Five stages of self-media operation and growth strategy

How can I keep my self-media account growing or "developing" relatively quickly? This problem may involve the corresponding strategies adopted at different stages of media operation. So how to understand the possible stages of self-media operation and the corresponding growth strategy? Let's look at the author's summary. Taking the official account of WeChat as an example, this paper expounds the operation strategy of the media. How long does it take to build a fast-growing official WeChat account? Some people can set up a thriving official WeChat account within one year, while others may need two, three or even five years. In the process of development, your official WeChat account will go through five different stages, which are similar to the product life cycle and need to adopt different growth strategies at different stages. Innovators, accounting for 2.5%, are early risers who dare to try new things in the market; Early users, accounting for13.5%; Early publicity, accounting for 34%; Evening public, accounting for 34%; Laggards, accounting for 16%, maybe you can never satisfy them. This article will outline the five stages of the growth of WeChat official account to help you understand the current situation and the way to go. 1. wechat official account is born. Estimated completion time: less than two weeks. In this preparation stage, you need to do four things. Even if you already have an official WeChat account, you can look at the following to improve it. 1. Defining your niche market is the first step, and it is also a step that most WeChat official account operators have not done. It is very important to know who (which readers) will benefit from your content. In order to bridge the gap, you must focus on a single niche market, aim at a niche and win your dominance at a pain point. In other words: Who do you want to serve? 2. Create a portrait of the reader. You already know the group you want to serve, and then you need to know more about them. In order to create content that can really help them, you must know who they are, their behavior and any information or content related to them. You can get to know the target audience in many ways. For example, at the end of the survey, you should know the information of the target audience, including: you can even give your readers a name, and all the information must be as specific as possible. 3. Create your WeChat official account If you want to build a content-based business, you need a functional WeChat official account first. The specific creation process is not detailed, so you can search by yourself. Second, find the real fans of 100. Estimated completion time: within four months. For most new official WeChat accounts, a relatively small number of loyal readers can make your business successful enough. If you have a new official WeChat account, the number of fans from 0 to 1 0,000 is a huge leap, and the early stage is more difficult. A better goal is to attract real fans of 100. When I first started writing articles, I started from scratch. No matter how excellent your research on the target readers is, you will make mistakes. The problem is that no one will tell you what mistake you are making. Although it may take some time, as long as you define the target audience well enough, you can attract the former 100 fans. These fans will play an important role in the growth of the official WeChat account. Loyal readers will comment on posts, and they will tell you when to communicate with them through comments and feedback. For some articles, you will get a high degree of participation, such as 10- 15 comments from 100 fans, while other articles will only get 1-2 comments. Use this feedback to adjust your readership and produce content that will help increase participation. Besides, you still have a lot to do. You need to build relationships with readers, create more content, promote your content and so on. At this stage, you can use the following strategies to get real fans of the former 100. The best strategy 1: The core of the initial traffic strategy of directed contribution should be to contribute to other platforms, and the target audience may visit other platforms most often. You need to find a platform with a large audience, and a small part of these audiences will be your target audience. Then, you can try to get these readers to subscribe to your account by reading. For example, the author's content positioning is the product field. At the beginning, it was directed to the "Everyone is a product manager" platform, and the first fans were obtained in this way. A common mistake people may make is to try to write anything you think will be popular on the website, but only if you need to connect it with the target audience. Your goal at this stage is to find real fans of 100. Before considering the audience of other traffic sources, you should first attract their attention. The best strategy 2: Create a suitable content type for your official WeChat account. Now, you seldom have visitors. You don't need to keep creating content, because no one is watching. It's best to spend some time trying to get traffic from other channels and then output a lot of content on your official WeChat account. You should create some content that can attract high-quality fans and help you build relationships with influential people. If you do it right, it will bring you some good target traffic. Best strategy 3: paid traffic If you have more money to invest in your business, then paid traffic is a way to accelerate growth. This strategy is completely optional. Many successful official WeChat accounts never use paid advertisements, and some successful official WeChat accounts partially use paid advertisements. The biggest advantage of paid advertising is that although there is no existing traffic base, it can still create audiences. Best strategy 4: Develop social media influence Popular social media platforms have huge traffic, and the most popular social media platforms will definitely include your target audience. The problem is that any good social media strategy takes time to work. It will take several months to gain the authority and trust of search engines to publish high-quality content. After about a year, you should start to see some actual natural search traffic, and then you can turn more energy to seo. Third, attract a large number of fans-expand the scale Estimated completion time: 8-24 months. You have almost completely understood what help your readers need and what they want. It's time for your traffic to grow rapidly. Although you will grow much faster than the previous stage, it will take time. The main challenge you face now is to start creating excellent content on a regular basis, and your time is still limited. Best strategy 1: Continue to implement the traffic construction strategy. From now on, you must spend more time on content creation, so you have less time to get traffic from other sources. Although you already have real fans of 100, if you only rely on these fans to promote it, your growth rate will be very slow. With the traffic gained at this stage, you can start to spend more time creating and promoting content on your official WeChat account. Best strategy 2: Create a content schedule. You need to decide how often to publish it and what to write. A detailed content calendar will help you plan your content one year in advance, and you will still get a lot of feedback from 100 real fans. It is recommended that you only plan the content for a few weeks or months, so that it can be adjusted according to the feedback received. After reaching an agreement, you can plan your own content arrangement in advance as needed. Best strategy 3: It is good to start thinking about profit flow, but the ultimate goal should be to generate income. If you want to sell services, such as consulting, do it as soon as possible. The long-term goal of your official WeChat account may be to sell products. If you already have a product, you can start selling it at this stage and spend some time to improve the conversion rate. If you don't have a product yet, it's time to start paying attention to the main pain points of readers so that you can create products around them. Most products take months to design, so the farther you plan, the better. Fourth, the reward-the reward. Estimated completion time: three to six months. Once you have developed a huge audience, most of them have 5000 _ 10000 fans, you can profit from your official WeChat account. At the same time, you need to keep growing and continue to implement all the growth strategies described in 3. Best strategy 1: Focus on profit. At this time, every month, you will have thousands of visitors. If you don't make a profit through the official WeChat account, how can you continue to provide good services to visitors? You can't invest in better content, and you can't reply to all the comments, because you can't serve thousands of readers alone. Once you have a large audience, someone will contact you regularly to establish a joint venture. Don't accept others' cooperation immediately, spend some time working with people you trust and respect to provide as much value as possible for your audience. Finally, if you feel that you are not ready to create your own products, you can always promote other reputable products. Best strategy 2: Employment Now that you have earned some income from the official WeChat account, you can start to get some help, so that you can continue to help your readers as much as possible. First of all, you need to determine the most important part of the official WeChat account. The following are the most common areas of employment: product support; Product development; Answer simple comments; Graphic design (images and charts of content); Content operation strategy; Content writing. Once you have determined which parts need your personal attention, start hiring others to handle the rest. Making sure that you hire high-quality talents to help you will save you a lot of trouble in the long run. 5. Keep your growth and status. Estimated completion time: I hope you will stay here forever! At this point, you have a mature enterprise. Your official WeChat account can easily generate enough content. In some market segments, you have an advantage because of the specific audience and market size. At the same time, your business is almost always in a state of growth or decline, so you need to focus on growth. Best strategy 1: Keep recruiting. If you do it right, your traffic will only continue to increase. In order to maintain quality standards and make time, you must find more reliable people to join your small team. In order to maintain successful business growth, the most difficult thing is to find and retain excellent talents in the team. The best strategy 2: the advantage of automation to get a lot of income is that you no longer need to do things you don't like. Some jobs can be automated by using paid tools or employees/freelancers. Finally, don't stop understanding readers and try to help them. Vote for me. I am participating in the 2022 author selection. I hope all my friends who like my article can support me ~ Click the link below to enter my personal election page, and click the red heart to vote for me. Everyone can vote up to 35 votes every day, and they can get lucky draw opportunities and books by voting. Everyone is a product manager to commemorate the surrounding areas &; Starting point class members and other gifts! Columnist Wei Peng, official account of WeChat: product manager Wei Peng, everyone is a product manager columnist. Pay attention to the field of intelligent hardware, and be good at market analysis, product design and development, production management, etc. I like reading books and climbing mountains. This article was originally published by everyone as a product manager, and it is forbidden to reprint without the permission of the author. The title map comes from Unsplash and is based on CC0 protocol.