Short video operation guide for educational institutions!

For educational institutions, using short video operations for marketing has become an industry consensus. So for institutions that lack short video experience, how should they do a cold start? What else should we pay attention to?

Do you think teaching and research is more difficult for educational companies, or is marketing more difficult?

Teaching and research strength determines how far an education company can go and is its core competitiveness. But when it comes to difficulty, marketing is more difficult. Even good wine needs no bush; good content is common, but cost-effective marketing channels are rare.

At this time, short video platforms entered the sight of educational institutions and schools, becoming a new traffic channel that will be heavily invested in in 2020. The advantage of short video platforms is that they can serve many individuals and bring many opportunities to small and medium-sized institutions and teachers. Moreover, short videos are essentially content-based platforms that use content as the core weapon to leverage traffic. Educational institutions have no shortage of valuable content.

As a result, from education giants such as New Oriental and TAL Education Group to education unicorns and small and medium-sized education institutions, they all tacitly started using Kuaishou and Douyin, and registered Toutiao and Bilibili. However, for many organizations that lack short video experience, the first thing they face is the four soul-searching questions of cold start:

1. If we start from scratch, how many people does the team need? How is the division of labor? What kind of capability models are needed respectively? What assessment indicators should be set?
2. How much one-time investment cost is required? How long is the payback period? How to measure the effect?
3. What are the criteria for selecting teachers to appear on camera? How do institutions and teachers distribute benefits? What should we do if teachers/on-camera employees leave or go solo?
4. What is the methodology for content creation? Is it feasible to copy historical recorded/live broadcast courses? Teachers are also responsible for teaching and research. What should they do if they don’t have time to make short videos? How to increase followers of an account? Do you want to build a matrix number?

The second article in the institutional series hopes to start with some simple thinking on these four issues. You are welcome to leave a message in the background with different opinions and engage in in-depth discussions.

1. Team Configuration

If we start from 0 to 1, how many people does the team need? The configuration depends on your account planning. In the initial stage, one operation is enough. However, if you want to build a matrix, or hope to get started faster, you need to add more people and have a division of labor for faster efficiency. The division of labor includes:

1. Operation: Complete the planning, editing, and publishing of videos based on platform attributes and account positioning;
2. Actors: If they do not appear on camera or have a teacher to support them, or if they are just using existing video footage for the second edit, then this is not necessary;
3. Editor: If complex editing is not required, there is no need to set up a separate position; the mobile app can be used for rough editing;

Regarding the capability model, it usually includes being familiar with the rules, gameplay and recommendation mechanisms of mainstream short video platforms, having content planning capabilities, shooting and production capabilities, data analysis capabilities and user operation capabilities, and also requires certain educational video content planning experience. Those with MCN work experience or successful incubation experience are preferred. It would be even better if you understand the business.

Regarding evaluation indicators, there are usually two types: one is responsible for user growth (number of fans, activity, interaction), and the other is responsible for conversion effects (effective sales leads, transaction volume, revenue).

2. Cost and Payback Cycle

The cost mainly comes from labor costs, followed by some video shooting costs. As for the return cycle, this varies from account to account and it is difficult to give a time standard. On the one hand, it depends on the brand influence of the institution itself, whether it has famous teachers or teachers with strong personality (natural advantages); on the other hand, short video accounts are not "standard products", especially platforms based on algorithm recommendations, which cannot guarantee KPI.

Several reference indicators to determine whether the account is "successful":

1. Exposure: Whether the brand influence and brand volume brought by the short video meet expectations
2. Number of fans: at least 500,000 fans for Douyin and Kuaishou; at least 100,000 fans for Bilibili and Weibo;
3. Hot-selling volume: Videos with over a million likes and tens of millions of views
4. Others: Successfully created an IP internet celebrity teacher

Precisely because of the mobility and sporadic nature of the short video recommendation mechanism, the most important methodology for creating an account on Douyin and Kuaishou is to maintain extremely strong patience and spend more time, and everything else is just skills. The biggest advice is to continue to do data analysis and maintain agile iteration.

3. Teacher Account Operation

Compared to the cold official account of an institution, it is obviously a better strategy to create a teacher account (institution prefix + teacher name). With fixed on-site shooting, the sense of interaction that real teachers bring to users cannot be replaced by a virtual brand.

1. Choose the teacher who will appear on camera

The subjects that can appear in the mirror are:

• Famous teachers and internet celebrity teachers: such as He Kaiwen, a famous teacher for postgraduate entrance examinations, and Tang Jiafeng, a mathematics teacher; but real famous teachers may already have a good income, unless they have a strong desire for personal IP, whether they are willing to make short videos is a question
• Teachers with outstanding personal style, good image and temperament;
• Teachers with good teaching reputation and student feedback;
• Employees with good photogenic qualities (need to sign a contract and continue to do so even if they leave)
• The founder himself: Fan Deng read books and got Luo Zhenyu

2. Distribution of benefits between institutions and teachers

Many institutions are reluctant to register accounts in the name of teachers because they are worried about the ownership of profits and the possibility that the teacher will leave or go solo after becoming famous.

Regarding the issue of profits, the division of profits between the institution and the teacher should be made clear at the beginning of the account operation. Whether they are institutional teachers or in-service teachers, the teaching burden itself is heavy and they rarely have extra energy to continue updating on an "obligatory" basis.

Another issue regarding working solo is that the institution can sign a binding agreement with the teacher, and small institutions can also allow teachers to become partners. In this way, institutions can confidently invest huge amounts of money and energy in promoting teachers, and the probability of launching phenomenal internet celebrity teachers will also increase.

4. Short video content creation

The core issue to be solved at this stage is: increasing followers. It is necessary to formulate the goal (O), timeline, key path, and key result (KR) of follower growth. The premise is to improve the underlying operating mechanism, including:

• Daily content creation SOP: topic selection, copywriting, shooting, editing, and publishing
• Platform activities, hotspot monitoring and response mechanism
• Industry hot-selling research and content solutions
• Certain amount of traffic purchase/advertising

Find ways to establish connections with officials and gain more internal opportunities. I will elaborate on the SOP mechanisms involved in future tweets on the official account, so please stay tuned. This time I want to talk about content creation techniques.

1. Common forms of creation

From the content level, no matter which form it is, fixed scenes, specific themes, and personalized and easily recognizable expressions are the basic consensus in creating content. The second is the pursuit of elevation, that is, to achieve the level of personal style, and to precipitate the loyalty and favorability of the account through the personal charm displayed by the teacher. Here are 5 common forms of creation:

1. Daily class scenes and course highlights: students from training institutions take classes online and offline, and have interesting online interactions, such as Zhuge Academy, Chaos University, and Wendu Education. As early as the end of 2017, Wendu Education, a well-established training institution with a large group of teachers, edited the highlights of the courses into short videos and posted them on Kuaishou. Several of its teachers with distinctive styles were very popular among college fans, which led to a wave of "tap water" dissemination and soon gained 70,000 fans. This video editing method is also more efficient and does not require teachers to take out independent time to cooperate;
2. Explain one question every day: Explaining questions is a necessary skill for teachers. As long as you design some jokes in the process of explaining and make the content more interesting, you can actually leverage enough production at a relatively low cost. It is only a matter of time before you persist in updating and iterating to create a hit product. It is best to buy a small blackboard, which can help you quickly establish your teacher's personality;
3. Oral broadcast: This is also the most common method on Kuaishou and Douyin. The teacher faces the camera and gives some professional knowledge. It requires a high sense of camera and expressiveness from the teacher. However, if the teacher has an outstanding personal style, the number of fans will increase quickly.
4. Drama: Dramas are divided into multiplayer dramas and single-player dramas. Because the content has storylines, conflicts, twists and other script design elements, it is easy to attract attention and likes, but this type of filming usually has a high cost and the main characters are not prominent enough;
5. Showcase the achievements of students from institutions: achievements of students from art training institutions such as paintings, dance shows, model shows, live competition videos, etc., and code works and programming skills of students from IT training institutions;
6. Slices of life: Organize content around the person himself, and appropriately display more aspects of life, such as communication and chat records with parents, life-like interactions with students, etc., so that the teacher can appear as a lively and curious person, rather than a stereotyped, tool-type teacher.

2. The topic is practical, fast-paced, novel and unique

It is obvious that the viewing threshold of Douyin and Kuaishou videos is very low. The positioning of short videos is naturally not friendly to educational videos. The desire to learn cannot resist the temptation of other types of videos. Serious knowledge teaching is difficult to continue to attract users to like it. This may be the reason why such accounts are difficult to produce explosive products and the data fluctuates greatly.

For educational videos, users do not need to have a high cognitive foundation and can learn a little knowledge from a video of more than ten seconds. It may not be actually used, but it can alleviate people’s anxiety about “killing time” to a certain extent.

3. The copywriting is carefully polished, and BGM is standard

The copy refers to the video title (introduction), which must perfectly match the platform characteristics (Tik Tok is foreign/Kuaishou is down-to-earth), the account positioning and the current topic selection screen. Some golden sentences that have been verified in the era of pictures and texts can be directly "borrowed". At the same time, in order to enable the machine to accurately identify, more hot words, high-frequency educational words, and general public words are incorporated into the copy, and less uncommon words and new Internet words are used.

Even with dubbing, BGM is still an indispensable standard. The Business Arithmetic Center of ByteDance used a quantitative research approach to study the issue of "the influence of music on videos and advertisements in Tik Tok" and found that compared with the overall market data, music can increase the playback and interaction volume of short videos by about 20%. Moreover, there is a clear concentration of top music works on Douyin. The average daily playback volume of music that accounts for 10% of the playback volume is 1,859 times that of the remaining 90% of the works. Next time you make a video, don’t forget to choose a popular song for yourself.

It is very important to build teachers into distinctive IPs, so that they appear to be in line with the tone of the platform users. The ultimate goal is to make them recognize you, and the conversion rate will be higher. The foundation of social interaction is trust, and you can sell anything.

Regarding monetization and traffic generation, I will discuss this separately later in the institutional series. I will continue to ponder two soul-searching questions:

• How to cultivate (private domain) traffic within the platform and successfully complete monetization conversion, and how big is the monetization space?
• How to divert platform traffic? What are the effective drainage methods? How high is the traffic conversion rate?

Author: Liao Liao Dimension

Source: Liao Liao Dimension