My favorite method for selecting popular topics! It’s amazing.

In new media operations, topic selection is a crucial link, but it is not easy to come up with a hit topic. This article will introduce the hit topic selection methods that the Mi Meng team has used, hoping that these methods can help everyone better select topics and create.

It is probably not easy for a new media person to operate if he has never lost his hair over topic selection.

Every month, there are always a few days when I feel so depressed about choosing a topic that I feel like I have no desire to live. Even worse, I spend every day of the month choosing a topic.

The truth is, the boss often comes over and says:

"Others can easily earn 100,000+ or ​​1,000,000+, I believe you can do it too, just write some popular topics, and the best articles are the best, you know?"

You see, choosing a topic is already difficult, and choosing a hot-selling topic is really scary.

Everyone wants to have a secret method for selecting topics, so that they can easily come up with a bunch of explosive topics.

Secret method, maybe there is!

But every time I write to you, it is a method! It is definitely useful, but I dare not call it a secret method.

As you can see, there are countless people who use the generally recognized effective method of selecting topics for hits, but they don’t often produce hits.

This is also where many keyboard warriors like to complain: "Why do these methods you shared say that they can create hits, but I haven't been able to write one? You are really a liar."

Is the method wrong?

no!

The method is the method, the result is the result. It is effective but not a shortcut.

A topic is a topic, and a popular article is a popular article. They are related but not equal.

In this era where everyone can express their opinions, I have always believed that everyone has the potential to create their own hit.

But a good topic never means a hit. Your field, content positioning, account tone, user insights, title, content framework, emotional interpretation, expression skills, etc., each of them will determine whether your content can become a hit.

Methods and techniques are only part of it, and topic selection is only part of it.

This should be very clear, please read on.

The topic selection method that I most admire is still the methodology that Mimi Meng’s team used to continue to produce hits after so many years. That’s really amazing.

Friends who have worked in or paid attention to self-media should know the name Mimi Meng.

She has written many phenomenal articles and is known as the "godmother of self-media". At that time, Mi Meng was at the peak of her career and was unstoppable, constantly bringing screen-dominating content. At that time, the price of Mi Meng's public account advertising reached 800,000 per piece, which was absolutely top-tier.

2019 was the peak of Mi Meng’s career, but her success was due to her content, and her failure was also due to her content. In that year, Mi Meng’s team was directly banned because of its overly radical content style and problematic value orientation, and Mi Meng’s public account was cancelled. Since then, she has retired and gradually faded out of the public eye.

At the beginning of this year, the short drama "I was a Stepmother in the 1980s" produced by Mimi Meng's team unexpectedly became a hit, not only gaining rave reviews but also receiving extremely good responses.

It is said that the highest recharge for the drama in a single day reached 20 million yuan - because there were so many people recharging for this drama, the server even crashed at one point...

Mi Meng once again became a hot topic with the phrase "earned 200 million during the Spring Festival", which also brought her back into the public eye. It turns out that Mi Meng has always been making short videos behind the scenes, but she has just changed her track, but it is still in the content industry.

Some people like Mi Meng, some people hate Mi Meng, I really don’t care! The Internet has always been a place where people “love and hate” clearly. If she is wrong, she is wrong.

Where Mi Meng did not do well, reality has already given her a naked "ban", and where she did well cannot be denied. Adults should have a correct outlook on life, and be able to distinguish between good and bad, and treat each matter separately.

So what was the "secret" of Mimi Meng's team to come up with popular topics at that time?

1. First, brainstorm 50 topics

During those years, Mimi Meng's team started brainstorming every morning and had to come up with 50 topics from hot topics before 12 o'clock.

Of course, these 50 topics are just alternatives, in order to finally choose the relatively reliable one. After intense discussions and based on past data, they will finally confirm one topic to focus on.

What is the basis?

When they shared their secrets at the conference, they mentioned:

New ideas are not so magical. The process of discovering new ideas is just a process of discarding old ideas. You must not write the ideas that come to your mind at the first time, because everyone can think of them.

Many top talent teams are like this too. Usually the editor-in-chief will ask everyone to submit a list of topics one day in advance. Each person may propose dozens or even hundreds of topics.

Then we held a topic selection meeting the next morning and looked at the topic list together. Everyone picked out the topics they liked and disliked and explained the reasons.

Focus on topics that most people like, and there is a high probability that they will become the next hit. As for topics that no one likes, study together why no one likes them? What are the commonalities? Summarize experience.

When creating content, you should follow eight words: unexpected, but reasonable.

Level 2 and 4 interviews

Once they have a topic they want to work on, they will ask the team to conduct level 4 interviews.

First there was a group interview with a core fan group of 5,000 people, then there were interviews with more than three small groups, 50 individual interviews, and finally interviews with the expert advisory group.

This kind of close interview with users is obviously of great significance in any field of content creation. Creating content is indeed a self-expression of the creator, but if you want to create content that everyone likes, you must not be self-indulgent and talk to yourself.

You need to care about user needs and find the intersection between user needs and self-expression.

In the interview, you can hear the real voice of the target users and understand what they already know and what they want to know. This is the prerequisite for you to know "what to do".

The sophistication of Mimi Meng's team lies in the fact that they not only conducted group interviews, but also conducted more precise segmented group interviews: they made appointments with a group of people for longer case interviews, and they even have an expert advisory group of more than 70 experts from around the world. For specific topics, they can get more specific and professional advice from the experts. Often, the interviews with experts have content materials of 5,000 to 10,000 words.

Let me ask, in such a model, with such details, how bad can the topics and content materials be? Even if these interviews are randomly edited, I believe they will be very good.

The devil is in the details, no problem!

What's even more perverted is that I heard that after finishing the CET-4 interview, they will get tens of thousands of words of interview materials, which they have to organize carefully before they can write the manuscript.

If that's the case, I'm really convinced.

3. Take 100 titles and have 5,000 people vote

When the Mimi Meng team is working on the official account, they have to write 100 titles for each article. You and I all know the importance of the title, which is the most direct factor that determines the data trend after the article is pushed.

You should often hear that a good title should be chosen 100 times.

But it's too difficult to do, anyway I'm lazy and can't do it at all. If you can do it, that's awesome in itself.

Moreover, after selecting 100 titles, they will send them to a core fan group of 5,000 people for voting. Instead of relying on their own guesswork, they always leave the "insight" to the users themselves.

4. 10,000-word data report

It is said that they will also make a 10,000-word data analysis report for an article. Of course, it is not just a single article, but also includes overall data analysis of their own account, information analysis of user feedback, analysis of popular articles in the same industry, and so on.

Summarize experience in real time and immediately turn all right, wrong, good and bad things into specific actions that can improve the results next time.

This is not content creation, it is clearly a systematic product operation thinking. Creating content in this way is really amazing.

They are so detailed that they can tell how many people like the title of each article, how many people think the beginning is good, how many people are moved by a certain sentence, how many people hate a certain paragraph, how many people feel in the end, etc.

By clearly analyzing every bit of data and user feedback, you can even gradually understand users better than they understand themselves. Then, will you still lack insight, resonance, and difficult pain points and tear points?

To achieve this, unless you kill yourself, you are truly invincible!

In general, the key points of Mi Meng's team's creation of a popular content at that time were:

Choose one topic from 50, conduct a level 4 interview, digest tens of thousands of words of interview content before starting to write, then pick 100 titles, get them to vote in a core group of 5,000 people, and finally make 10,000-word data analysis reports for the article to improve in actual practice.

Of course, for various reasons, not all individuals or teams can achieve such "abnormal" and sophisticated operations.

However, this kind of product thinking of creating hit products is completely worthy of learning and reference for every new media person to improve upon and develop methods that suit them.

You will find that there are methods, but the ceiling is always determined by you. The core is to get into it, pay attention to details, do every touch point well, polish it again and again, and practice deliberately...

That's the difference, and it never ends.

Fight yourself to the death! Serious as a madman! Paranoid as a fool!