Tik Tok, are they really the next operational frontier?

Since April, I have repeatedly heard that the operation of an enterprise should be expanded from the original two Weibo platforms to Douyin , forming an operational layout of "two Weibo and one Douyin".

To be honest, when I first heard this statement, I was a little shocked. I first came into contact with the product Douyin in October last year. At an operation sharing session, a guest specifically mentioned Douyin when talking about how content operation should be done. After the event, I downloaded and tried this product. Since then, the word Tik Tok has appeared in my vision more and more frequently.

But why did the term "two Weibo and one Douyin" shock me?

Because when I used to watch Tik Tok, I was completely relaxed: if I saw a good video, I would like it, read the comments, take a look at the personal homepage of a pretty girl, and decide whether to follow her based on the quality of the video. Then slide your finger up and move on to the next one. It’s very enjoyable to watch Tik Tok in this state.

However, since I realized that my future operations career might be linked to TikTok, my attitude has become: when a short video comes out, I first check whether it has a high number of likes, comments, and reposts, and then carefully study and appreciate what highlights the video content has and why it has received so many likes and reposts. Then I thought, could I make a similar video or something. It has completely changed from a happy and relaxing state of killing time to a stressful working state that is killing brain cells.

This torturous experience made me decide to study whether the statement about the operation of “two Weibo and one Douyin” is reliable or not. After all, if it is unreliable, you can rest assured when you see similar statements in the future, and you will not be anxious about the knowledge payment for various Douyin operation practical teaching in the circle of friends and then pay the IQ tax.

And if this is true, we don't have to worry about it. We can study it earlier and get on board earlier to seize the traffic dividend.

Here are my research conclusions:

1. How popular is Tik Tok?

First, let’s look at how popular Tik Tok is from both an emotional and rational perspective.

Let’s talk about the emotional angle first. When talking about Tik Tok, the first thing that comes to people’s mind is all kinds of brainwash music and magical dances. Tik Tok has made popular the music of many singers who are not well-known to the public, such as: "The One I Love Is You" by Liu Jia, "We Are Different" by Da Zhuang, "Take You on a Trip" by Principal, etc.

There are more than 360 Douyin playlists on NetEase Cloud Music , and the number is still increasing. When it comes to the magical dances on Tik Tok, there are various gesture dances, C哩C哩 dance, ghost step dance, seaweed dance and so on. The Peppa Pig meme, which has been very popular recently, "Tattoo Peppa Pig on your body, give applause to the social people", has largely benefited from the promotion of Tik Tok. It is no exaggeration to say that over the past year or so, most of the popular culture among young people comes from Tik Tok.

The popularity of Tik Tok lies not only within the app, but also in its influence that radiates to other apps and offline scenarios.

If you search for "TikTok" on Taobao , you will immediately see a considerable number of products marked "same as TikTok"; when you go to Haidilao for hotpot, tell the waiter that you want to shoot TikTok, the waiter will very tacitly serve Haidilao's TikTok set meal, and even guide you on how to shoot more interestingly...

The influence is so great that Weibo and WeChat have begun to restrict or even ban the sharing of content from Douyin. Remarks such as "Weibo banned Douyin, but Douyin has almost killed Weibo" and "Tencent revived Weishi and provided 3 billion in subsidies to block Douyin" have fueled the flames and made people feel that Douyin is coming in with great momentum and has amazing fighting power.

Not only that, for heavy users with particularly high stickiness and who spend a lot of time on the app, Douyin also learned from the previously popular national mobile game " Honor of Kings " and launched an anti-addiction system, giving people the impression that Douyin is about to become the next national social app after WeChat.

All of this tells us intuitively that Tik Tok is indeed popular.

What about looking at the data from a rational perspective?

If you search for TikTok on App Annie , you can see that TikTok has topped the list of free downloads on the Chinese App Store many times.

Data from Chandler.com shows that as of April 28, the total number of downloads of TikTok in the Android market (excluding the Xiaomi market) has exceeded 470 million.

The monitoring results of Aurora Big Data show that as of the last week of February 2018, the market penetration rate of Douyin short videos reached 14.34%.

That is to say, out of every 100 active terminals, more than 14 have TikTok installed. The average time users spend on Douyin every day has reached 20.27 minutes (heavy users often spend more than 5 hours on Douyin). According to the rough estimate that each Tik Tok video lasts 15 seconds, it means that on average each user watches 80 Tik Tok videos every day. I have to say that Douyin’s data performance is very impressive.

What’s special about the popularity of Tik Tok is that it is not only popular among domestic users, but also among foreign users. This is in stark contrast to the past when domestic apps could only occupy the domestic market and had difficulty going overseas.

According to data from App Annie: Tik Tok, the international version of Douyin, has long been ranked in the top 20 in the free download rankings of the App Store in Singapore and Japan.

On November 10 last year, Toutiao , as the parent company, spent US$1 billion to acquire Musical.ly, a music short video social platform that performed well in the North American and European markets, and merged it with Douyin.

Therefore, from both emotional and rational perspectives, it can be seen that Douyin is undoubtedly a hit.

2. Can Tik Tok continue to be popular?

Over the years of Internet development, there are hundreds of popular products. However, most of them are just fire and pass. After the extremely brief highlight moment, it returned to silence.

If we regard Douyin as a business operation platform like Weibo and WeChat, then before we operate Douyin, we must first make sure that the popularity of Douyin is not a flash in the pan or fleeting, but is sustainable.

Does Tik Tok have such sustainability?

I don’t know either, but there are ways to find out the answer to this question.

When we cannot see the development prospects of a product clearly, we can get a glimpse of the opportunities from the industry development behind the product.

According to the 2018 China Mobile Internet Spring Report released by QuestMobile:

From March 2017 to March 2018, the number of monthly active mobile Internet devices in China increased from 1.039 billion to 1.095 billion, and the year-on-year growth rate decreased from 15.9% to 5.4%.

Real data shows that the domestic mobile Internet industry has shifted from incremental competition to stock competition. For those of us who are in operations, the most intuitive feeling is that traffic is becoming more and more expensive and difficult to obtain.

Continuing to look at the data on “Total usage time share of popular industries in the secondary sub-segments of mobile Internet”, we can see that the attention allocated by mobile Internet users to instant messaging has dropped significantly, from 37% a year ago to 32.2% now. This is reflected in reality: the average opening rate of WeChat public accounts continues to decline (it has long been less than 5%), and fewer people are posting or browsing their Moments.

Under such circumstances, the short video industry in which Douyin is located has flourished, with its share increasing significantly from 1.5% a year ago to 7.4%.

Looking further at the user scale of the short video APP industry, we can find that: within this year, the short video industry continued to grow rapidly, with the monthly active user scale exceeding 460 million and the penetration rate reaching more than 42%, which has doubled compared to a year ago.

In terms of total monthly usage time, the short video industry's share of the entire network has also increased from 5.5% in December last year to 7.4%, and user stickiness continues to increase.

The fact that short videos are able to buck the trend and seize user time from other popular industry apps despite the overall slowdown in the growth of the mobile Internet shows that they are recognized by users.

As typical apps in the short video industry, Kuaishou , Douyin, Huoshan Video and Xigua Video have all achieved good growth in the past year. Compared with long videos, short videos are more suitable for people's fragmented time usage scenarios, and they can convey richer information than text. The popularization of 4G and the faster 5G will be commercially available in the next few years. All these favorable factors will promote the short video industry to continue to develop rapidly in the next few years.

Now that we understand that the short video industry will continue to grow rapidly, let’s look at Douyin: As one of the four typical short video apps, Douyin started the latest, but its growth performance is more impressive, forming a trend of catching up from behind.

In March this year, the total number of newly installed users in the short video industry reached 169 million, of which Douyin’s new installations accounted for more than half, reaching 55.4%.

In addition, Douyin short videos are also favored by public opinion, with positive opinions being the main focus, accounting for more than half. Its users are mostly young people from first- and second-tier cities (more than 85% of users are under 24 years old), with a male-to-female ratio of 4:6. They are highly educated, with most of them between high school and undergraduate level, and are beginning to move to third- and fourth-tier cities.

What are the characteristics of such user attributes?

"First- and second-tier cities", "mostly female users ", "mostly young people with a high level of education" - these labels together show that Douyin has captured a very high-quality user group. This group has a strong desire to consume and a certain level of consumption capacity. They have strong social needs and are happy to speak out and spread high-quality content on the mobile Internet.

Therefore, Tik Tok can create trends many times and has a strong ability to bring goods.

Therefore, it is foreseeable that Douyin’s highlight moments will continue, and it will remain popular for some time to come.

3. Now we can draw conclusions

Now, we can try to answer whether the saying “two Weibo and one Douyin” is reliable.

On the one hand, the traffic of Weibo and WeChat is slowly declining, while on the other hand, Tik Tok continues to be popular.

If there is still a particularly large free traffic dividend on the mobile Internet that has not been seized, then apart from WeChat's mini-programs , the only one left is Douyin. Douyin, relying on its addictive product design, has successfully established its own unique community culture and strong influence in the past year or so. Its mainstream user group is the new generation of mobile Internet, and user stickiness is very high.

In addition, its pace of commercial exploration is also not slow:

• Its platform is connected with Taobao, trying to provide "see now, buy now" e-commerce business;
• In early April, the 2018 Marketing Summit was held in Shanghai, where a number of marketing strategies were announced for the first time, including supporting brand owners’ official accounts, cooperating with brand stickers, and encouraging user interaction.
• On April 19, we reached a cooperation with the Tourism Development Commission of Xi'an, a popular city on TikTok, to promote Xi'an in an all-round way through cultural city promotion, customized city theme challenges, in-depth experience of TikTok influencers, and TikTok version of city short films, so as to boost Xi'an's tourism industry;
• Enterprises can open a Blue V account.

Of course, Douyin also faces the following crises:

• The first is policy risk: some time ago, Douyin was summoned by government departments and asked to make rectifications, so it took down its live broadcast business and strictly reviewed the video content posted by users. In the short term, it is equivalent to pouring cold water on Douyin when its product is rising, but in the long run, the regulation of the industry by policies will be more conducive to the sustainable development of this industry.
• Second, the competitive environment it faces is still fierce: its number of users is still far behind that of Kuaishou, and the giant Tencent has "resurrected" Weishi, regarded it as its own strategic product, and offered large subsidies to compete with Douyin for internet celebrities KOL . Therefore, the business environment that Douyin faces today will be much more severe than in the past year, and will test the competitiveness of the Douyin team even more.

However, these risks are not a reason for us not to try to operate. The Internet is an industry that changes extremely rapidly and requires every practitioner to quickly perceive and actively embrace changes. You never know which opportunity you missed will lead to your rapid decline in the next few years.

What's more, some corporate peers have already taken the lead. Alipay , Xiaomi, Lenovo and other well-known companies have opened official Douyin accounts and happily played with their users on the stage built by Douyin...

4. Will short videos be the next generation of social media?

For a long time during the development of the Internet, our main social carrier was text. We communicated through text messages through IM tools such as QQ and used text to record our lives and feelings in QQ space.

The rise of mobile Internet and the advent of the great product WeChat have gradually transformed our social media into pictures + texts. We take pictures, retouch them, and then post them on WeChat Moments for everyone to see and appreciate, and receive comments and likes from everyone.

Nowadays, short video social products such as Kuaishou and Douyin provide us with a better way to record and display our lives. With the changes in social media platforms, after the transition from mainly text to mainly pictures, will it continue to transition from mainly pictures to mainly short videos?

Tencent’s emphasis and anxiety on Weishi may tell us the answer.