivery of DOU+.

Author: Truffle

Source: Newrank (ID: newrankcn)

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