How do young people today celebrate the New Year?

This article mainly describes the way contemporary young people spend the New Year. Contemporary young people are Internet natives, and their way of spending the New Year is created by mass media. For example, they "watch the evening party" on Weibo, create a sense of participation, and reshape the New Year's Eve ritual. Their New Year is connected by the Internet.

According to my old memories, the ritual sense of New Year's Day was not strong in the past. There was Christmas before and Spring Festival after, and New Year's Day seemed to be just a satellite TV gala to watch that night. But as Christmas faded out, "New Year's Day" became a more dynamic and participatory "New Year's Eve", which has the momentum to replace Christmas and form a set of holiday patterns with the Spring Festival - the Spring Festival represents family and tradition, and has a set of fixed rituals. New Year's Eve can be played more fashionable, more relaxed, and more varied.

You can tell how lively and popular the New Year's Eve is now among young people by looking at Weibo. It can last almost a month. Now, a week has passed since the New Year's Eve, and I still frequently see netizens on Weibo sharing that they have collected someone's card. The party and celebrity customized co-branded cards issued by the "2023 Weibo New Year's Eve Carnival" have a strong presence in several major TV stations and celebrity Weibo.

Which stage of the New Year's Eve party is the most exciting? First go to Weibo to check the hot searches. Which star will be the most popular in 2022? Weibo data is the most convincing. Even the seating arrangement of the satellite TV New Year's Eve party and the way of star-fan interaction have been made by Weibo. New Year's Eve is not a moment on Weibo, but a lively market that has been brewing for a long time and is lingering. You can come to the market at any time and get something at any time.

In a sense, today's festivals are created by mass media. Platform activities such as the "Weibo New Year's Eve Carnival" set the atmosphere to this point, and people are drawn into this carnival feast consciously or unconsciously.

1. "Watch the Gala" on Weibo

Since December 23rd, Weibo has started the "New Year's Eve".

Satellite TV stations started the promotion war early on for their New Year's Eve shows. Unlike the regular materials released on short video platforms, major satellite TV stations have worked closely with Weibo to launch a combination of promotional materials.

The choice of satellite TV stations is also easy to understand. On the one hand, Weibo has a strong media gene, with users covering all age groups, especially young people who are willing to speak out, and has always been the first stop to ignite the topic of the entire network. Before the New Year's Eve Gala started, the satellite TV stations had already made full use of Weibo's hot searches to attract a wave of attention.

On the other hand, as early as 2016, Weibo launched the "New Year's Eve Carnival", which has now become a deeply rooted brand IP and an important part of the New Year's Eve ceremony of Weibo netizens.

This year's "Weibo New Year's Eve Carnival" has innovated again, and has smoothly connected the two sides of TV and the Internet - Weibo has reached a cooperation with the five major TV stations, and has planned supporting live hot chats, original topic rankings, secondary creation competitions and other gameplay, which has driven the popularity of famous scenes and high-quality programs of the New Year's Eve to soar, until they are fully popular.

In this way, the originally isolated marketing points were connected by the "Weibo New Year's Eve Carnival", from the early warm-up to the official launch and then to word-of-mouth fermentation, continuously raising the popularity with extremely strong penetration.

First, during the warm-up phase of the New Year's Eve Gala, Weibo launched a daily review of the New Year's Eve highlights to relive the New Year's Eve memories. More worth mentioning is the interactive level, Weibo and satellite TV launched a theme card collection activity. While opening the New Year's Eve Gala interactive special, it also launched an exclusive celebrity co-branded card, which was issued by a group of stars, thus constantly narrowing the distance between the audience and the New Year's Eve Gala and stimulating curiosity.

Among them, Times Youth League, as the surprise opening officer, gave netizens the first New Year's surprise and shared their New Year wishes for 2023. Derivative topics such as #微博跨年开幕官时代少年团# and #马嘉琪的新年愿是继续勇# landed on the hot search list.

When the New Year's Eve party was launched, the "Weibo New Year's Eve Carnival" party live chat officially started. On the satellite TV side, the artists guided the audience to enter the Weibo live broadcast during the New Year's Eve party, and Weibo successfully received a large number of satellite TV users. On the Weibo side, celebrity guests dropped into the chat room and randomly flipped netizens to get the most surprises.

The "Weibo New Year's Eve Carnival" connects Taiwan and the Internet with multiple touchpoints and scenarios.

For example, each satellite TV station launched a collection activity on its super chat and official Weibo account, and then responded and linked up during the New Year's Eve party. Among them, Jiangsu Satellite TV and Weibo jointly launched the #Light up the happiness keywords# collection activity, and displayed the happiness keywords written by Weibo users on the big screen at the New Year's Eve party. Wang Junkai, Deng Ziqi, and Zhou Shen, the three happiness witnesses, flipped the cards in real time and gave out signed New Year's Eve co-branded cards on the spot.

For example, celebrity guests responded to Weibo hot searches on the New Year's Eve stage, achieving instant connection between the two screens. Wang Junkai responded to the hot search #王俊凯单手吊威亚# on the spot, which set off a new round of hot discussions.

In addition, the "Weibo New Year's Eve Carnival" also has on-screen benefits and creative incentives to fully mobilize the audience's enthusiasm, allowing users to become deeper participants while playing and creating, and further promote the penetration and dissemination of New Year's Eve content.

Data shows that the 2023 New Year's Eve Gala received 236 hot searches on Weibo, including 4 explosive hot searches. The reading volume of New Year's Eve related topics increased by 126.07 billion, and the related video playback volume reached 8.75 billion. In the context of short videos and vertical communities competing for New Year's Eve traffic, such results further illustrate that the audience consumes not only the New Year's Eve program itself, but also the festive carnival atmosphere that resonates and creates with everyone on mass social media such as Weibo.

2. Create a sense of participation

Everyone should have experienced that there is an extra lot of celebrity news at the end of the year. The reason is that online traffic surges during the New Year's Eve period, which is naturally a good time for celebrity teams to operate.

In short videos, celebrities and internet celebrities mingle and follow the trend to shoot New Year challenges. On Weibo, they are more inclined to show and express themselves, and entertain the audience across screens with a more lifelike side.

This sharp contrast is determined by the community genes and media characteristics - imitation is the mainstream creation mode of short videos. If you don't take advantage of the platform's hot topics, no matter how big a star you are, you will not have traffic; on the contrary, on Weibo, the more refined and personalized the content, the more it can drive the star's national popularity to increase rapidly and form a distinctive personal label.

More than 6,000 stars and fans have formed a huge and stable star-fan ecosystem on Weibo. This means that Weibo can ensure that diverse content and rich gameplay are successfully implemented, and can also allow these contents to flow quickly in users' high-frequency consumption, making the atmosphere and emotions of the entire New Year's Eve more high-spirited.

In order to make everyone have more fun during the online New Year's Eve, Weibo launched the "Informal New Year's Eve Party" this year, using various interactive methods to guide users to produce interesting and high-quality content and enhance the New Year's Eve atmosphere.

Part of the program of the “Informal New Year’s Eve Party”

According to statistics, the Weibo #Official Cross-Year Party# in 2022 increased the main topic reading volume by 23.8 billion, the discussion volume reached more than 38.2 million, and a cumulative hot search volume of 78. As of December 21, 2022, one million Weibo users participated in posting, and a total of more than 9.65 million Weibo posts were published.

In this "party", Ren Jialun performed new songs and dances, Ren Min showed off her singing talent, Bai Lu and Mao Xiaotong performed finger dances, Charmaine Sheh once again appeared in "The Golden Branches of Desire", Zhang Ruoyun challenged baseball skills, Li Sidani presented a handsome street dance, and Victor Wong held a family concert... In short, the stars posted what they love and think, and users see thousands of different faces. Take Ren Jialun as an example. The number of reposts of his special dance exceeded 1 million, and the total number of video views reached 18.05 million times.

Not only did the stars entertain themselves and others, but fans and bloggers from various fields also actively participated in the "informal New Year's Eve party". Fans shared their annual works in four major tracks: editing, design, fan painting, and talent. In the talent track alone, fans of various groups showed off their hidden skills, such as cover songs, playing and singing, Peking opera, and guzheng... They were good at everything.

The sense of participation created by Weibo during the New Year's Eve is all-round, and of course it goes beyond the comments on the New Year's Eve party and the interaction between stars and fans. The #EnjoyPartySeason#, a large-scale year-end project in the field of music performances, is a year-end carnival that fully links stars, musicians, fan clubs, users and KOLs. Singers such as Hua Chenyu, Shang Wenjie, Li Sidani, Zhu Jingxi and Pin Guan have all participated in it. Since the launch of the event, the total number of readings of the event has exceeded 4.7 billion, and the number of readings of related topics has exceeded 1.5 billion.

In the film field, #Cross-Year Movie Wishes#, the number of related topics on Weibo has exceeded 14.4 billion. The two movies "Avatar: The Way of Water" and "See You" have rekindled the public's enthusiasm for watching movies, contributing a lot to boosting confidence in the film market. The #2022 Favorite Movies# and #2022 Favorite Movie Roles# year-end voting activities, and the #2022 Big Screen Highlight Moments# inventory video give recognition to well-received movies and roles, allowing good works and good actors to be seen and understood by more people.

We have to admire Weibo's ability to create new things. From the New Year's Eve carnival to informal parties, to various cultural and entertainment vertical activities, New Year's Eve marketing, which is triggered by topics, interactions, and emotions, has risen comprehensively. It is under the guidance of such a platform and the support of the media that the sense of ritual of New Year's Eve is getting stronger and stronger, and the long-tail effect is becoming increasingly prominent.

3. The reshaped New Year’s Eve ritual

Looking through the topics on Weibo related to New Year's Eve, we will find that the reasons why netizens participate are basically - watching and playing at the same time makes the New Year's Eve more festive.

Today's young users are highly immersed in gaming thinking. It can be said that games have reshaped young people's perception of other art forms. To some extent, the Internet's New Year's Eve is becoming more and more "cool", which is also due to the platform's deep insight into and clever application of "gaming sense".

Take the New Year's Eve party as an example. As a fixed content once a year, its traditional marketing scope is relatively narrow. Even now, the operation of short videos and vertical communities for New Year's Eve content is still at the stage of simple distribution. A more advanced level is to push hot topics and then integrate resources for top-down dissemination. Users lack subjective initiative and are not enthusiastic about participating.

Weibo is operating the New Year's Eve event with the idea of ​​creating a "large-scale interactive game", and it is upgrading it year by year, constantly supplementing and updating the gameplay.

Take card collection as an example. This is a relatively simple branch task in the "Weibo New Year's Eve Carnival", but it has a rich process of satellite TV card distribution, celebrity card delivery, task interaction, and welfare unlocking. The progressive gameplay is combined with reward stimulation to maximize the user's sense of participation and achievement, so that everyone is interested and motivated to call friends to explore and build in the "New Year's Eve Sandbox World" created by Weibo.

Weibo has always been working hard on the interactivity and participation of the "New Year's Eve". After doing this well, users' enthusiasm for discussion and creation will naturally increase, and the "New Year's flavor" of the New Year's Eve will become stronger and stronger. Data is the most intuitive. Compared with the same period of the 2021-2022 New Year's Eve, the number of discussions on Weibo's entire site in 2022-2023 increased by 18%, the number of interactions on the entire site increased by 27%, the number of topic readings increased by 273%, and the number of hot searches on the entire site increased by 126%. The popularity of projects and the activity on the site have both achieved a leap.

It is certainly not easy to create such a comprehensive "New Year's Eve game". This requires not only a platform with a large and rich content ecosystem, diverse forms of expression and mature operating experience, but also users with rich enough portraits to support the overall New Year's Eve atmosphere.

In the past two years, short videos and vertical communities have been competing for New Year's Eve traffic, but they have been limited by content formats and interactive gameplay, and have always been difficult to break through. If you want to get the greatest sense of New Year's Eve ritual, you have to go to Weibo. As the largest star-fan interaction platform and entertainment marketing platform on the Chinese Internet, Weibo has a complete entertainment industry chain of upstream and downstream practitioners and active users, which is enough to produce and consume a variety of entertainment content and create an immersive New Year's Eve atmosphere.

Netizens on Weibo repeatedly mentioned the "sense of ritual" during the New Year's Eve. Just like what is said in "The Little Prince", the sense of ritual is to make a certain moment different from other moments.

People from all over the world comment on the New Year's Eve in the live chat, which is a sense of ritual; stars and fans who grew up together celebrate on the same screen in the "informal party", which is a sense of ritual; strangers yet familiar netizens wishing happiness from afar and making wishes earnestly on Weibo, which is also a sense of ritual.

Under the topic #2023年新年心愿#, Weibo users sent out 540,000 Weibo posts in the first minute of the New Year's Eve, and 11.02 million Weibo posts expressing New Year's wishes in the first hour of the New Year. This is everyone's best wishes for the New Year. At this moment, we are truly connected by the Internet.

Author: Gu Han, Editor: Li Chunhui

Source: WeChat public account "Entertainment Hard Candy (ID: yuleyingtang)"