How can a newbie on Douyin become a big V? Remember these 7 creative methods

When working in new media , choose a popular platform, and a newbie can also overthrow the big Vs.

Tik Tok is very popular. Countless new media newbies, including students, working artists, mothers, beauty newcomers, educational institutions, and start-up companies, have used Tik Tok to counterattack the heavily-protected big V circle and become a new generation of internet celebrities .

So how do you make a popular Douyin short video ?

1. Tik Tok is a short video app about beauty

I was fortunate to have heard the sharing of Zhang Nan, the head of Douyin products, and she emphasized on many occasions:

TikTok is a product about "beauty".

The beauty that I understand comes from life and is higher than life. This is different from Kuaishou ’s restoration of life, where most of the traffic comes from curiosity. On the contrary, the content on Douyin is somewhat "pretentious" and "actual".

People often ask me: Is TikTok a flash in the pan? Given the regulation it is facing, can it continue to be popular?

My answer: It is precisely because of this kind of pretense and acting that I think the future of TikTok is worth looking forward to.

This is because: everyone wants to become the beautiful self they imagine, and this pursuit of becoming better will never stop, while curiosity and vulgarity will eventually become tired . In addition, Douyin relies on strong operations to strictly control the quality and direction of content, which means that Douyin will never become Kuaishou.

Those who are determined to invest deeply in TikTok, please feel free to do so boldly. We all know that the growth of Toutiao has slowed down, and ByteDance has irreversibly invested all its resources in TikTok. This is the future of ByteDance. TikTok has already taken off and there is no possibility of stopping. If you enter and invest now, you will definitely get good returns.

"Beauty" determines the direction of our content and the form of our output.

Don’t try anything vulgar or bad-taste anymore. There is no market for it. Even if there is a market, it will be strictly suppressed and have no future.

So, how do you combine a seemingly not-so-good product with beauty?

• First, think of a representative of beauty in the public mind, for example, Michelin restaurants are beautiful;
• Find the wonderful features of a Michelin restaurant; the more exaggerated the better. For example: the way Michelin food is presented on the plate;
• Then think about which aspects of your product can be combined with this feature;
• Finally create a scene that combines the two.

For example: Weilong spicy strips have also entered Douyin, and only two pieces of content have been posted so far. The relatively popular content is: The spicy strips taste like Michelin.

Look: In fact, any product and content can be presented in a beautiful way.

The benefits of doing this are:

• On the one hand, it enhances the product brand image;
• On the other hand, the characteristics of the product itself and the beautiful way create a dramatic collision, which is the core of the explosive content.

I will teach you in detail at the end of the tutorial. (One more thing to add: figure, sexiness, and subtle sexual metaphors are definitely considered beautiful. There is no need to argue with me about this, because how to express it is the key.)

In terms of production methods, batch copying and moving, or even gamble on the probability of producing junk content, have no future. Of course you can simply create a small account and hoard traffic, but the value return is not high, and I don’t recommend you to do low-yield things.

These are the two conclusions we have drawn based on beauty: one is about content; the other is about production methods. They are also the basic consensus that must be reached before studying the tutorial. I hope everyone will follow the governor's ideas.

My goal is that everyone who has completed my tutorial will be able to create a large account within a month, with a target of 400,000 followers. That's all you need to remember about beauty.

2. Scarcity is the core of TikTok’s addictive mechanism

Someone asked me: What is the key difference between people who are good at new media and those who are not good at new media? What is the essential difference between the people who do the best and those who do averagely?

Such questions are asked and answered almost every day.

Now let me talk about my conclusion after making a hit product. In fact, the difference is most obvious in discovering users' sense of scarcity.

Why is it that some people’s content receives no attention, while others’ content explodes on social channels ?

Insight into scarcity is the most critical.

Scarcity is the feeling of "having" less than "needing". Hunger, poverty, time pressure... are all scarcity. All your strong needs will create a sense of scarcity.

Studies have shown that under the influence of scarcity, users' attention will automatically and powerfully shift to unmet needs, even without them realizing it.

Don't believe it?

Look at two sets of studies:

In one study, subjects were randomly divided into two groups, one group ate heartily and enjoyed their meal, while the other group was extremely hungry. They were asked to recognize a series of English words that flashed on a screen at a speed of about 33 milliseconds. Such a task would be difficult for any normal person, and you might think that hungry subjects would not be able to concentrate and would perform worse on the task.

But the opposite was true: The hungry subjects performed just as well on the common vocabulary test as the well-fed subjects. However, they were able to recognize food-related words faster and better than the well-fed subjects.

This means that hunger, a sense of scarcity, caused the subjects to automatically and powerfully turn their attention to food.

If you think this physiological sense of scarcity is not enough, take a look at the second set of experiments:

A group of children were divided into two groups, one from poor families and the other from wealthy families. They were asked to estimate the size of coins ranging from one cent to one dollar. In the eyes of children from poor families, coins look big, so they will obviously overestimate the size of coins. The more valuable the coin, the greater the deviation in their estimation.

Then, you might say that children from poor families are not well educated and do not know the skills to estimate size.

In fact, there is another set of reference experiments - estimating the size of a piece of paper that is the same size as a coin. In this case, the children from poor families and the children from rich families have the same estimation level.

This means that under the influence of scarcity, users' attention will automatically and powerfully shift to unmet needs, even without them realizing it.

This is also the core reason why you are addicted to TikTok.

Any user who opens a Toutiao product will be labeled with around 3 million labels. These label data come from your mobile phone and your usage habits. In front of the Douyin product, you are naked. The content you see on Douyin is recommended to you based on your tags and usage habits. There is an exaggeration that the content you receive when you are lying down and standing up is different.

So, the smart algorithm knows where your sense of scarcity lies.

• For example: If you are practicing basketball hard, you will definitely receive basketball teaching videos through the algorithm.
• For example: If you are losing weight, you will definitely receive weight loss tutorials through the algorithm.

Combined with what we said above, the more you lack something, the more your attention will be drawn to it, automatically and powerfully, without even noticing it. So there is a phenomenon that people keep scrolling through Douyin until late at night and can’t stop.

I am not telling you this to tell you why you are addicted to TikTok. What I want you to do is - before you make TikTok, make it clear who your target users are and what their sense of scarcity is? In this way, you can be recommended to users by the intelligent recommendation algorithm, and their addiction can make you popular.

For example: Where is the scarcity of workplace accounts and people in the workplace? Salary, self-worth, workplace skills...

Corresponding topics: "How many people fail at dinner parties because they can't speak, and use the dinner party routines for a lifetime", "What's wrong with mediocre qualifications? Learn these 3 tips to achieve great success in the workplace

Another example: Zodiac number, why is there a scarcity of people who care about zodiac signs? Self-exploration, desire for emotions, keen on socializing, lack of security...

Corresponding topics: "Know Yourself about the 12 Zodiac Signs", "What Does It Feel Like to Be Loved"

You need to know how to select topics and produce content based on users’ sense of scarcity.

So how do you find the sense of scarcity among your target users?

The simplest and most practical technique is to find the first and second ranked accounts in your industry (either Tik Tok or WeChat official accounts ), find the top 20 articles with the highest likes or views, analyze and summarize the commonalities, and derive the sense of scarcity of your target users.

3. Understand the basic composition of Douyin short video content

What basic contents make up Tik Tok’s short video content? This question seems a bit strange. Isn’t video content just a video?

The answer is that there are 4 parts: the video itself, description, likes and comments.

Let's change one of your misunderstandings. Don't think that short video content is just the video. The four parts of the video itself, description, likes and comments are all very important. Their organic combination can make your video eventually explode, and each part of the content can be controlled by the creator.

When we mention [video content] below, it refers to the organic whole formed by the combination of these four parts.

Are there many videos stored on your homepage that only have a few hundred views, 2~3 likes, 1~2 comments, or even nothing? In fact, your video does not get any traffic allocation.

Have you ever wondered why this is? How does Tik Tok judge whether your video is high quality and should be recommended? Is it manual review?

Of course this is impossible. With tens of millions of videos a day, the cost is huge. Therefore, the traffic distribution mechanism of Douyin is a threshold-type traffic pool advancement mechanism .

In other words, your videos that are not popular are judged to be poor because they cannot inspire users to like, comment, share, view the homepage and other user behaviors . So you will die in the first small traffic pool of hundreds. If you want to enter the traffic pool of thousands, tens of thousands, millions, or even tens of millions, what you need to do is to make all aspects of your video data excellent.

Moreover, you cannot cheat. I am absolutely against the practice of brushing data. In my opinion, it is useless because how can hundreds of product experts not discover your little tricks?

I have seen accounts with millions of likes but without a single follower. This proves that inflating data is of no use in achieving real growth. What we need to do is to improve data performance in all aspects.

I only agree with one point: as long as you make sure your video does not have 0 likes, it is really useless to spend a lot of money to brush up the data.

The benefit of ensuring that there is not 0 likes is that when users decide whether to like a post, they will act based on the opinions of others. That is, whether people like a post sometimes depends on what other people do.

This is because when faced with a complex external world with a huge amount of information, it is difficult and impossible for people to judge what is right and what is wrong through reason. As a result, a mechanism has evolved that allows people to think a behavior is appropriate when they see others doing it. This is what herd mentality means.

4. Improve the like ratio

The like ratio refers to the ratio of the number of likes to the number of video views. Increasing the like ratio to 5% in the smallest traffic pool is considered excellent.

So how to increase the like ratio?

First we need to redefine likes:

(1) Likes are a window for emotional catharsis

When the emotional fluctuations caused by the video content accumulate to a certain amount, it will prompt the user to have the urge to like the video. Beauty, happiness, fear, sweetness... and so on, all these emotions have the potential to prompt users to like the post.

(2) Likes are the fulfillment of self-commitment

There is a psychological phenomenon: people will accept similar things to what they have promised before . For example: People who have accepted roadside flyers are more likely to accept flyers again.

Here is a very useful trick for us. If you have no experience in operating Douyin or don’t know what content to produce, go and see which videos your target users have liked.

It’s very simple. Find the corresponding account or video, and the people in the comment section, his fans, or your fans, and their homepages will contain traces of all the likes they have ever given.

(3) Likes are a recognition of self-labeling

Self-labeling is the user's setting of his or her self-image, and it is also the image that the user spends energy to manage and display to the outside world.

For example: An investor ’s circle of friends must include the following keywords : summit, unicorn, marathon. The image they manage is: an investor with a high level of cognition, strong professionalism and a love of life. This is their professional label.

When those labels that users are proud of are recognized, it will bring users a strong sense of pleasure and satisfaction, and the pleasure brought by self-identification of labels is even stronger.

For example: I like to see videos that are scientific and logically clear, and I am willing to like them. This is because: I once again recognized myself as a person who loves science and is logical.

This is also the reason why there are so many criticisms of TikTok from the outside world. It amplifies the instantaneous sense of accomplishment and pleasure and exploits the weaknesses of human nature. But I don’t think this is a bad thing. It is a skill that we operators and marketers must have.

(4) Praise is a fear of missing out on value

Suppose you are asked to make the following choice:

• You can definitely get 30,000 yuan;
• There is an 80% chance of getting 40,000 yuan, and a 20% chance of getting nothing.

In fact, option b is better because the expected value of option b is 32,000. But most people chose option a, which shows that people are risk-averse.

Now, let’s make the second choice:

• You will definitely lose 30,000 yuan
• There is an 80% chance of losing 40,000 and a 20% chance of losing nothing.

There is no doubt that you will choose b. By the same token, the expected value of b is still 32,000, which means taking a greater risk. Why do people like to take risks?

The reason is simple: people are more afraid of losses than risks.

So do you know why the title of this course you are attending is: Don’t Miss the TikTok Bonus in 2018. People are so afraid of losing that they become somewhat blind.

So, you know why those PPT-like lists of movies , books, and songs are so popular on Tik Tok.

The purpose of clicking a like is to be able to find it in the like list next time you want to watch it, and you may even share it or collect it. With so much weight added to the video, how could it not be popular? To win in this type of video, you need to continually add value to the content.

5. Improve the Comment Ratio

1. The video itself has a high density of information

Comments themselves have a high weight, but inspiring comments is probably the most difficult and sometimes requires a bit of luck. Sometimes you don’t even know which point in your video hits the user’s desire to complain and becomes popular.

There is a very famous video - the part where a man pretends not to know the subway handrail, and his hands grab it little by little and finally hold it together. The most popular video is because of the contemptuous look of a young lady in the background, which has inspired users to comment and complain, which was beyond the expectations of the person who filmed it. Dozens of imitators that followed also inserted background characters into the video and became popular as well.

There was a big mistake in one of my videos before. I made a ranking of 985 universities, but one of them was not a 985 school. This caused users to complain strongly, and it unexpectedly became popular.

For this kind of method of stimulating user comments through the video itself, I have summarized a set of methods: increase the information density of the video content. Luck is difficult to control, but probability can be controlled. We increase the information density of videos and increase the points that motivate users to comment.

So how do you determine the density of video content?

A simple way, what you see is what you get, use text and voice to describe everything you see in the video.

• For example: A very beautiful young lady wearing a green dress is dancing in front of the camera. The possibility of it becoming popular is not high, as video content like this that can be described in one sentence will basically fall into oblivion.
• For example: a beautiful young lady wearing a green dress. With a hole in her skirt and a tattoo of the Hulk on her leg, she dances for the camera. It is obvious that the second one has a higher information density than the first one, and contains many points that can trigger comments.

Think about it more divergently: This also explains why videos that transcribe various pictures of movies, books, and songs are more likely to go viral. A 15-second video can contain up to 11 pictures, which contains a lot of information. For example: There is always one among 11 movies that you have not seen, want to see, or want to complain about after seeing it. There is always a point that works, and the high density of information has a strong effect on likes and comments.

2. Description leads to comments

I have an account that I created purely by myself, without any help from our team. This is also the account I use to verify my theories and methods. I did this for over a week and haven’t posted a single video since, which contains some very typical examples of describing and guiding comments.

The account name is "Don't Say Love Words" and it already has many imitators. The one with the most fans has almost 100,000.

This account summarizes two very useful methods:

(1) If your video itself does not contain much information, find points that go against common sense and use them to describe and guide the audience.

For example, this video - if you have watched more than 5 of them, it proves that you are really old.

In fact, these TV series were all watched by those born in the 1990s, and my goal is to trigger comments from those born in the 1990s, so before I posted them, I knew that everyone’s comments would basically be: I’ve seen them all, I’m not old, and similar comments.

Another example: A space video like this doesn’t contain much information, but it can present a very interesting point through the description: “Please protect the Earth, our only home.”

This tone of voice is implying one thing: I am on the spaceship, and you must protect the earth well. It is conceivable that people will be very curious about how you could use your mobile phone to shoot videos on the spacecraft and successfully guide comments.

Remember: If your video itself does not contain much information, find points that go against common sense and use them to describe and guide.

(2) If your video itself has a high information density, just ask

Ask your question directly and guide the user to answer.

For example: The content of the list itself contains a lot of information, so you might as well ask directly, how many have you seen? Or directly point out the most controversial points in the video and ask users for their opinions. The psychological testing account works on this principle: direct questions arouse user curiosity and increase the conversion rate of comments.

In fact, even if you have the above skills and abilities, you still can’t create a big hit. What I mean by a big hit is one with tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of views. If you reach this level of views, the profits you can make are really considerable.

You are still lacking the following core capabilities:

6. Creating conflict is the basis for short video hits

The concept of conflict is generally used in literature and is called dramatic conflict. Many schools of thought believe that conflict is the essence of stories, and there is no story without conflict.

We all know that novels have conflict, development, and climax. When it comes to short video content, I think conflict is enough, because it is difficult to tell a complete story in 15 seconds. If it is impossible to express it completely, we can express the conflict and leave the development and climax in the comment section.

So what is conflict?

Conflict is the contradiction between people, the contradiction between people and their inner selves, the contradiction between people and their wills, and the contradiction between wills.

For example: Beauty and the Beast, The Ugly Man and the Magnetic Voice, The Monkey King and the Cute Monk, and The Little Monk Talking about Adult Emotions. These contradictions are used by many creators, and some authors even use them without realizing it.

How do you tell if there are any contradictions in your video?

Use the method I taught you above to translate the video you saw into text. What you see is what you get. Express everything you see in text so that you will know whether there are any contradictions. The first thing my apprentices have to learn is to become heavy users of Tik Tok. Then, they can be trained quickly by frequently using this method.

But in my opinion, such contradictions are unlikely to become a big hit. A big hit means tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of views and millions of likes.

A true hit is made up of great contradictions. What is a great contradiction?

• For example: system and freedom, democracy and centralization, hard work and enjoyment, adventure and stability, ability and qualifications, time changes and eternity.
• For example: a Tik Tok video I posted before.

The changes of time and the eternal love moved everyone. More than 60 million views and nearly 4 million likes.

Why are great contradictions like this likely to produce big hits?

The great contradiction is a common concern of all mankind. No matter which side is on the side, it is not wrong. The system has its supporters, and freedom has its supporters. Some people favor taking risks; some people favor stability; some people choose to enjoy life while the wine is still there; some people choose to suffer first and enjoy the sweetness later. It is precisely because human beings stand on both sides of the great contradiction that they have the desire to express their opinions and agree.

Your audience is all TikTok users.

7. Creativity itself is not creative

In fact, for people like us who are very handsome but don’t like to show our faces, we can only rely on creativity to win.

So how can we generate inspiration continuously?

This question bothers many friends. In fact, for me, creativity itself is not creative. There is a very clever way to get inspiration - from public account materials. I follow no less than 1,000 public accounts. Each public account has created a lot of popular content that is circulated in the circle of friends. I can directly use them as editing materials or divergent thinking. The source of creativity is simply endless.

The advantage is that the content of the official account can go viral in the circle of friends, which is much more difficult than going viral on TikTok. The difficulty lies in:

• First, a certain user base is required;
• Secondly, it requires user action to forward it in order to spread.

On the contrary, Douyin does not need these two points to recommend content to users, so content that can go viral in Moments will definitely be more popular on Douyin. This is where my creativity comes from. I asked my team to sort out all the popular content that has been popular in WeChat Moments over the years and make a table. This is our material toolbox . How can we worry about lack of creativity when creating content? 

In fact, each of the 7 parts of the tutorial has very rich content that can be broken down and discussed separately, and there are also many techniques and routines that can be reused. However, due to the limitations of the content format, I cannot finish talking about it all in one article. I will make up for it in subsequent updates.