Watching 300 Douyin videos a day made me rethink Toutiao

Douyin has become a hot commodity. Compared with the popularity of Kuaishou in third- and fourth-tier cities, Douyin has become the favorite of young users in first- and second-tier cities.

This phenomenon is driving people crazy. White-collar workers in first- and second-tier cities and college students have the most demands. The people with the highest vision, the most tricks, and the strongest ability to identify tricks, a group of people that no number of apps can please, have been harvested by TikTok.

Out of interest in this matter, I also started playing Tik Tok, and a large amount of time was cut out of me in the 15-second world. Where did the time go ?

Music is the cutting edge of Tik Tok and also the accompaniment that inspires users’ creativity

If someone asks what TikTok is, how can we accurately describe it in twenty seconds?

Douyin describes itself in its external promotional materials as follows:

The Douyin short video community uses music as its entry point, and combines it with creative forms of expression such as dance, parkour, and performance to create a rich and diverse way of playing for users, allowing users to easily and quickly create unique and powerful short videos, and interact with many users in the Douyin community.

From this definition, we can clearly know several information points:

Tik Tok is a short video, and it is a short video based on music. Through actual experience, I found that the 15-second short video requires the music to be customized. Therefore, Douyin purchased music copyrights and established music creation competitions. The purpose behind all this is to provide users with more creative tools .

Users need to create spontaneously based on music as a creative tool, which determines that the seed users that need to be cultivated for this product at the beginning are people with imagination and creativity.

To make short videos easily and quickly, Tik Tok must provide enough creative tools. Shooting functions such as looping, slow motion and fast forward are basic.

Interact with other users in the Douyin community. The community means that this is a big stage, but if you want to interact, you need to connect with multiple parties. Here, multiple parties can be simply understood as content producers and users. The connection inevitably involves a push mechanism. The solution is Toutiao ’s technical distribution combined with the common Follow mechanism.

From this definition, we can naturally understand the necessity of Tik Tok doing many things.

One of the necessities: polish the production tools to be good enough.

Before March 2017, Tik Tok did not carry out large-scale promotion. During this period, Tik Tok was frantically iterating its products, which meant completing the basic construction of the tools.

Toutiao already has similar experience in this regard. In the early days of Toutiao, it continuously iterated the backend editor of Toutiao to provide content creators with better creative tools. This has become the company's gene for polishing a product.

The second necessity: cooperate with professional musicians to customize short music.

Music production is an industry with a high threshold, and wanting to produce a 15-second soundtrack for a short video that can inspire user creativity is a very challenging task for professionals.

On the official website of Douyin, the Douyin Music Project currently being held seems to be one of the solutions to implement this demand, and judging from the current direction, this matter will be very sustainable.

The third necessity: reduce production costs through operations and gain "worship" from users through technology distribution.

After completing the construction of the tool, a threshold that urgently needs to be broken is to let users learn how to use this tool. This is the same as when the Office suite first came to China, many people were learning how to use Word.

Therefore, the operation side must first face this reality: even if it is a 15-second short video, as long as it involves shooting, short video is an industry with a high threshold.

Therefore, the first thing the operator does is to produce tutorials to educate and assist users on how to shoot lovely Tik Tok videos ?

In this link, Douyin's operation needs to have strong training and control capabilities. While releasing tutorials, it also expects users to come up with new creative ideas on these basic functions. Just like when we were students, teachers taught us the rules of word choice and sentence construction and expected students to be able to write sentences that were eye-catching.

The ability to control is reflected in: facing each short music video that may trigger large-scale imitation , how to control the overall tone? You can't manage too much and thus discourage users' creativity, nor can you allow users' overly enthusiastic creativity to hurt others.

Once users’ creativity is unleashed, there is only one kind of feedback from the user’s side that can encourage them to continue to indulge in the app.

Users need rewards. The rewards for content creators used to be cash on Toutiao and "worship" on Douyin.

Because everyone needs money, but young people need "admiration" more.

Driven by official operations, smart users will quickly get started with the software and have the opportunity to define the future imagination of this app together with the official.

What kind of video content is suitable for this platform and can be officially recognized and recommended on a large scale?

It is difficult to have a definite answer to this question at the beginning. It must be that users start by creating in a flourishing manner, and then the official tries to filter out the content style that best suits the tone of Douyin, while also allowing a certain amount of space for the wild growth of other styles of content. These early TikTok users who grew up with the app are enjoying the happiness brought by TikTok while enjoying the "worship" bestowed on them by other fans.

Brand awareness

Let talented people get enough appreciation.

Tik Tok’s slogan is “Let worship start here”. I think this slogan is not complete. The complete slogan should be to let talented young people start to enjoy admiration from here.

This sentence has the same meaning as the slogan of Toutiao: What you create is the headline.

If Toutiao's Toutiao account platform is to unleash the creativity of text creators, then Douyin short videos are to unleash the creativity of those who are good at video shooting.

From the beginning, text creation platforms were dominated by middle-aged people who had been writing articles for countless years. From the beginning, the skill of shooting short videos was in the hands of the younger generation who grew up with smartphones. When it comes to creating short videos with mobile phones, middle-aged and young people do not have obvious differences in experience due to age differences. On the contrary, young people have greater creativity in new things.

When you open the Tik Tok creation app, no relatively older people will choose a European or American style music accompaniment to dance to. Tik Tok’s music creation tools were designed from the beginning for the music styles that young people prefer.

After all, music can easily appeal to many age groups, but creativity is more likely to be in the hands of young people. So how does Tik Tok short video use the creativity of young people to spread?

Tik Tok promotional materials are very youthful

Initial stage of brand promotion

We talk about the stars that young people like, and we show up on the shows that young people like.

In all the articles analyzing Tik Tok’s brand promotion , Yue Yue is mentioned, but I don’t know anything about Yue Yue. Was the Weibo post driven by marketing, or was it the result of Yueyue's own initiative?

But Yue Yue is indeed a very good starting point for promotion. We only need to think carefully about how Yue Yue is perceived by young people today, and we can understand how many young people have Yue Yue’s emoticons on their phones.

Since the release of Yue Yue, Douyin has begun to enter the vision of a large number of young people. The following Douyin Famous Paintings H5, The Rap of China, Happy Camp , Day Day Up, and the offline event idou night were all crazy about promoting the popularity of this product among young people, and eventually this product completely conquered the young people.

Future business imagination

Music will attract more voices, and short videos are just a form.

If we think of the business pyramid from the perspective of information form, the bottom layer of music is sound. The use of sound as an information form is a business direction for Tik Tok to expand its foundation.

And we have also seen the sound forms based on different scenarios in some of the current popular videos. Looking up is the imagination of the music industry. Will we be able to see complete music of 15s in the future? Even a 15-second music MV. I am really looking forward to the creativity of the music industry.

If we analyze it from another perspective - short videos.

Short videos themselves carry more than just music, and there are indeed a lot of high-quality content such as pure pictures and short documentaries about life in the popular Douyin videos, which is also the diverse space for short videos themselves.

Expanding business imagination from different angles upward and downward has also brought Douyin greater space for commercial cooperation.

Imagine how big a business sound is? How big a business is the picture business? Even if we do not expand these business spaces, at least in the future, promoters will have new points of cooperation from the perspectives of sound and picture.

Future business challenges

Entertainment that isn’t tacky? The young people are the focus, but not the whole world.

From an operational perspective: content production, content distribution , user sedimentation, and conversion consumption are the four stages of the development of UGC content tools.

In the stage of content production and distribution, Douyin saw an explosion in popularity earlier and faster than Toutiao in its early days. So how should it formulate operational strategies in terms of user retention and consumption conversion? This is the next challenge that Douyin needs to face in its entire operational strategy. Excellent exploration on the operational side may also feed back into the commercialization strategy.

From a market perspective: Douyin’s explosive development has brought about an Internet miracle, but it has also brought great challenges. Even if all young people aged 15 to 30 are harvested, the number of this group is only about 280 million (China's population data in 2013), which is not enough compared with Toutiao itself and Kuaishou.

The biggest challenge will also be faced by this group of young people. The highly creative young people will inevitably release powerful communication conversion. Once there are more non-young users, they will begin to regard this platform as another Kuaishou for entertainment.

So, how to balance the consumption needs of young people playing basketball and elderly people dancing square dance in the same venue? This will become a difficult problem in setting the tone for later content.

Moreover, this trend has already begun to take shape. Judging from the Douyin content that has been refreshed on the homepage information flow recently, it is obviously a level lower than that of the previous year.

Douyin shakes dog head

Re-understanding Toutiao

The essence of decentralization is to give equal opportunities.

The success of TikTok is due to both the short video trend and the genius idea of ​​music. Combined with the capabilities of its own team, it has been able to develop to where it is today. There are many things worth learning from the TikTok team.

At the same time, the development of Douyin has made me re-recognize Toutiao because of its decentralized technology distribution mechanism.

Let’s go back and take a closer look at Toutiao’s introduction to itself:

Toutiao is a recommendation engine product based on data mining. It recommends valuable and personalized information to users and provides a new type of service that connects people and information.

The essence of Toutiao is: a service that connects people and information, relies on data mining, and provides personalized and valuable information.

This sentence determines that Toutiao has no page recommendation mechanism and is decentralized, giving everyone the opportunity to become popular. Everyone creates content that they are good at and promotes it to groups that have the same interests as themselves.

All of this comes from decentralized distribution technology.

Today, when class mobility is becoming increasingly rigid, giving everyone equal opportunities should have been a top-level design. However, due to various reasons, this issue ultimately relies on technology to be solved on the Internet.

In fact, this is a return to the era when the Internet first gave people countless confidence - the world is flat .

The era of portal era, where layout positions and front-page headlines represented the right to speak controlled by a few, is gone forever, leaving countless creative and talented young people far away from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou with an idea - even if they don't know any employee in an Internet company, a creative young person will get more exposure and income on this platform.

This is TikTok, where young people create and gain admiration.

Talented people create content here and gain more material and spiritual satisfaction here. This is Toutiao.

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

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games