How to attract traffic from Zhihu and gain 10,000 followers in one month?

Zhihu is currently the largest knowledge question-and-answer platform in my country. There are both professionals and amateurs on the platform. Zhihu has built a platform for disseminators and acquirers of knowledge, and has also brought a huge business opportunity for operators of public accounts.

I think operating Zhihu is much more convenient than running a public account, because its questions and answers do not require too much embellishment: you ask your questions, and I express my own views and opinions. I think this kind of atmosphere is very good and it can be done with a mobile phone.

So how should you operate Zhihu to quickly attract traffic to your official account?

Zhihu traffic diversion method

Currently, promoting one’s own public account in a one-sentence signature on Zhihu and at the end of an answer is allowed by Zhihu administrators by default. Even if someone reports it, the account will not be deleted or blocked.

△Swipe left to view promotion cases

When Zhihu officially handles reports of the above-mentioned advertising forms, the result is usually “processing completed, the reported content does not violate any regulations at the moment.” This shows that according to their regulations, advertisements of this scale do not violate regulations. Here I would like to share with you several types of copywriting.

01. Follow the public account "xx" to see more of the xx I shared, which will help you xx.

02. About xx: xx is a public account that shares xx and provides you with xx for free. For details, please see the public account "xx".

03. Follow the public account "xx" and send "xx" to get xx.

The above three types of text can be modified and placed after the answer, and will not be folded. As long as you master this principle, you can write better copy. When users see your Zhihu answers, they feel recognized and want to get more content of the same type, so they want to follow you. This adds a layer of trust endorsement for you and provides strong support for the later monetization of the official account.

Therefore, your copy should accurately introduce what your official account does and what it can provide to users. You can also do it like the third copy above, allowing users to send "xx" to get xx, and you can also use this to do fission, which will have a very good effect. For example, last year the toolkit provided by Naodong Operation was all over the circle of friends, and that article also received more than 100,000 readings.

Although the screenshots above use QR codes, I don’t really recommend this approach. Because the QR code may be deleted; and I think it is not realistic to divert traffic across platforms through QR codes : Zhihu is not like WeChat where you can long press to identify the QR code. If others want to follow you, they have to save the QR code - open WeChat - scan and follow with WeChat, which is quite cumbersome.

Zhihu traffic generation case

When I first started my official account, I wanted to find some useful information about operating an official account. I accidentally found an answer written by an official account master on Zhihu. I read the content and found it very good. In addition, I was going to start my own official account anyway, so I planned to follow some well-run official accounts to learn from them, so I followed his official account. This was a successful traffic diversion.

His answer also received more than 5,000 likes, and the number of readers was even higher than that. Later, I also got to know the operator of this account through the official account. He revealed that he gained a lot of fans in the early stage through Zhihu traffic diversion, which provided a fan base for subsequent growth. Therefore, Zhihu traffic diversion is especially suitable for the cold start-up stage of official accounts with useful information.

By the way, Zhihu's SEO data is really good . Many questions are indexed by search engines such as Baidu. That is to say, your answers can mostly be searched on the Internet, and they are ranked quite high.

Ranking mechanism of Zhihu answers

Earlier we talked about the principles and methods of using Zhihu to attract traffic, but we know that many popular questions usually have hundreds or thousands of answers. How to make the answers you write rank at the front determines the number of times your public account is exposed, so I will tell you about the ranking mechanism of Zhihu answers.

In December 2014, Zhihu launched an answer ranking mechanism. After so many years of optimization, a relatively mature algorithm mechanism has been formed.

The idea of ​​the new ranking algorithm (which can be simply referred to as the "Wilson score" algorithm) is that if an answer is shown to many people and they are asked to vote, answers with different content quality will receive different proportions of approval and disapproval votes, and ultimately get a score that reflects the quality of the content. When there are fewer people voting, the quality score of the answer can be estimated based on the number of votes received. The more people vote, the closer the estimated result is to the actual score.

—— Author: Huang Tao Source: Zhihu

This is an article published by a product designer on Zhihu. The specific algorithm in the article will not be explained in detail, because the Wilson scoring algorithm is as follows:

Forgive me for not being able to understand English, but to put it simply, this algorithm means that when you answer a question, Zhihu will push it to some of the people who are paying attention to that question , such as the person who answered the question, the person who asked the question, and other followers, and let them vote on your answer. They will rate it based on the number of votes you get, and then decide whether to push it to other people, as well as the ranking of your answer, etc.

The weight of each person's vote is also different . For example, a certain public account expert may have answered many questions on the public account and received a high approval rate. Then when he answers the public account, his one vote may be equivalent to ten or even dozens of votes from others. Therefore, it is recommended that you follow some experts in the same industry, and it is best to become friends with them. If they like your answers in the future, perhaps your ranking will be improved.

But please note that Zhihu is a community where content is king. Your content must be able to withstand the judgment of readers. Even if you use other methods to make your answer rank at the top, but your content is not excellent and others vote against your answer, your score will be recalculated and re-ranked at any time. We can temporarily call this algorithm the "dynamic ranking mechanism."

Wall-E recognition mechanism

This is an anti-cheating mechanism of Zhihu. Your answers will be automatically recognized.

Recently, with the help of engineers, I have acquired a new skill: automatic identification and processing of irrelevant answers, and processing of low-quality content such as "taking up space without answering", "answering the wrong question", "only giving conclusions without explanation", and "taking comments as answers".

In the future, based on the reports from friends and our joint efforts to maintain the community content and atmosphere, the "irrelevant answers" that you hate will be folded more quickly and accurately.

This is the self-introduction of the Wall-E recognition robot. This is also another black technology of Zhihu. Unqualified answers will be folded with an accuracy rate of 98.52% . At the same time, users can also report answers. Therefore, there is less water in Zhihu. Content is king. As long as your content is good enough, you can get better exposure.

Zhihu also has other anti-cheating measures. For example, if you answer multiple questions in a short period of time and give an answer of several hundred words, but you only stay for a few dozen seconds, which is obviously illogical, it will be judged as cheating. The first time, you will be asked to send a text message to unblock your account. The second time, your account will be blocked for 24 hours. The third time, it is unclear. After all, three times the law will prevail.

When I first started using Zhihu, I wrote an answer. After the answer was successful, I wanted to post it to other questions, thinking that this would increase exposure, but I was wrong. After copying and pasting, my account was immediately blocked as soon as I clicked to publish. Fortunately, it was unblocked after I sent a text message the first time. Therefore, any illogical marketing behavior will not work on Zhihu.

Having written so much, in short, if you are a public account that provides useful information, you can definitely try to attract traffic from Zhihu. Just use it like a normal user, answer questions, and then add copywriting after the answers. There is no need to deliberately market. Finally, good luck to you.

Author: Watermelon Jun

Source: Operations guy (ID: yunyingxg)