1. What is TikTok’s “short video super snowball model”?
2. How do the elements of TikTok’s “short video super snowball model” interact with each other?
3. How to produce high-quality content?
After we have completed the account creation and passed the “black hole period”, the most concerned issue is how to detonate our own short videos and obtain huge traffic from the entire TikTok platform.
I once simply listed a list of all the factors that contribute to traffic. But when I was incubating Chinese companies’ overseas projects, I found that if I simply listed these factors without explaining the internal logic, it would not be easy for my students to remember them completely, nor would it be conducive to their reasonable allocation of project resources.
So I repeatedly refined and summarized the experience of my team in making accounts, disassembled hundreds of TikTok accounts, classified these effective factors according to roles and functions, and extracted a set of exclusive TikTok “short video super snowball model”. Then I continued to practice this model on my new account, used it in one-on-one guidance of students and corporate project incubation cooperation, and achieved good results.
This model contains five core elements: foundation, route, core, viscosity, and slope. These five elements interact with each other and are indispensable. Each of them has its own function. When combined, they constitute this “short video super snowball model” that helps us obtain huge traffic from TikTok. Let’s take a look at what these five elements represent and what role they play in the entire model.
1. The foundation of “snowball”: healthy account status
The foundation is the premise and foundation, as well as the red line that cannot be crossed. The content we publish cannot violate laws and regulations, infringe on the interests of others, or have a negative impact on society. The platform has very strict control over content in this regard. Once we violate the rules of the TikTok platform, the platform will immediately punish us: limit traffic, block accounts, or more serious accountability.
I believe you will not publish this kind of content, but there are several violations that may occur if you are not careful, and you can try to consciously avoid them.
The first case: [The 8th pit] The download, installation and operation of TikTok are wrong, resulting in abnormal identification by the system background;
The second case: [The 9th pit] When using the product display video provided by the supplier, no editing is done, and no other account has been found to have posted the same video on TikTok, which is checked by the system;
The third case: [The 10th pit] When editing the video, music that TikTok does not have copyright to is used, and the system determines that the music copyright is infringed.
Avoiding the above problems and keeping the account in a normal and healthy state will not hinder our traffic acquisition at the “foundation” level, nor will we lose all our previous efforts due to platform penalties.
Second, the route of “rolling snowballs”: correct account labels
Correct account labels are like putting your “snowball” on a large, fluffy ski slope that has just been covered with snow. As long as you roll the “snowball”, the places you roll will be covered with new fluffy snow, making the “snowball” roll bigger and bigger. If the account label is incorrect, it is equivalent to putting your “snowball” on the lawn or the desert. There is no white snow. Even if it is covered with grass and sand, it cannot roll bigger and bigger, and it will dirty the “snowball” after attention.
I have described in detail the five ways to label accounts in Section 2 of Chapter 3. If you have not completed this step, you can help label your account according to the methods in Chapter 3. Here, I will continue to teach you how to determine whether your account has been successfully tagged.
Use a new account to enter your account homepage and click “Follow”. At this time, a row of “suggested accounts of the same type to follow” will appear below. If the account that appears below is the same type as your account, it means that the account’s content label has been successfully identified and tagged by the TikTok backend system.
For example, this account is about jewelry. After clicking to follow, the recommended follow-up that appears is also of this type, as shown in the figure below, indicating that the account label in the figure has been successfully tagged.
You can use this method to check whether your account has been successfully tagged. If not, continue to optimize your content steadily according to the method in Section 2 of Chapter 3 until success.
3. The core of the “snowball”: the value it can provide to users
The core is the indispensable force for us to form a small “snowball”. In TikTok, it is the value that this account or video can bring to users. If your video has no value, the “snow” is scattered, and there is no way to condense into a “ball”, let alone roll bigger and bigger.
I have summarized several values that TikTok accounts usually bring to users. The first value: emotional value. Most TikTok users use this app for entertainment and leisure, and emotional value is also the value that users want to get the most. If you can make users feel happy, relaxed, decompressed, exciting, addicted, happy, sad, nervous, pleasing to the eye, warm and healing, etc., users will be willing to stay on your video for a long time, watch it repeatedly, and like and collect it.
When I was working on a US account, I combined selling goods with the emotional value of decompression, and the effect was very good. The picture below is our nail art account. Whether it is a short video or a live broadcast, we use large acrylic diamonds to cover the entire screen, and then keep playing with these acrylic diamonds, just like we liked to play with rice in the supermarket when we were young. In the process of playing with the diamonds, there will be a clattering sound, which is very decompressing. Combined with this picture, it is a double decompression. This account is very popular whether it is a short video or a live broadcast room. We often receive comments like this:
“This sound is really comfortable and decompressing!”
“I like this picture and this sound!”
Emotional value is the password for traffic, especially decompression, which is very useful in the US area. Every time you encounter a bottleneck period of account traffic, there will always be surprises when you make adjustments based on emotional value.
The second value: social value. TikTok is a social media. In addition to interacting with their friends, users also have a great need to get to know some interesting bloggers, follow them, and read their content frequently. If you are an expert account, you can show what you are best at, and many people who like your personal style will follow you. If you are a TikTok merchant selling goods account, you can set a “founder IP” to make users want to know this flesh-and-blood person.
For example, when I was making an oil painting account, I found an American to shoot short videos with the image of “founder” and “painter” as the protagonist, and hired him to live broadcast painting. Users will follow this account because they want to know a boss or painter, and have a strong desire to interact with this real IP. If there is no such a person, the interaction rate and attention rate will definitely drop a lot. Foreigners also have social needs, especially upward socialization.
The third value: shopping guide value. I have deeply analyzed interest e-commerce in Section 4 of Chapter 1. Many users do not have shopping needs, but love shopping and good things. When your videos and live broadcasts can provide them with good things to share, they will be very surprised and want to know where to buy them. And now many users already like to find their own shopping inspiration on TikTok.
Even if you are a pure seller, as long as your products are good-looking and amazing enough, you can provide users with very direct value. For example, we show large yellow diamonds on the jewelry delivery account, which attracts many fans to ask for prices directly.
The fourth value: learning value. Just like we follow knowledge bloggers on Douyin, there are also bloggers on TikTok who share all kinds of knowledge and skills. Many teachers of Chinese as a foreign language have created TikTok accounts to teach foreigners to learn Chinese, which are very popular. There are also some skill-based teaching, such as teaching everyone to edit videos, make PPTs, and repair old photos. When users find that this is the content they need or are interested in, they will finish the broadcast and pay attention, and even buy courses.
No matter which kind of value, it can be used as the core of “Snowball”. With this core, it can condense into the small “snowball” at the beginning, and with the correct “rolling” route, the “snowball” will be rolled bigger and bigger.
Tips
The above four values can be used in combination. For example, the most commonly used combination by merchants is shopping guide value + emotional value.
Fourth, the stickiness of the “snowball”: high-quality content
High-quality content will make the “snowball” very sticky, and it will stick to more “snowflakes” when rolling in the snow, and stick very tightly. Because good content will bring about an increase in data such as the completion rate and interaction rate, thereby triggering the TikTok recommendation mechanism to push the video to the next traffic pool, just like the “snowball” constantly sticking to new snowflakes.
In addition to improving our top ten content libraries, I have also summarized three methods to improve the quality of video content.
1. Refer to benchmark accounts and videos
Before creating any type of account, you need to work hard to find and learn benchmark accounts and videos in the same track, and make a detailed split of these contents, summarize the parts that can be copied, and find ways to use them in your own account or content.
Looking for benchmark cases means learning from the good works that have been carefully selected by TikTok’s various mechanisms in this track. If your work has a unique style and is self-contained, this is naturally good. But generally speaking, accounts that do not find benchmark cases will take many detours in content polishing. And learn from the high-quality content of this track, combined with your own
Another good way to find benchmark cases: check the most popular topics on TikTok recently to see which topics can be related to our main content. But don’t force the relationship, which can easily cause confusion in account labels.
2. Optimize the video screen
First, the most attractive thing about short videos is the screen. Different picture quality, clarity, color, and proportion will give users different first impressions. For videos with poor pictures, users will slide away without even the patience to understand what you are talking about. If you want to use your mobile phone to shoot the “rough edge feeling” of real life, you must pay attention to adjusting the screen ratio, color and other eye-catching factors.
Second, the first two seconds of the video are the most important, and the best things must be placed at the beginning. If it is a product display video, give the most amazing product picture at the beginning. If you don’t know how to do the first two seconds well, pick out the best 2~3 seconds from the video you have made and copy it and pull it to the front.
Third, make good use of the screen at the end of the video. On the one hand, it is the peak-end rule. We need to give users a peak-end experience at the end of the video, that is, to give them a reason to like it. I will arrange a “like moment” at the end of the picture or copy. Generally speaking, it is a sentence that can hit the user’s “satisfaction point” and resonate with them. I have done data statistics, and the like rate difference between setting the like moment and not setting the like moment is very large. On the other hand, it is to improve the conversion rate. When I make a product-carrying video, I like to use the “pure black background + action command” method at the end of the video, so that after watching the beautiful product pictures, users suddenly focus their attention only on the purchase or attention instructions, and the conversion effect is often better. I have specifically talked about this in the operation power, so I will not repeat it. 3. Carefully select music and sound effects Good music and sound effects will add a lot of points to the video. Not only the video effect, but also the traffic of the video will be greatly affected by this auditory factor. If you turn the volume of your phone to silent, many users will close TikTok after a short time.
The first is music. Music cannot infringe copyright, as I mentioned before, otherwise it will affect our playback volume, reduce the account weight, and the work cannot be put into paid traffic. On this basis, we can increase the playback volume of the video by adding the most popular music on TikTok to our videos.
The second is sound effects. Sound effects are a very useful traffic password. I mentioned earlier that the emotional value of decompression requires sound effects to achieve it. The sound of tearing off a label, the sound of zipping, the sound of hitting an object with nails, etc., the addition of these sound effects will make users unconsciously immersed in it. Many immersive works on Douyin in China are like this, using decompression sounds with high-quality pictures, which are welcomed by many users. This is also very effective on TikTok. In addition to decompression sound effects, there are also funny, tricky, surprising, embarrassing, etc., which can amplify the video effect when we make content. I specifically asked the editing team to collect and organize the most popular sound effect library for TikTok users, so that they can be used as needed when making videos, which is convenient and efficient, and can also improve the quality of videos.
4. Make good use of traffic products
A good product has its own traffic, because it can provide users with shopping value. We can clearly find that whether it is a short video or a live broadcast, under the premise that the user tag has been marked and successfully passed the “black hole period”, the traffic of different products is very different. I changed a lot of accounts to test. Some popular products are still popular with a new account, and products with no traffic have no traffic.
I incubated a jewelry project. At first, the person in charge selected more than 30 products, but the traffic of short videos and live broadcasts has never improved. I looked at their products and videos, and my online sense told me that the styles of these products may not be liked by Americans. So I suggested that they choose more styles, whether it is a short video or a live broadcast room, and test the traffic one by one. Sure enough, among more than 200 jewelry models, 5 models with first-level traffic, 10 models with second-level traffic, and 10 models with third-level traffic were measured. I helped them develop an 80/20 strategy, which is 80% traffic models + 20% new models (testing new models to give old customers a reason to repurchase). As a result, the traffic increased a lot in both short videos and live broadcasts.
5. The slope of the “snowball”: a good paid traffic strategy
Finally, there is the slope of the “snowball”, which means we can use paid traffic strategies to boost. I mentioned in the third section of Chapter 2 on traffic acquisition and the first section of Chapter 4 on the role and correct use of paid traffic that we should regard paid traffic as a very good boosting force, use the leverage of paid traffic to accelerate our accumulation of correct tags, and then push the video to a larger traffic pool. So in this model, paid traffic is the slope that is levered up, allowing the “snowball” to roll down from a sloped mountain on the basis of a solid foundation, correct route, strong core, and high-quality viscosity, which plays a role in the “gravity acceleration” that helps us to quickly grow the “snowball”.
If you want to get huge traffic for TikTok short videos, you have to get big “snowballs” one by one. I used a dynamic “snowball” model to interpret the whole process and influencing factors of the “snowball” from small to large. When we operate a TikTok account, we are realizing the process of “snowball” from nothing to something, from small to large. Deeply understand this model, and implement it one by one on your own TikTok account, constantly review and optimize, and then you can wait for the flowers to bloom and wait for the arrival of huge traffic.