5 stages of self-media operation and growth strategy

How can you make your self-media account continue to grow in followers, or "grow" relatively quickly? This question may involve the corresponding strategies adopted at different stages of self-media operation. So how do you understand the stages that self-media operation may go through, and the corresponding growth strategies? Let's take a look at the author's summary.

This article uses WeChat public accounts as an example to explain the operation strategy of self-media.

How long does it take to build a fast-growing WeChat public account?

Some people can build a thriving public account in just one year, while others may need two, three, or even five years.

During the development process, your official account will go through five different stages. These five stages are similar to the product life cycle, and different growth strategies need to be adopted at different stages.

• Innovators, accounting for 2.5%, are those who are early in the market and dare to try new things;
• Early adopters, accounting for 13.5%;
• Early majority, 34%;
• late majority, 34%;
• The laggards, 16%, may never be satisfied by you.

This article will outline the five stages of WeChat public account growth to help you understand the current situation and the path you need to take.

1. The Birth of WeChat Official Accounts

Estimated completion time: Less than two weeks.

During this preparation phase, you need to do four things.

Even if you already have official accounts, you can improve them by reading the following content again.

1. Define your niche

This is the first step, and it is also the step that most WeChat public account operators fail to do. It is crucial to know who (which readers) will benefit from your content.

To cross the chasm, you must focus on a single niche, target a small segment, and win your dominance on a single pain point.

In other words: Who do you want to serve?

2. Create a reader profile

Now that you know the group you want to serve, you need to learn more about them.

In order to create content that actually helps them, you have to understand who they are, how they behave, and any information or content that is relevant to them.

You can learn about your target audience in a variety of ways, such as:

• Face-to-face conversations;
• Demographics sites and more.

At the end of your research, you should know a few things about your target audience:

• age;
• gender;
• Work;
• Hobby;
• Beliefs, values, etc.

You can even give your persona a name, and all information should be as specific as possible.

3. Create your WeChat official account

If you want to build a content-based business, you first need a functioning official account.

The specific creation process will not be described in detail, you can search it yourself.

2. Find 100 real fans

Estimated completion time: Within four months.

For most newly established WeChat public accounts, a relatively small group of loyal readers is enough to make your business successful.

If you have a new public account, the number of followers from 0 to 1,000 is a huge leap, and it is difficult in the early stages.

A better goal would be to attract 100 real fans.

When you first start writing articles, you are starting from scratch, and no matter how well you research your target audience, you are going to make mistakes.

The problem is that no one will tell you what mistakes you are making.

Although it may take a while, you can attract your first 100 followers as long as you define your target audience well enough.

These fans will play an important role in the growth of your official account.

Loyal readers will comment on posts, and they’ll tell you when something resonates with them through their comments and feedback.

For some posts, you’ll get very high engagement, like 10-15 comments from 100 followers, while other posts will only get 1-2 comments.

Use this feedback to adjust your reader targeting and craft content that helps increase engagement.

Besides, you have a lot more to do.

You need to build relationships with your readers and create more content, promote your content, and so on.

At this stage you can use the following strategies to get the first 100 real fans.

Best Strategy 1: Targeted Submissions

The core of the initial traffic strategy should be to contribute to other platforms, as other platforms may be the places where the target audience most frequently visits.

You need to find platforms with a large audience, a small portion of which will be your target audience.

Then, you can try to get these readers to subscribe to your account through reading.

For example, the author's content is positioned in the product field. At the beginning, he made targeted submissions to the "Everyone is a Product Manager" platform and obtained his first batch of fans in this way.

A common mistake people can make is trying to write anything you think will be popular on your site, but only if you can relate to it with your target audience.

Your goal at this stage is to find 100 real fans and capture their attention first before considering audiences from other traffic sources.

Best Strategy #2: Create the Right Type of Content for Your Official Account

Right now, you have very few visitors.

You don’t need to create content continuously because no one is reading it.

It’s better to spend some time trying to get traffic from other sources before churning out a lot of content on your own account.

You should create content that will attract high-quality followers and help you build a relationship with the influencer.

If done right, it will get you some nice targeted traffic.

Best Strategy #3: Paid Traffic

If you have more money to invest in your business, paid traffic is a way to accelerate growth.

This strategy is completely optional. Many successful public accounts never use paid advertising, and some successful public accounts use paid advertising in part.

The biggest benefit of paid advertising is that you can create an audience despite not having an existing traffic base.

Top Strategy #4: Develop a Social Media Presence

Popular social media platforms have a huge amount of traffic, and the most popular social media platforms will definitely contain your target audience.

The problem is that any good social media strategy takes time to work.

It takes months of publishing high-quality content to gain authority and trust with search engines, and after about a year you should start to see some actual organic search traffic, at which point you can turn more of your efforts toward SEO.

3. Attract a large number of fans – expand the scale

Estimated completion time: 8-24 months.

Now that you have a near-perfect understanding of what your readers need help with and want, it’s time to start growing your traffic fast.

Even though you will grow much faster than in the previous stage, it will still take time.

Your main challenge now is to start creating great content on a regular basis, and your time is still limited.

Best strategy #1: Continue to execute your traffic building strategy

From now on, you’ll have to spend more time on content creation, so you’ll have less time to spend on acquiring traffic from other sources.

Even if you already have 100 real fans, if you rely solely on these fans for promotion, your growth will be very slow.

As you gain traffic at this stage, you can start spending more time on your own account, creating and promoting content.

Best Strategy #2: Create a Content Schedule

You need to decide how often you want to post and what you want to write.

A thorough content calendar will help you plan your content a year in advance, and you’ll still get a lot of feedback from your 100’s of real fans.

It’s recommended that you only plan out a few weeks or months of content so that you can make adjustments based on the feedback you receive.

Once you’ve reached a consensus, you can plan your content schedule in advance as needed.

Best Strategy #3: Start thinking about profit

Traffic is nice, but the ultimate goal should be to generate revenue.

If you’re selling a service, such as consulting, you can do this early.

The long-term goal of your official 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 your conversion rate.

If you don’t have a product, now’s the time to start focusing on your readers’ main pains so that you can create a product around them.

Most products take months to design, so the further you plan ahead the better.

4. Get Rewards – Get Paid

Estimated completion time: three to six months.

Once you develop a sizable audience, most have 5,000 – 10,000 followers, you can monetize your account.

At the same time, you need to keep growing and continue to execute all the growth strategies described in 3.

Best Strategy 1: Focus on Profits

At this point, you will have thousands of visitors every month.

If you don’t make money from your official account, how can you continue to provide good service to your visitors?

You can’t invest in better content or reply to all the comments anymore because you can’t serve thousands of readers by yourself.

Once you have a large audience, people will regularly contact you to set up joint ventures.

Don’t just accept offers to collaborate right away. Take the time to work with people you trust and respect to provide as much value as possible to your audience.

Finally, if you don’t feel like you’re ready to create your own product, you can always promote other reputable products.

Best Strategy 2: Hire

Now that you’re generating some income from your account, you can start getting some help so that you can continue to help your readers as much as possible.

First, you need to determine the most important parts of your public account.

The following are the most common areas where hiring is typically done:

• Product support;
• Product development;
• Respond to simple comments;
• Graphic design (images and graphics for content);
• Content operation strategy;
• Content writing.

Once you’ve determined which parts require your personal attention, start hiring others to take care of the rest.

Make sure you are hiring high-quality people to help you, it will save you a lot of trouble in the long run.

5. Maintain your growth and position

Estimated completion time: Hope you stay here forever!

At this point, you already have a mature business.

Your official account can easily generate enough content.

In some segments, you have more advantages due to specific audiences and market sizes.

At the same time, your business is almost always in a state of growth or decline, and you need to focus on growth.

Best Strategy 1: Keep Hiring

If you do it right, your traffic will only continue to increase.

To maintain quality standards and free up time, you have to find more reliable people to join your small team.

One of the most difficult things to maintain successful business growth is finding and retaining great talent on your team.

Best Strategy 2: Automation

The great thing about having a large income is that you no longer have to do things you don’t like.

Using paid tools or employees/freelancers, you can automate some of the work.

Lastly, never stop learning about your readers and working to help them.

Author: Wei Peng; Official Account: Product Person Wei Peng