4 major pitfalls of short video operations in the education industry

In 2020, if large, medium and small enterprises do not have a few short video accounts, they will feel like they have been abandoned by the times, especially education companies. They have missed the opportunity of WeChat's fission growth and are unwilling to miss the huge traffic of short videos.

Online education has been pushed to a new level of popularity under the impact of the epidemic. Kuaishou launched the "Suspended Classes but Not Learning" campaign, and Douyin launched the "Study at Home" campaign. The platforms have teamed up with major educational institutions to introduce a large number of live and recorded educational learning courses, and provide massive exposure to high-quality resources. The future of short videos + education is full of imagination for a while.

It is a consensus that short videos are a trend. This article will talk about the four most common pitfalls that educational institutions are prone to fall into when operating short videos. Let’s see which one you have fallen into?

Pitfall 1: Uncertain operational objectives

(Pit level index: 5 stars ★★★★★)

At first glance at this pitfall, many operators will refute it by saying "our goals are very clear", "number of views, number of fans, fan-to-like ratio, completion rate... these are all very clear indicators." However, these indicators are just supply stations along the way to the final destination, not the ultimate goals.

I once asked various bosses in an industry exchange group why they operated short video accounts, and most of the answers I got were "others have them, so I can't do it without them", "whether it makes money or not is another matter, let's take a step in first", and "short videos are the trend".

On the question of why educational institutions should invest in short video accounts, many bosses themselves may not have thought through the answer clearly. They just try to set up a short video team based on the psychology of loss aversion, or because the team has already been formed, they can only urge their operations to expand the account first.

However, due to different destinations, the operating methods and approaches adopted are definitely different. Both Douyin and Kuaishou have requirements for the verticality of the content. If the labels are incorrectly attached from the beginning, it will be difficult to reverse it in the later stage and attract target fans. Therefore, before operating an account, companies/individuals must think deeply about these three questions:

1. “Why should I run a short video account?”
2. “What do I want to gain from investing in a few short video accounts?”
3. “Is running a short video the best way to achieve my goals right now?”

There are three reasons why educational institutions open and operate short video accounts:

1. Aiming at acquiring customers - reducing the cost of acquiring customers

The pool of over 100 million users gathered on short video platforms has enabled the education industry to see the possibility of acquiring customers at low cost. Representative accounts in the education industry that use short videos as a channel for customer growth include the Gaotu and GSX series accounts on Kuaishou. The content of the matrix accounts they have set up is mainly ppt/film and television mashups, and the production cost is lower and more efficient than that of live-action and drama interpretation accounts.

The Gaotu series of accounts have opened small stores on third-party platforms. Most of the products in the stores are academic notes and teaching supplementary books, with a unit price of no more than 50 yuan. However, none of the stores have paid a deposit, which also shows that the main battlefield for account conversion is not on the video account. The way to acquire customers for this type of account is usually to leave the WeChat and mobile phone number directly on the account’s personal homepage, directing users to WeChat for further conversion.

2. For the purpose of brand promotion - to expand brand influence

Representative accounts include KaiYan English on Douyin and Xueersi Online School (Kuaishou: Wenquxing, who will pass every exam). This type of account produces content around a fixed personality. It neither opens product showcases nor adds shopping carts in video promotions. Overall, its marketing and promotion behavior is relatively weak, and it focuses on the packaging and shaping of the personality.

Taking Xueersi Online School as an example, the video content uses multiple scenes and plots to present the character of "Wenquxing" in a three-dimensional way, creating the image of Wenquxing, a smart, knowledgeable, omniscient but a little naive straight male immortal. The profile on Kuaishou reads "I am Wenquxing, working at Xueersi Online School." Users remember this person and indirectly remember the brand "Xueersi Online School."

The Wenquxing account currently has 886,000 fans on the Douyin platform and 767,000 fans on Kuaishou. In the fan portrait, the proportion of students on both Douyin and Kuaishou exceeds 70%. A Weibo account has also been built around this IP personality. The success of a personal image helps a brand establish a marketing presence in various channels, even saving on brand advertising costs.

3. Purpose of product sales - explore new channels for product sales

The key indicators for evaluating operations under this goal are conversion amount and order volume. Through the content operation of the account, product sales are directly driven, making short videos a new channel for sales. Representative accounts include Xueersi Light Class English Teacher and Achaige Mathematics Classroom on Kuaishou.

I counted the three paid courses of Achaige, all priced at 9 yuan. As of the time of writing, the total sales volume was 139,000 copies, with accumulated revenue of 1.25 million yuan. When his fans reached 300,000 in June 2018, Achai Ge started to monetize paid content. By selling low-priced courses through this account, Achai Ge's annual income was at least one million.

Putting aside the labor costs, if educational institutions can gain millions of fans on traffic platforms, they can save a considerable amount of advertising costs every year even if they do not make any money.

The overall production cost of Achaige’s video content is not high, and the videos mostly use a blackboard as the background to explain math problems. Educational institutions naturally have no shortage of teachers and high-quality content resources. The threshold for investing in a short video team to produce such content or to create similar IP teachers and then gradually monetize them is not high.

Pitfall 2: Trying to find a balance between interesting content and practical information

(Pit level index: 4 stars ★★★★★)

When making short videos in the education industry, one must have both an interesting soul and useful knowledge. Don't just seek a balance between interesting forms of expression and serious knowledge popularization. If you want both, your account may be neither fun nor able to convey valuable knowledge and information.

1. Either useful

There is a particularly interesting phenomenon on Kuaishou. The Chinese language accounts that rank high under the education tag are basically independent individual teachers/institutions. The video content they publish daily is mostly a few seconds of live broadcast previews, but even these live broadcast previews have an average playback volume of about 50,000, and can receive a lot of user interactive comments, which shows the high user stickiness.

Why can their videos attract so many users to click and watch even though their content is not sophisticated or interesting? The core secret lies in that they grasped the most urgent need of students - textbooks. The video content and live broadcast content released are all centered around the textbook content that students are currently learning. Students can learn on the spot and use it in their textbooks after learning. For students who are eager to improve their academic performance, this is the most direct, practical and relevant content.

All the educational accounts that have become popular on Douyin and Kuaishou and are recommended by the platforms have succeeded by providing serious teaching content, such as teachers Yang and Xiang Bo from Zhuge Academy.

2. Either interesting

"Comparison between poor students and top students", "One hundred ways to cheat", "When you are caught by your teacher for being late"... This type of content is essentially a scene interpretation type, which is based on down-to-earth student life phenomena. The content focuses on small conflicts and contradictions in the relationship between teachers and students, and is most likely to resonate with the 6-17 year old student group and make them follow the account.

Interesting and useful are different in the essential values ​​they convey: one is emotional value, and the other is knowledge value. What triggers a video is often the empathy conveyed in the content, joy, shock, anger... these are all emotional fluctuations. The reason why chicken soup is enduring is that it mobilizes people's sensory emotions.

Educational content is more of a one-way transmission. I give you a piece of knowledge, and users only rationally "know", "understand", and "learn" it, but they will not be "touched/angry/passionate" because of this knowledge point. This is why it is difficult for educational content to produce hit videos.

However, just because it is difficult to create a hit does not mean that it is impossible to create a hit. Knowledge-based content has a special advantage in that once it "convinces" users through the content, users will often respond with trust and loyalty beyond their expectations.

Pitfall 3: Educational accounts can only be accumulated from 0 to 1

(Pit level index: 3 stars ★★★)

Here are several ways for educational institutions to operate short videos. All of them are feasible, and the risks need to be assessed based on actual conditions.

1. Aiming to increase the number of fans

Method 1: Purchase accounts and gain big returns with small investment.

Many accounts that have already amassed millions of followers may be sold at a price of 0.1 cent per follower. Compared with the expensive agency operation fees, an overall evaluation and acquisition of such highly vertical and high-quality educational accounts can immediately make you a leading mid-level or even top player in the field, and it is not a bad idea to carry out detailed operation afterwards.

Method 2: Find an agent to do cold start in the early stage, and then operate it yourself

The only difference between this method and method one is that it is not a complete acquisition, but only uses the power of a professional team to do cold start operations on the account in the initial stage. Let "professional teams do professional things", reliable external MCN can invest more people to form a team, and the probability of incubating large accounts is higher.

2. For the purpose of gaining profit

Method 1: Interest Binding

This method is generally for educational institutions to look for high-quality educational expert accounts on the market, sign contracts, and help the experts polish course content products and sell them. The final profits will be divided in proportion as agreed upon by both parties. Educational institutions are turning themselves into a quasi-agency company. They do not need to invest extra manpower to set up a short video content production team. Talented people who do not have much product polishing ability can also obtain professional content product sales, which is a win-win situation.

Method 2: Experts bring goods

A win-win cooperation model is adopted, with product commissions agreed upon. Experts provide short video sales channels, and educational institutions provide products. The two parties are not involved in the collaborative production of course content. This is also a relatively widespread and mature mode of cooperation on short video platforms.

3. Self-hatching

The biggest risk of building a team to incubate and operate the business on your own is the uncertainty of team size, time cost and benefits. However, this method is also the choice of the vast majority of educational institutions at present. As mentioned in the previous article "I have managed hundreds of thousands of short video operation projects and summarized these practical experiences", the team's ability to polish short video content and disseminate operations needs to be in the hands of the company itself. This is inevitable.

Pitfall 4: Ignoring the best learning platform for short videos + education

(Pit level index: 3 stars ★★★)

For short videos + education, the best platform is actually Bilibili. I guess the order should be Bilibili>Kuaishou>TikTok. The learning content of Kuaishou and Douyin is too fragmented. The platform's way of obtaining traffic forces educational creators to compress knowledge points as much as possible. The length of content is reduced, and the depth of knowledge is also reduced. Good knowledge content will make users want to ask the next question after watching it. However, the video content of Kuaishou and Douyin is a series of independent small units without much connection. When users want to find the next text after reading the previous one, it is not easy to find it.

The learning resources and content arrangement of Bilibili can meet the learning needs of students. When you search for the keywords you want to learn on Bilibili, you will see packaged and systematic content. The videos have a progress bar, so you can fast forward and control your own learning pace. There is a study list on the right, so you can see at a glance what you are learning. The study area of ​​Bilibili is like a sincere youth classroom.

Douyin and Kuaishou have become two eye-catching leaders in terms of traffic, but Bilibili is still on the competitor monitoring list of Douyin and Kuaishou. If educational institutions have enough high-quality content but are tired of the traffic acquisition methods of Douyin and Kuaishou, they might as well shift their focus and take a look at Bilibili.

The above are the four most common pitfalls that I have sorted out when operating short videos in the education industry. How many of them have you fallen into?

Author: Tian Xin

Source: Operator Notes (ID: Operator-notes)