"Good Pig" gained 1 million followers in one week. How did this 23-year-old pig-raising girl master the code to go viral?

This article uses the Douyin blogger "Haodandandezhu" who has recently become popular because of the "sense of contrast" as an example to tell the secret of success in the era of short videos. Pig farming and "high-end sense" can also appear to be in harmony under the blogger's shooting. How can we learn from advanced experience to create traffic? This article will tell you.

Recently, a miracle of communication has occurred in the pig farming industry: the popular blogger "Good Pig" has used contrast and beautification to cut into the big cake of the short video market. She showed us that pig farming can be elegant and interesting. It can be seen that rural content is still very popular in the field of short videos, and the content of this track is showing a trend of becoming more and more diverse. In this fast-paced era, if you want to stand out, you must have your own characteristics and skills, and at the same time avoid being bitten back by traffic.

When it comes to pig farms, dirty and messy may be the first impression that everyone has, but in the video of a beautiful pig farming expert, the pig farm has become a fashionable stage. She is the "good-looking pig" who has recently become popular in short videos: a master who can not only change into countless styles, but also perform the "pig-slaughtering" skills in the pig farm.

In the camera, she is wearing a western-style cowboy suit, walking around the pig farm confidently, patting the pigs' noses with a basin and scattering feed. Her eyes reveal a kind of mockery, indifference and disdain, coupled with the pigs' bright little expressions, and the background music of British jazz, she makes pig farming look like an art. It is also with the help of the "Elegant Pig Farming" series of videos that "Good Pigs" gained more than 1 million fans in a week. Now the number of fans has reached more than 2 million, and it has received more than 20 million likes. The 23-year-old girl used the feeling of a pigpen blockbuster and her "pig brother" to grasp the code of going out of the circle and gain hundreds of millions of traffic.

01 Standing at the forefront of short videos, “good-looking pigs” grow their own wings

When watching the works of "Good Pig", I wonder if many people will unconsciously think of the "Desert Butcher" @灰太狼的羊 who became popular on the Internet last year with his 8-minute sheep. The young beauties who also became popular in the rural areas and farmers' circles and were called "butchers" have become popular one after another, allowing the public to see that in the turbulent stage of short videos, if you want to be famous, you still have to master some "traffic secrets", otherwise you can only be unknown or disappear overnight. So what are the secrets of Good Pig?

1. Multiple contrasts: establish a clear and stable story background

Generally speaking, people are not very interested in things they are familiar with, but they are curious and surprised by things that are not common. In other words, everyone likes to watch some novel and interesting videos. Yao Yao, the chief planner of Dragon TV's omni-media column "Rural Taste", once said in an interview that the reason why rural-themed short videos are so popular is mainly because of contrast and curiosity.

The contrast between the environment and life in rural areas and big cities can attract the public's attention to a great extent. Living in the reinforced concrete urban space, many people have probably only eaten pork, but have never seen piglets running around in pig farms, which gives the "Three Rural Issues" short video a natural sense of contrast.

In addition, the content itself and the image of the characters are more important, that is, the contrast needs to be unique and personalized. Just like Li Ziqi wearing beautiful clothes and working in the fields, Hui Ran's expressionless "Ga" sheep in the desert outside the Great Wall, both give people a great sense of contrast, and at the same time have beauty, forming their own iconic contrast labels.

From the perspective of content, strong contrast and multiple contrasts are also one of the main labels of "Good Pig". The first video of "Good Pig" followed the popular #对视变装# route on the Internet at that time. She changed from wearing pajamas and dressing casually to wearing delicate makeup and hair and a white dress. Although the scene was set in a pig farm, and she was leading or holding a piglet in her hand, adding a comparison between the beautiful girl and the pigpen, it was still in the stage of following the trend, which made her still a long way from becoming popular and gaining a large number of fans.

The series of videos about elegant pig farming, which made "good pigs" the ceiling of the pig farming industry, showed more obvious characteristics of strong and multiple contrasts: the "good pigs" in the video had cold eyes and neat movements, while the piglets in the pigpen looked like they were waiting to die and dared not resist, just like a confrontation between a cold-blooded killer and cowardly victims. The fear of the pigs and the indifference of the people, the calmness of the scene and the tension of the music, made the contrast elements in the video richer, so the contrast it brought to the audience was stronger and easier to attract the audience's attention.

It is said that it starts with appearance and ends with talent. The contrast of appearance + skills taken by "Good Pig" is essentially the same. After all, who would have thought that the seemingly innocent girl is actually a "jade-faced butcher" who doesn't even blink an eye. With a knife and a bottle of disinfectant, he can kill a pig in a few seconds. His technique is quick and efficient.

2. Excellent production: Make the ordinary pig farming life look like a movie

In addition to the content, external video beautification methods also played a crucial role in the popularity of "Good Pigs". To a certain extent, "farming" itself is a technology. How to make ordinary farming activities stand out through short videos is a test of the way each technology is presented.

Compared with the relatively fixed, simple and original video recording of "Grey Wolf's Sheep", "Good Pigs" undoubtedly appears more refined, whether it is the relationship between people and "objects" in the picture, the speed or the rhythm, all of which are well controlled, which has become one of the characteristics of her videos. Especially in the "Elegant Pig Farming" series and the "With this BGM, XXX can also shoot a high-end feeling" series, the video style is basically unified: dynamic rock BGM, diversified shooting angles, blockbuster slow-motion shots, it can be seen that she tried to use a kind of film technique and skills to make the whole video more atmospheric, story-like, emotional and other elements, so that the audience can resonate and feel shocked when watching.

How to do this well is not an easy task for ordinary users. "Haodandandezhu" chose to leave professional matters to professionals. Compared with UGC creation, PGC creation in the field of short videos is better at using audio-visual techniques to arouse the audience's resonance. The stimulation of close-ups and the infection of the soundtrack create a strong sense of emotion.

In the comment section of the video "With this background music, repairing a pig pen can also be filmed with a sense of luxury", "Good Pig" showed his filming team @Shuhang. After checking Qichacha, he is the operator of a film and television studio. Following the "network cable" to open the blogger's homepage, the central idea of ​​"filming daily life" basically runs through most of his videos, among which the theme of "pig farm" has also been filmed long ago, and a sense of familiarity comes to mind, which shows that this type of creation is relatively easy for them.

3. Highly interactive: more room for audiences to decode

Henry Jenkins pointed out in "Text Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture" that fans are active consumers and skilled participants of media content. In the era of short videos, when users watch video texts, they sometimes do not fully understand them according to the author's intentions.

Although "Pigs Are All Right" is short, many design elements are incorporated into the "pig farming" narrative of more than ten seconds, such as capturing the pigs running with their ears shaking in the smoke, the piglets squinting their eyes to observe the surroundings, the confrontation between people and pigs, etc. This fantasy scene, while arousing the curiosity and imagination of users, also attracted many audiences to interact in the comment area, leaving messages to interpret the texts of these famous scenes from their own perspectives and backgrounds, thereby "stealing" and reconstructing the texts to create new meanings and stories. Some speculated on the psychology and motivations of the pigs and gave many interesting answers, such as "Pigs: There is murderous intent" and "Pigs: This damn sense of oppression will sooner or later fall into your hands"; some came up with brain-opening titles for the videos.

This active participation of thinking in the process of interpreting the video, on the one hand, allows for a deep level of interactivity between the sender and the receiver, which can attract more users to participate; on the other hand, it "creates" more and broader meanings for the video and enriches its connotation.

02 What did the "pig farm" story bring after it became popular?

1. Brought a new way of spreading folklore

On the Internet, being able to resonate with the public is the key to the success of original works. In reality, we have a variety of emotions, among which rural sentiment is a special emotion, which includes our attachment to the land, our nostalgia for familiar things, and our regret for the old times that we can't go back to.

With the advancement of science and technology, various related surgeries can be performed with more sophisticated instruments, which has also led to the gradual decline of some techniques that can reflect folk wisdom. This technique of castrating livestock while walking is destined to decline. Pig castration has existed since the Eastern Han Dynasty. This mysterious ancient skill is said to have originated from Hua Tuo's surgery. In addition to the fun brought by the contrast, "A Good Pig" is also actively spreading the traditional skill of "pig castration", making netizens happy while allowing more people to see this folk craft full of rural characteristics.

The "normal" pig-raising life connects tradition and modernity, the masses and the minority, the city and the countryside by packaging extremely obscure folk techniques in a fashionable way, suggesting that the display of rural life and folk activities can be presented in more unique and fresh ways.

2. Brought some thoughts on assembly line creation

However, it is still difficult to become popular in a short time like "Good Pig" and to have a stable output in the future. Not only does it require appropriate creativity, but there is also cost pressure. We can see that since the emergence of the heavyweight player "Good Pig" in the pig farming track, it has inspired many pig farmers, and even chicken farmers, sheep farmers, etc., who can apply ready-made shooting templates and get a wave of traffic.

However, compared to the hottest ones, the others did not make much splash. This is mainly because the predecessors were surprising, and there is still some gap in professional level. However, it can also be seen that this wave of elegant pig farming has attracted the attention of many people.

On the short video platform, Haodandandezhu is currently not signed to any MCN agency, but after searching on the China Trademark Network, it was found that the trademark of "Haodandandezhu" has been applied for by a company established in February this year. The "Haodandandezhu" co-production team @Shuhang is also among the shareholders of this company.

It is worth noting that the company also applied for a trademark called "铁当的珊珊". A search on the short video platform did show an account called "铁当的珊珊". This account posted three videos in three consecutive days starting from May 14. In the video, "Shanshan" is a girl who is not afraid of being beaten with a hammer. It is also a beauty + showmanship, but so far netizens do not seem to buy into "铁当的珊珊".

Source: TikTok

On the one hand, the similarity between "Gazhu" Haodandan and "Tie" Shanshan is too high and the time interval between them is too close. The popularity of the former has not completely subsided, and the latter has already been launched. Such homogeneous videos are difficult to surprise the audience, but rather a kind of aesthetic fatigue. As Benjamin said, since the reproduction technology can repeatedly produce replicas, the unique birth of the replica is replaced by the appearance of a large number of copies, and the "spiritual charm" is therefore covered.

On the other hand, compared to the majority of users' affirmation of the former "Gazhu Girl", the comment section of "Tie Dang Shan Shan" focused more on her professional blacksmithing process. Many unprofessional blacksmithing problems were pointed out at one point, and the audience's vision was thus drawn into a context dominated by criticism.

Of course, the current status of an account cannot determine its future development. For example, if you have watched all the videos of the account "Hao Duan Duan De Zhu", you will find that the creative template that made her popular was also developed and stabilized after continuous exploration.

Conclusion

From the good-natured pig to the iron-clad Shanshan, we can see that creation on short video platforms is a process full of changes and challenges. On the one hand, creators need to constantly find new ideas and forms to attract users' attention and emotions, while also considering the balance between cost and benefit.

On the other hand, creators also have to face the risk of homogenization and aesthetic fatigue, as well as users’ demands for professionalism and authenticity. In such an environment, how to cultivate and maintain KOLs, how to use KOLs to promote products and brands, and how to enable KOLs to interact and resonate with users at a deeper level are all issues worthy of our in-depth thinking and exploration.

Perhaps, we can learn some inspiration from the pigs: carefully discover and display the unknown folk arts in rural life, break the communication barriers in new ways, and win the trust and love of users with sincerity. In this way, perhaps we can create more and better content on the short video platform and let more people see the value we want to convey.

Author: Zhou Kexin Editor: Time Editor: Peninsula

Source public account: Cultural Industry Review (ID: whcypl), China’s top new media for cultural industry.