What knowledge is needed to operate Tik Tok?

Douyin in the south and Kuaishou in the north are currently the two wonders in the short video field. Where there is traffic, there are people who make money from it. In addition, the overall market conditions this year are not very good, so many people are looking for opportunities on Douyin and Kuaishou. In fact, the best time to play Tik Tok was probably the end of last year and last year, because there was a huge explosion of incremental users. It’s still okay to do it now, but the difficulty level is a little higher. But after all, it takes ordinary people to react to the trend, so I decided to write something, hoping to help friends who are just starting out avoid detours.

1. Personality (account positioning)

The first step is to set up the persona, or to be more precise, account positioning. Because your personal image will collapse, being yourself is the most lasting and safest approach. There are two points to pay attention to when positioning an account: one is content output, and the other is monetization path.

To output content, you need to find something you are good at and continue to produce content. It is recommended to focus on vertical niches and never do a hodgepodge. If you post unfocused content, it will be difficult for others to establish an understanding of you. You will find that some accounts become popular due to accidental reasons, but the subsequent content cannot keep up, and the data of other content is very ugly and cannot carry the market.

So think carefully about what you have and what kind of works you can produce. Can you sing and dance? Or can you tell jokes? Do you have a nice voice? Or do you have cute kids at home? At least being able to eat is okay. Being a food broadcaster has the lowest threshold. . Don’t say you don’t know anything. Everyone has a skill that they are good at. Maybe you haven’t discovered it or can’t find it. Send me a red envelope and I will help you find it.

Regarding the monetization path, if you are a singing and dancing person, someone will invite you to perform for money or appear on variety shows; if you are a food broadcaster, you can sell local specialties; if you do street photography, you can sell goods through e-commerce or be a Taobao agent; if you are a speaker, you can receive training.

In short, there are only a few ways to monetize: appearance fees, e-commerce sales, training, paid communities, advertising, book publishing, live broadcast rewards, etc. In fact, if you have fans, many opportunities will come to you on their own initiative, so you don’t have to worry too much about monetization.

2 Platform Mechanism

The second step is to familiarize yourself with the platform mechanism. The underlying logic of each platform is different. Next time you write for Kuaishou, you will find that it seems very similar to Douyin, but it is actually very different. Tik Tok’s recommendation mechanism is centralized, promoting popular celebrities, similar to the way Weibo does it. Kuaishou pays more attention to individual stickiness. Let’s not expand on this for now.

Tik Tok is adept at algorithms, and although humans are involved to a certain extent, it relies more on big data models to make recommendations. When talking about this algorithm model, several key indicators cannot be avoided: forwarding, comments, likes, completion rate, stay time, stay trajectory, account activity, number of fans, etc.

When you post a piece of content, Douyin will give you a basic display (for example, 1000, and then the system will look at the data model. If these indicators look good, ROBOT will determine that the content is more popular with users, and then throw it into a larger traffic pool for display (for example, 10,000. If the performance continues to be good, it will be put into a pool of 100,000 or millions of people. And some may be recommended multiple times. Therefore, you will find that some popular videos have tens of millions of views.

Secondly, the system will perform a weight analysis on your account, which is similar to the PR value of websites in the search engine era. If your weight score is high, the content you post will most likely get more traffic recommendations. If your score is low, it will be less visible. In addition, don't use those machine software to actively add people, say hello and attract traffic. It's easy to get caught. Even if your account is not blocked, the system will judge you as a marketing account and put you in a small black room or throw you into the worst weight pool. You probably won't be released for a long time, and you're done.

3 Model disassembly

The algorithm model was mentioned above. Next, we will break it down around several key indicators. What should we pay attention to in specific operations to comply with the Tik Tok algorithm? Thereby gaining more recommendation opportunities.

3.1 Forwarding

This is very important. Retweet: This indicator represents strong liking and willingness to recommend the content to friends around you. Therefore, every time you update your content and want to get recommendations, you need to encourage your friends to forward it. My idea is to set up a fan group, post some interesting videos in the group, chat, send out red envelopes for maintenance, and ask friends to help spread the word. Or you can create a special Douyin interactive group. When someone posts new content in the group, you can interact in batches and work together to break into the next traffic pool. The former is better because the friends and classmates around you may be distributed in different regions and are real users. The latter has too many account friends who engage in marketing, which will affect the account weight.

3.2 Comments

The importance of comments cannot be overstated. The first is that the title needs to guide user comments. There are many ways to do this, such as ending a question with a question mark, asking everyone to come up with a title, or asking everyone what bgm is likely to be popular. The second thing I want to talk about is the comment area. You will find that Douyin comments are a bit like NetEase comments back then. Many people will check out what others are saying in the comments before finishing watching the video. Therefore, a brilliant comment can, to some extent, serve as the finishing touch and easily make an ordinary piece of content popular. This requires that your content itself has some connotation, similar to the hidden jokes and gags in crosstalk. Someone has to find the humor and deconstruct it. When there are no normal users to comment, you have to use a small account to appear. A great comment can stimulate the ordinary users' impulse to comment.

3.3 Like

This is very important and needs no further explanation.

3.4 Completion Rate

People nowadays are more impetuous and under a lot of pressure. They watch videos just for fun and users generally lack patience. If a video is 15 seconds long, users will scroll away before watching the whole video. The system will consider this video to be less popular. Therefore, even though 60 seconds is now available, if the content is not attractive enough, it is recommended to shoot 15 seconds. Also, try to get straight to the point. If you want to play with the connotation or twists, use words like "the highlight is at the end" in the title to attract users.

3.5 Duration and trajectory of stay

When you see an interesting video, many people have the habit of clicking on your homepage to watch it, and some even keep watching it all the way to the end. This operation will also be recorded and will add points. So, this involves the account positioning mentioned earlier. It must be the same type of vertical content, repeated, repeated, and repeated. Even if you just write a quote with a pen every day and add some popular music, you may become popular if you persist in doing so for a long time. This is the power of time and the power of accumulation.

Some accounts make short story videos or leave suspense in the videos to guide users to watch the next video. This is also a way to increase the length of stay.

3.6 Account Activity and Number of Followers

First of all, you have to immerse yourself in the game and play it in depth, and stay active every day. It doesn't necessarily mean to update daily, but you should keep logging in and watch videos when you have nothing to do, leave comments, take photos with others to gain fans, comment on popular videos, take the same popular BGM, add an internet celebrity on WeChat and join his fan group, all of which can attract fans. With high activity and a large number of fans, the weight will naturally be high.

4Content Output

Ensuring continuous content output is actually a process of overcoming laziness, which is anti-human. This requires persistence. That is why it is important to create content that you are good at and like. That way you won’t feel tired, especially before you become famous, which is very boring.

The second thing is to analyze more about why those popular videos became popular and whether there is anything that can be learned. Generally speaking, there are reasons for the popularity, and some methodologies can be summarized.

4.1 Features

Real-life shows still need to have some characteristics. What people fear most is being ordinary, the kind that is difficult to distinguish among a crowd of people. Either you have to be good-looking and have a good figure, or you have talent, it's easy to become famous anywhere. Either you dress up to be ugly, or you have to have some characteristics of your own, such as the big bearded guy who imitates the cat's meow, Ximen Piaopiao, Kong Kong, etc. They all became famous because they have their own icons. Being ugly to a certain level is still impressive, and if you watch them often, you will gradually ignore their appearance and instead discover their connotation and shining points.

4.2 Hotspots

Or you can catch the current hot spot. For example, Operation Ice Breaking is very popular recently. If you take photos of popular characters in the TV series such as Lin Yaodong and Uncle Hui, it is easy to attract fans.

4.3 Emotion

Or it should touch the deep hearts of people today. Most people working outside are hard and lonely. The copywriting and music should touch people's hearts and hit a certain point in everyone.

4.4 Technical Flow

Either you are good at technical skills, timing, editing, special effects, and memes, and being able to reach new heights is also very popular. People like Dai Meishi, Black Face V, and Chen Shixian all play very advanced roles. The brand advertisements I took on were also very impressive.

And so on and so forth. The list goes on. I won’t give more examples.

Postscript: I found a problem, that is, some seemingly reasonable truths can easily mislead people, such as this sentence: When everyone is discussing something, it means there is no chance anymore. You can't say he is wrong or right about this kind of logic. The key is whether you want to make a short-term or long-term investment. How you look at this matter is very important. It is never too late to do something if you really want to do it. If you look at it over a longer period of time, I don't think it's too late to play Tik Tok now. The overseas version of Tik Tok is now very popular in the United States. Isn't it an opportunity to create an account to repost and select videos?

In addition, China has just issued 5G licenses and is still in the infrastructure construction stage. 5G can have faster speeds and carry larger pipeline data. I believe that there will be many new things coming out in the entire entertainment industry in the future. So if you do it now and accumulate some fans, it may work in two or three years. Therefore, sometimes we still need to look at things from a developmental perspective. Finally, thank you all.