How did the short video app “Tik Tok” become popular?

If I were to say which APP is the most popular in May, I think it must be the TikTok APP .

What the hell is Tik Tok ?

To put it simply, it is a lip-syncing spoof APP similar to Xiaokaxiu .

To put it simply, it is an app for creative music short videos , on which users can shoot 15-second music short videos.

To put it more complicatedly, this APP is a product incubated by Toutiao , and it is from the same mother as the pornographic live broadcast platform "Huoshan Live " that was exposed by CCTV a while ago, that is, it is a product of Beijing Weibo Vision Technology Co., Ltd.

Brother Xiaoyu checked the Encyclopedia Prophet and found out that Douyin was launched in September last year and received several million yuan of angel investment from Toutiao at the beginning of this year. On Douyin, users can choose songs and match them with short videos to create their own works. In terms of functions, it is actually very similar to the previous Xiaokaxiu. The difference is that Douyin has made some enrichments on the technical level. Users can adjust the speed of video shooting, video editing, special effects (repeated, flash, slow motion), etc. This is another abnormal video APP. If they capture young people, it means they capture money!

From the Baidu Index above, we can see that before March of this year, Douyin’s search index has always been 0. It was not until March 17 that a clear upward trend began to emerge, and this trend was increasing exponentially. So what happened to Douyin in March that it appeared before our eyes overnight.

In this article, we will analyze why Tik Tok has become so popular from an operational perspective!

The star effect is always the key to a product's cold start

Just now we mentioned that starting from mid-to-late March, Douyin suddenly came into the sight of users. Many people who are engaged in operations have guessed that Douyin either invested in advertising, held some activities or brought in a celebrity to promote it. Yes, on March 13, Yue Yunpeng reposted a Weibo with the Douyin APP logo below. The next day, the index soared to more than 2,000 and showed a gradual upward trend in the following months.

Tik Tok video itself is an entertaining and interesting app, and it fits in with the current young people’s love for ghost culture. After it started to gain momentum, many celebrities also started to join in and experience this app. For example, Hu Yanbin launched a music video challenge on Douyin using his new song "No Choice" as the background music. The effect was very good. Even Hu Yanbin's former dancers participated in the challenge, and the video they shot received more than 20,000 likes. Other stars include Christy Chung, Du Haitao, etc., and now the Tik Tok short video team is also promoting the celebrity effect. Now when users download the APP and open the APP, they can see some short videos of celebrities playing Tik Tok recommended to you on the homepage. Therefore, the celebrity effect has greatly helped Tik Tok to get a cold start.

Content operation is the foundation

In terms of content operation, the first point is that it mainly combines the algorithm advantages of its parent company Toutiao, and decentralizes content recommendation and distribution. In other words, an ordinary person without any fans can still gain a lot of attention as long as he takes good photos. Isn’t this the Toutiao version of TikTok? That is why more and more ordinary young people are willing to play in this place and express themselves here.

The second point is that the content operation team is good at combining current hot topics and then slightly transforming them into spoof short videos that young people like. For example, some time ago, Xie Tengfei’s emoticons from “Country Love” became popular on the Internet. This is a very typical Internet discourse. Xie Tengfei has broken away from rural love and has been given a new meaning as a popular symbol by the Internet. Then the TikTok operation team went a step further and combined the music in Xie Tengfei's Country Love with Thug Life, launching the #谢腾飞Thug Life challenge. The trend of Thug Life in the past two years stems from the popularity of Thug Life stickers and short video spoofs, among which pixel sunglasses and big gold chains are classic elements. The final mix of the two cultural symbols created a feeling of "the more localized, the more internationalized", and in less than a week, more than 10,000 users participated in the challenge. In fact, we can also find that whether on Weibo or on the APP, from some of the relay challenges and other gameplay it initiated, we can see that its operation team is becoming more and more mature in grasping the rhythm of combining these hot spots with short videos. This is also a control of the operation rhythm.

The right amount of public relations

In fact, now whether it is a short video startup or a startup in other industries, when the product has not yet been fully rolled out to the market, or when users do not yet know about your brand, many operations teams will rush to start publishing various public relations articles and conduct public relations communications. But in fact, we can see that before celebrities started using Tik Tok and before many users knew about this APP, Tik Tok did not make any efforts in this regard. However, after users gradually became aware of this APP, it actually still has some brand influence, but this only remains within the circle. Only young people who play music short videos or like to use their imagination will know about this product. So I can guess that the operation team of Tik Tok also realized that it is only one step away from the explosion of this APP, which is to start advertising and public relations. Therefore, we saw in May that Douyin began to focus on public relations articles for dissemination, and these platforms were also concentrated on some vertical technology media or some large portals that Internet people pay attention to, in order to let more people at the forefront of the Internet know about this brain-opening APP, and this group of people is also a group of people with great dissemination effect.

The sudden popularity of Tik Tok may be a natural result, but it is also inseparable from the operation team's insight into the short video market and their good grasp of the operation rhythm, so its sudden popularity in May is not a coincidence.

But what we are most concerned about now is whether Douyin will become popular and then die, because everyone says that this APP is actually a copy of Xiaokaxiu. At that time, Weibo relied on crude promotion methods and the support of the big tree of Weibo, so this purely entertainment tool product became popular all of a sudden, but died after it became popular for a while. Will Tik Tok be like Xiaokaxiu, which becomes popular for a while but dies later?

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article @艺林小宇is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map