New media operation: Find hot spots in 3 directions!

I was chatting with a friend recently, and she talked about her confusion. The Douyin account created by her company is based on hot topics as its core competition. Although such positioning is somewhat difficult to stand out, it is low-cost and has a good probability of success. Then the question arises. My friend said that he always saw a lot of hot searches before, but until he did it himself, he realized that it was too difficult to find a hot spot.

I originally thought that there would be many topics to choose from and no shortage of materials, but I didn’t expect to hit a bottleneck so quickly. How to find hot spots and how to predict effectiveness? I can't give her very professional advice, I can only share some of my own experiences to stimulate discussion! I will divide it into four major parts: hot spot search, hot spot judgment, hot spot application, and network sense cultivation , and express some superficial opinions.

1. Hot search

The so-called hot spots refer to news or information that is of great concern or popular among the general public, or places or issues that attract attention in a certain period of time. Such as "social hot spots" etc. Where do we usually search for hot spots? If the channels are too diverse, you won’t be able to take care of everything; if the channels are too narrow, you will lose sight of one thing while focusing on another. I think it can be divided into four main parts:

1. Tencent: WeChat official accounts, Moments, and Kanyikan

It is easy to understand WeChat official accounts. In relevant vertical fields, you should pay attention to the top accounts as much as possible. Generally speaking, when major official accounts are posting the same thing from different angles, or a tweet is repeatedly reposted, it may be a hot topic. When paying attention to the tweets of a public account, you cannot ignore the comments below the article. Sometimes the article is not outstanding, but the comments are bright and will provide you with an excellent perspective to cut into the hot topic.

For example, in 2018, China Investment Corporation published on its official website the "Public Notice of the 2018 Fresh Graduates from Domestic Institutions". An undergraduate student from Shaoxing University of Arts and Sciences was included in the public list along with nine other master's and doctoral graduates from Tsinghua University, Peking University and Renmin University of China. Compared with a series of famous universities, it seemed very shabby that an undergraduate student from a college in Shaoxing was shortlisted. For a time, netizens speculated about the "inside story" and questioned whether China Investment Corporation had "nepotistic recruitment".

Amidst the numerous doubts, some people found a different entry point by commenting in support of "Shaoxing University of Arts and Sciences". The university in Lu Xun's hometown has produced many celebrities and deserves recognition. I can't find the link to this article, but it was very memorable at the time because of its unique perspective. Videos and articles are actually similar. They both need scarcity of angles to maximize hot topics, and this scarcity means innovating by standing on the shoulders of others.

The circle of friends is also easy to understand. You can never pay attention to all the information, and personally, what you like may not be what others like. But from the circle of friends, you can see some points that you have never discovered before. The purpose of Moments is not to see how many people forward the same content, but to focus on two "fews": first, what did the people who rarely post on Moments post recently? The motivation for this content will definitely be stronger than that of the people who post frequently on Moments; second, what were the events posted by the minority, and why are they not the majority? Because when most people post, the hot spots may have already become blurred.

Let me give you an example. The news about Shaoxing’s “National No. 1” duck going to the expedition was later debunked, but when people who hadn’t posted on WeChat Moments for half a year suddenly posted this, we would have been on high alert. Sure enough, the duck incident became a hot topic on Douyin.

As for taking a look, what to see? What are those people who don’t post on their Moments but silently like your posts looking at? In addition to watching their own work tasks, what other content are there? The second is to look at the selections. What are the selected content recommended by Tencent? You don’t need to read for a long time, just scroll down and read the title. There is no very relevant example here, so I won’t give one.

2. Toutiao: Toutiao, TikTok

Although Toutiao is a data recommendation, because it belongs to the same ByteDance platform as Douyin, the content hotspots on it are also Douyin's hotspots to a certain extent. Open the homepage of Toutiao on PC, glance over the content titles, and focus on the 24-hour hot news on the right.

The Douyin platform is also a good channel for searching hot topics. When browsing Douyin, you can see how different people interpret different events and record them; see what the top accounts in the vertical field are posting; and see which videos have received millions of likes. In addition, in the TikTok search section, click on the hot list to view hot topics. For example, the third hot topic, I keep seeing it when I am browsing Douyin. At this time, you may be able to get started quickly.

3. Sina: Weibo

Weibo is a natural hot search pool. Many verbal battles or interesting challenges all start to ferment on Weibo. Check the hot topics on Weibo and see the topic volume. Remember, you must look at the quality of the discussion points of the participating topics, because many people bring up this topic but post all kinds of irrelevant content. Looking at the quality of topic participation will help in searching for hot topics.

4. Third-party platforms: data statistics platform, professional content platform

There are also some third-party platforms that should not be forgotten, such as the data statistics platforms such as Xinbang, Qingbo Index, Xigua Assistant, and Optimistic Short Video Assistant. Through their data statistics, you can also discover some hot spots; then there are content platforms. Whether in the community or on the official website, there are often some hot spot highlights for reference.

2. Hotspot Judgment

Through the above method, we may list some hot spots and then record them in the form of keywords in a notebook. Among the many hot topics, which one is more worthy of research? This involves the judgment of a hotspot. In my experience, there are also four paths to hotspot judgment:

The first is the WeChat index. Enter your keywords, such as "oil price", and look at the recent index changes, 7 days, 30 days, etc., to see the rising trend of the index. If the index is relatively sloped, it means that there is still room for this hot spot;

The second is Baidu Index. In addition to month-on-month and year-on-year trend research, you can also view the demand map to see what users are paying attention to and determine whether your entry point is feasible.

The third is Sina public opinion, which includes the average heat index, one-hour heat change trend, and heat index peak. At the same time, there are some related hot keywords for reference;

The fourth is the hot word analysis in Toutiao’s function laboratory. Enter the hot word in your mind and see what articles are related to the hot word.

Although we need to rely on these indexes to judge the feasibility of hot spots, it is better to have no books than to blindly believe in them. These tools only give us some inspiration. The final judgment still depends on our own intuition, that is, online sense, which I will talk about later.

3. Hotspot Application

Then, the third step is about how to use hot spots. You know a hot spot, but how do you present an article or a short video? I have two methods:

One is the combination arrangement method. List out the hot keywords, reference points, characters, major events, etc., and arrange them in order. For example, there are three keywords: oil price, epidemic, and holiday. Then oil price and holiday are a group, oil price and epidemic are a group, and epidemic and holiday are another group. By expanding the words in the combination, we can form an event in the human field.

The second is the inductive and deductive method. We don't need to delve into it as deeply as mathematicians, we just need to remember the major premise and the minor premise. For example, if strawberries are unsalable in one place, then you can infer whether this problem exists in your area. This principle is equivalent to the ancient saying that when a city gate catches fire, the fish in the pond will be affected. Even though this scene does not happen around us, we can derive the same theory of events through induction and deduction.

4. Cultivating Internet Sense

I said before that judging hot spots depends more on online sense rather than tools, because for many hot spots, by the time you have finished analyzing them, others have already made them popular, and they are of no use. Therefore, regarding hot topics, the most important thing for us is to systematically train our online sense on a regular basis.

Three-step training: search, judge, and apply. These are the three steps above. In addition to our own work, we can set aside another account and train our own network based on these three steps. At the beginning, our account naturally had little traffic, so we couldn’t judge whether it was good or bad based on the traffic. Instead, we had to look at the similarities and differences between our own use and the big accounts or popular ones, find them out, and record them. After a period of time, your sense of the internet will naturally improve. This is also the method I used when I first entered the industry.

Quantitative change and qualitative change training method: The second method is to use quantitative change to induce qualitative change. For example, when watching Douyin, for a video, add 10 copywritings, and then let colleagues choose which one is better. When your brain gets used to such output, the sense of the Internet will come.

Prediction training method: The third method is to rank and estimate the hot searches on a platform every day. For example, when a topic comes out on Weibo, which hot search do you think will peak, what is the approximate volume of hot searches, etc.; or for the platform you operate, judge the final peak from the 10-minute click growth trend. I can predict how many readings an article had in the past within 10 minutes, and it is very accurate. Remember, write down your predictions so you can find out where your flaws are.

These are some of my own experiences working in new media. I have always believed that when it comes to hot topics, online sense is the most important thing. However, people nowadays will not spend three months, or even longer, just to train online sense. They will think it is a waste of time. My friend has a poor grasp of hot topics, and this is not something that can be changed overnight. As for whether it can be changed, I think the key is whether we can persist in taking every step steadily.

Author: Flowery Little Master

Source: Huahua Xiaomengzhu