"A small bowl of rice" earns millions of fans. The more "stalky" the Douyin influencer is, the more popular he is.

This article deeply analyzes the phenomenon of increasing followers on the Douyin platform, explores how different types of accounts attract fans through unique content and style, and reveals the importance of personalized tags and creative content in the success of social media. It is recommended for readers who are interested in social media operations, content creation, and network influence building.

Judging from the overall trend of increasing followers, there is not much difference between Douyin in March and February.

There are two accounts that have gained more than 5 million followers. One is the "matchmaker" @开封王婆 who rushes into young people's blind date venues and arranges marriages for tourists on the scene; ("Wang Po's matchmaking" has cooled down, but there are matchmakers everywhere on the Internet) the other is the brand account @哇哈哈官方旗舰店. Due to the death of its founder Zong Qinghou, many fans flocked to the live broadcast room to mourn him. The account gained 5.033 million followers in a single month.

In addition to these two accounts, there is another account with 3-5 million followers, which is the beautiful music expert @Shirley Lin. Unlike other music experts, @Shirley Lin not only shares her singing videos, but also shares her daily life: going to the United Nations headquarters for lunch, riding horses in her own garden, attending Bill Gates' dinner, etc. Her luxurious and high-end style has attracted many netizens to speculate about her identity and background, and the account has been shrouded in mystery, thus attracting more people's attention.

@Shirley林TikTok video screenshot

Among the remaining accounts, there are 3 accounts with an increase of 2-3 million followers, and the remaining 14 accounts have an increase of followers between 1-2 million.

Overall, the trend of followers growth in March maintained the usual "calm" trend in the past two years, and was not outstanding. However, it is worth noting that the March followers growth list not only covers multiple vertical categories such as music, film and television, pets, food, outdoor, sports and fitness, drama, vlog, etc., but also shows that new faces occupy half of the accounts on the list, and stylized accounts emerge in an endless stream, which also means that as long as the content has highlights and characteristics, it can still stand out in the Douyin content ecosystem.

Next, Kas will focus on selecting some typical accounts and analyze the reasons for their increase in followers.

@巨爱吃的周黑鸭: The more prominent the personalized label is, the faster the fans will increase

The food expert @巨爱吃的周黑鸭 follows the eating broadcast route, and similar to another eating broadcast expert @敦煌老马 (羊头) who emerged not long ago, Zhou Hei Ya became popular because he developed his own set of processes and style of eating, and through some differentiated operations, he created personalized labels that impressed users, thereby driving the continuous improvement of the account's popularity.

According to Kass’s observation, Zhou Heiya has been posting eating videos since April 2018. At that time, he was still a young student who had not yet left school, and the food he ate mainly came from the school cafeteria. Because his camera performance ability was still weak during this period, and the food he ate did not have obvious characteristics, and his appetite was not much different from that of ordinary people, for a long time, not only did his account gain followers slowly, but there were always unfriendly voices in the comment area.

@I love eating Zhou Heiya Tik Tok video screenshot

Since then, with day after day of persistence, Zhou Hei Ya's camera expressiveness has gradually improved - on the one hand, his expression has become more relaxed, on the other hand, his speech has become more fluent. At the same time, the food he chooses has become more abundant and more distinctive, and his performance while eating has become more contagious , and his video mode has gradually become fixed:

There is a wooden table in front of the sofa. Zhou Hei Ya sits down with great enthusiasm and takes out a large golden bowl that is often seen on camera. Then he starts to feast again and again. Because he prefers sesame sauce and sticky bibimbap, Zhou Hei Ya has developed these two ways of eating into his own personal characteristics. Many fans jokingly call him the "Sticky King". Because he prefers meat and rice, he has also received a series of labels such as "Little Prince of Soup Bibimbap", "Carbohydrate Master", "Green Vegetable Insulator", and "Fat Storage Machine". In addition, many netizens think that his expression every time he eats is like Jerry in Tom and Jerry, and some even think it is like the Chinese character "An".

@I love eating Zhou Heiya Tik Tok video screenshot

The distinctive style and numerous tags have undoubtedly made its account a significant improvement. Since the beginning of this year, @巨爱吃的周黑鸭 has experienced explosive growth. According to Kas statistics, in 2023, its account gained a total of 2.512 million followers, and in less than 5 months in 2024, its number of followers has reached 4.4 million. So far, its number of fans has exceeded 10 million.

Analyzing the reasons, on the one hand, it is because Zhou Hei Ya has strengthened the interaction with fans - he will pin the comments in the "ordering area" in the comment area, and let the fans decide what he eats. This approach makes fans feel more involved and also makes the connection between him and the fans closer.

On the other hand, it is because he buried more "little tricks" in the videos, making the account more interesting and more contagious.

Specifically, in many videos, Zhou Hei Ya would say "the rice is still a small bowl" before officially starting to eat, but his actions were completely the opposite: every time he would use various means to add rice to himself unexpectedly, either several rice balls would inexplicably fall from all directions in the process of adding ingredients, or he would hide the rice balls in various corners, sometimes even rubbing a ball of rice directly from his neck, or hiding a piece of rice in his mouth. Many netizens therefore called him the "rice pitcher", and some fans even jokingly said "new fans are watching him eat, and old fans are already looking for rice."

With the help of this "little trick", "Rice is still a small bowl" gradually evolved into a hot meme, and Zhou Hei Ya's account also added another feature. On this basis, the trend of finding rice to play memes further promoted the account's popularity. This also confirms the conclusion that Kass came to when analyzing @敦煌老马 (羊头): making your content have the genes of memes, becoming a meme, and adding memes are undoubtedly a powerful tool for short video accounts to become popular.

@奶茶小肥仔: Second creation of "The Legend of Zhen Huan", attracting 5 million fans

On March 28th, at the Caomu Renjian roadshow at Shanghai University, the invited music expert @奶茶小肥仔 "put his face close to "Silang" Chen Jianbin and his wife Jiang Qinqin, and sang his carefully composed song "Love a Little". This bold move not only made Silang's exclusive song more popular, but also made @奶茶小肥仔 the dubbing singer known to more people.

According to observations, @奶茶小肥仔 posted his first singing video on Douyin in July 2021, and has been singing songs of various styles in this split-screen format since then. In addition to singing with his own voice, he also imitates the voices of different singers to sing their songs , such as imitating Phoenix Legend's Linghua to sing "All Is Love" and imitating rapper Pharaoh to sing "Alcohol". Because his voice imitation is very accurate and shows good singing skills, and every time he imitates, he will configure a mouth effect for the singer's photo, which enhances the comedy effect of the video. Therefore, the account has accumulated a certain number of fans in the early stage, but its real explosion is due to its development of the popular IP "The Legend of Zhen Huan".

@奶茶小肥仔TikTok video screenshot

On May 31, 2022, @奶茶小肥仔 sang an adapted version of the song "爱你" imitating the voice of Silang in "The Legend of Zhen Huan", which received 51,000 likes. With this as a starting point, he began to build a huge "The Legend of Zhen Huan" music universe, and successively released a series of magical brainwashing songs for Silang Chen Jianbin, and the account also took advantage of this to reach a peak in the number of fans.

In the early stage, the Silang series of videos he released were the same as his previous works, using split-screen dubbing and special effects to sing popular songs with lyrics adapted around the plot of "The Legend of Zhen Huan". Before each opening, he would shout "Huan Huan" and then sing passionately. Since @奶茶小肥仔 grasped the essence of Silang's voice, many netizens even thought it was AI or editing. In addition, his adapted songs are all popular nowadays with varied styles, and the lyrics incorporate many popular memes, which are both audible and entertaining, so they are loved by many "Zhen fans".

Later, @奶茶小肥仔 upgraded the content format. Not only did he sing and add magical narration, he also produced exquisite MVs for each song - matching the lyrics with corresponding plot scenes from "The Legend of Zhen Huan", making the already magical and brainwashing songs more visual, more vivid, and more popular.

@奶茶小肥仔TikTok video screenshot

So far, @奶茶小肥仔 has produced many popular videos with more than 1 million likes. Among them, "Let the Heavy Rain Fall" released on December 14 last year has received 3.89 million likes; "Love a Little" released on January 17 this year has received 4.865 million likes; "You" released on March 19 this year has received 4.393 million likes...

@奶茶小肥仔TikTok video screenshot

As the songs became popular, lyrics such as "Huanhuan, I'm emo" and "Can I sleep in the middle?" became popular memes and were talked about by many netizens. At the same time, comments such as "Chen Jianbin is the only one who has a lot of albums without singing" and "Chen Jianbin has never entered the music scene, but he is a little famous in the music scene" also became jokes that fans often talked about.

There is no doubt that the huge popularity and huge fan base of "The Legend of Zhen Huan" have already provided a considerable traffic base for the related secondary creative works. However, @奶茶小肥仔 has taken a different approach and used his own music skills, dubbing skills, and endless creativity to come up with new ideas for secondary creation. It is no surprise that the number of fans of the account has increased.

After looking at these two accounts, let’s take a look at other featured accounts on the March follower growth list.

The core feature of @维C动物 is to conduct animal science popularization in a live way, bringing users the "animal world for adults".

Specifically, @维C动物 changed the "serious" popular science documentary and reinterpreted the habits of animals in a relaxed, funny and interesting way. During this period, he not only gave the animals some anthropomorphic voices to give them more personalized characteristics, but also incorporated a variety of popular literature such as "nonsense literature", "absurd literature", "decadent literature" and "crazy literature" into the narration, thus creating an extremely dense collection of classic quotations, such as:

"Time is money, time is money", "Occasional mistakes, often occasional", "Ten years to sharpen a sword, five years to sharpen half of it", "In the matter of failure, it has always been very successful, so isn't this also a kind of success", "One day without seeing you feels like three eight-hour gaps"...

@维C动物TikTok video screenshot

Because the popular science method keeps pace with the times and conforms to the mental state of contemporary young people, @维C, in the video it released, five or six American high school students posted only 63 works in SUNNY L's finger C zoo, and the number of fans has reached 440.1W.

@SUNNY L, a Chinese student who is conducting mysterious "cultural export" on American high school campuses.
Led by the students, they performed scenes with strong Chinese cultural characteristics in their broken Chinese. Sometimes they were imperial concubines and eunuchs in the palace, sometimes they were monkeys and monsters in Journey to the West, and sometimes they simply imitated the hot topics on the domestic Internet, such as the recent "Thank the Emperor, thank the Emperor, I want to diss you"... No matter what kind of plot they performed, the several American high school students were serious and hard-working. The strong sense of contrast and the collision of different cultures brought about a comedic effect that made people laugh.

@SUNNY L Tik Tok video screenshot

In the video, SUNNY L has a lot of say and several high school students obey him. Therefore, netizens call him "the best teenager trainer in North America, with a 100% winning rate and a record that can be checked." Some people also said in the comment area that SUNNY L's appearance "fills the gap in American history that there was no emperor." In the midst of the excitement, @SUNNY L was able to gain more fans' love.

In March, the story creator @七颗猩猩 launched a series of short drama videos. The series of short dramas, "Reborn as a Nanny in a Domineering Boss Short Drama", uses the perspective of a nanny who is often "persecuted" in "cliché" short dramas to criticize the old "intelligence-reducing" routines for users. Besides being funny, it also brings enough emotional value to the audience. Thanks to this series of short dramas, @七颗猩猩 has been on the Douyin and Xiaohongshu fan growth charts at the same time, attracting 3 million fans in a single month.

@潘宏爱玩狗, his family has raised dogs for three generations. His early works mainly shared his dog-raising experience. Later, he began to help others train "problem dogs" for free - dogs with violent personalities, a history of biting people, and disobedience. Because Pan Hong's dog training method is very hardcore and effective, and he has a straightforward and humorous personality, he has attracted a lot of attention from users. As of press time, his account has reached 272.9W followers.

@潘宏爱玩狗TikTok video screenshot

Author: Yue Yao; Source public account: Kas Data (ID: 736105)