Click 'Read Original' for details. Short videos can be said to be the hottest way to attract traffic right now. Their short duration and low production cost have attracted a large number of users to short video platforms, but without the right methods, it's hard to create viral content, and naturally hard to make money. How exactly should viral short videos be made? Short Videos You Must Make Why must you make them? Because the environment, tools, and trends are constantly changing. Each evolution shows us that the era of short videos is coming. In such an era, we first need to understand what "network effects" mean. Simply put, they are things we are forced to do not out of our own volition but due to environmental influences, because the factors in our environment are greater than our own factors. For example, how many people like WeChat? And how many people have to use WeChat because their friends and family use it for communication? If we understand this logic, we know we are in the network effects of WeChat, and short videos are undergoing similar changes. The Eightfold Path of Short Videos Before analyzing methods for making short videos, let's first popularize a concept: short videos are not new; they do not create new needs and desires but re-express existing ones. So short videos are just a new video presentation form for images and text. We need to determine the IP of short videos, with 4 key points: First, lock in the content track. Short video content can be divided into beauty, entertainment, technology, food, cute pets, collection, etc. Choose precisely which category you belong to, and having a clear label makes it easier for users to remember. Second, determine the product content. Third, enhance the content's flavor and form. Should our content be explosive? Tragic? Or intense? That is the flavor and form. Fourth, simplify decision-making thinking. Do not create overly complex or scarce content; instead, transform what the public already knows. Before determining the IP, we must clarify a principle: Don't do things that are self-indulgent or that don't make money. Because the early stage of short videos is the so-called beauty economy, and in the beauty economy, there is no content, so we cannot realize the commercial value of our products. In content creation, the simplest method is the imitation method. Imitation has a principle: find a benchmark account IP, analyze its plots and routines, and imitate and shoot one before it becomes popular on Douyin, so our content can keep up with trends. In the imitation method, the most commonly used method is the "three-dimensional restoration method." When creating, we often fall into a state of content scarcity. At this time, we need the scene expansion method to keep creativity flowing. Specifically, it can be divided into: daily scenes, such as clothing, food, housing, and transportation, finding conflict points in basic life scenes for content expansion; work scenes, such as expressing the inner thoughts of modern white-collar workers that they want to say but dare not; social scenes, such as dating, shopping, etc., discovering unique beauty; other scenes, such as travel, entertainment, reverse thinking, and finding exquisite scenery in other fields. When we set content, there is a four-layer positioning method. Strategic layer: Focus on increasing product sales; Feeling layer: What feelings can the product bring to users? Content layer: Highlight product features based on user feelings; Expression layer: Reasonably visualize product gameplay and user experience. When we produce great content, we need to have strong dissemination power, with 3 elements: the key person law, the environmental power law, and the attachment law. Douyin Rules & Operation Details Only by resonating with Douyin's logic can we achieve greater dissemination effects. Here we need to pay attention to several rules of Douyin: Also need to pay attention to the completion rate issue. There are 5 common forms of commercial monetization on Douyin: accepting ads, closing deals on other platforms, Douyin live streaming, direct selling, and selling accounts. In fact, we don't need to make content too peculiar. As long as we find the climax point in Douyin, when we feel that the entire short video content provides surprises, it means the short video creation is fine. The Thinking Crisis of Short Videos First, don't take a negative attitude towards new things. Not being familiar with short videos is not a reason for us not to make them. Because the underlying technology of society has no high or low, the high and low lie in our skills. Don't set boundaries for yourself. It's not hard to use underlying technology; innovation is hard. Second, the core of social marketing lies in user sharing. Short videos are a form of social marketing. We need to give users a reason to share, not to make a plan for users to share, but within the video plan, what sharing purpose of users does our planned content satisfy? Third, in the post-Internet era, the principles of traffic generation, distribution, and consumption have not changed. What has changed is the tools produced by each environment, and their rules and scenarios have changed. Fourth, with the refinement of industry and the maturity of social rules, it is increasingly difficult to gain wealth through information gaps and resource gaps. Internet people should find the traffic they are good at + suitable products, and build them into lasting brands. Traditional people should leverage product advantages, find traffic that suits them, and make their products become brands. These two logics, although the content is the same, have different ways and methods of generation. Finally, I want to give you a sentence: "All choices are calculations of investment and cost." In the past, we would make careful decisions because we were in a non-competitive, non-supermarket era, so we had a lot of time, energy, and ability to prepare. But now the cost of careful decision-making > the cost of rapid trial and error. We need to verify business models faster, more accurately, and more decisively. Don't hesitate, don't reject new things, and try everything. In such a situation, short videos will bring us huge benefits, and the cost is basically zero. We need to seize this opportunity. That's all for today's sharing. Thank you. Source: Fans Research Institute (ID: gh_0586707fa9ab)