The secrets of Douyin App's operation and promotion routines

The reason why Douyin is so popular is not only because of the high quality of its products, but also because of its operating routines. Let the author reveal the secrets to you.

In the past six months, a short video app has become quite popular, namely Douyin. In addition, the results I found on Baidu Index also confirmed my guess.

From Baidu Index:

In January this year, the index of Douyin was only 20,000-30,000. In February, it suddenly reached 150,000, and then dropped to 300,000 in April. It has now returned to a normal range.

So how did Tik Tok become so popular, and what is Tik Tok’s promotion strategy? Below I would like to analyze it through perceptual understanding and rational thinking.

First, let me tell you how I knew about TikTok.

I heard that TikTok actually started in the last six months, and it became popular all of a sudden. This should be related to the intensive release of PR articles by TikTok in February and April, because from the news spread by my two 5,000-person friend circles , I understand that TikTok is all about making money, fans, and fighting with big brands .

Basically, the first time I heard about TikTok, I heard about making money. In short, I heard about how much money various people made on TikTok in the first half of the year.

I suspect that this is a batch of PR articles from Douyin, because making money is hard to prove, but it can be fabricated, and as long as it is related to making money, basically everyone will read it. I think everyone knows the reason. Who doesn’t like money? Of course, this path is still continuing. In short, many people have made a lot of money on Douyin.

The result of this kind of article is that many people will pay attention to it and then download it, because everyone wants to make money. But whether they can really make money, whether it is only a few people or the majority of people, is unknown. It all depends on how the manuscript is hyped.

Secondly, there are fans. There are also various articles that are circulated in the circle of friends and on the Internet, which are used to earn fans. So-and-so gained millions of fans on Douyin in a few months.

This is also a kind of batch PR manuscript. The purpose of PR is either to let others know you or to let others get benefits from you.

It is obvious that Douyin’s PR is the latter. Since it can gain millions of fans, many people will flock to it. This kind of article is also a routine article. As long as you tell people that they can gain millions of fans, most people will still be easy to pay attention to it.

Again, it is the competition between Douyin and big brands.

It is obvious that Douyin is riding on Tencent's coattails. Many commentary articles have linked Douyin with Tencent, saying that Tencent missed out on short videos and that Douyin is an obstacle to Tencent's progress. In short, Douyin has gained a lot of user attention by leveraging the Tencent brand. This tactic is called leveraging marketing .

At present, the news found on Baidu are basically about these three aspects, and there are a lot of these news, and they are released in large quantities every day. In fact, as long as you have money and know how to operate resources, you can release such news every day. Plus, since you can make money and gain fans, many people will definitely flock to it.

Therefore, this PR promotion is the first routine of Douyin promotion.

So what is the second routine? It's the fission of the address book.

Through the first routine, Douyin has established its popularity and attracted the attention of users, so the number of downloads will increase rapidly. If users download it but have no fans or no one pays attention to it, will they be disappointed? Just like attracting new users and retaining existing users, which is often mentioned in operations, the most important thing is to keep the users who follow Douyin.

Tik Tok relies on content production and will encourage you to produce content. For example, there is a large icon in the middle of the app that prompts you to download the premium version so that you can upload your own content. Once you upload your own content, many software will encourage you to share it on social media such as WeChat Moments and Weibo, but what TikTok does differently is that the first step is to encourage you to upload your address book so that you can spread it through your address book. This trick is called acquaintance marketing .

Many social apps like to use this trick, which is to encourage you to synchronize your address book. This trick is very important for promotion. Once the user uploads the address book, any information uploaded by the user on Douyin will be pushed to your address book friends through the system.

For example: Your friend XXX uploaded a video XXX on Tik Tok, go and watch it quickly.

We must know that people are profit-seeking and vain, especially women. Once you publish your first Douyin video, all your friends in your address book will know about it. Once your friends in your address book download Douyin and see you, they will also synchronize their address books. Through this continuous fission of address books, more and more users will join Douyin.

This is a very important promotion method, which is much more effective than spending money on channels every day. We can think about whether this is what WeChat used to do? Therefore, fission promotion through address book is a very important promotion method. If you promote your app and can take advantage of the features of your own app and this technique, then your app will never lack users.

In order to allow users to quickly bind their address books, Tik Tok has placed many entrances on the App’s interface, including the upper left corner, pop-up windows, and the middle. The design intention of this is actually very obvious, and it continues to spread through your address book.

If everyone has an address book with 500 phone numbers, then the first fission would be 250,000, and the second fission would be 120 million. I think everyone can calculate how powerful this fission effect is. Therefore, Douyin’s promotion strategy is worth learning from.

Our goal in promoting the app is this: the first step is to let users know that they can get honor and money from your app, and the second step is to let them help you spread it. This is exactly taking advantage of human nature.

For example, when I was using the app, I almost clicked on the bind address book button several times. Its design intention is very obvious. For many ordinary users, it is estimated that many people will click on it, and one click is equivalent to helping the spread of Douyin. This is a very barbaric way of promotion, but it is still worth learning from.

Finally, it should be difficult to get fans and make money on Douyin, because I have observed many users and found that they don’t have many fans. In addition, Douyin has designed many traps. As long as you don’t know how to click, you will accidentally follow others and become their fans. This is the purpose of Douyin.

If users come to Douyin and do not sell out their friends in their address book, they will basically not get many fans simply by taking selfies and dubbing, unless they are beautiful.

However, I think everyone can learn from Tik Tok’s promotion tactics, which is much more effective than spending money to promote the app.

The author of this article @李建华 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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