Zhihu Column is another important product of Zhihu after Zhihu Daily. It embodies Zhihu’s attempt to accumulate and precipitate user knowledge through more efficient methods. It is a Q&A from Zhihu The self-media platform generated by the community is the result of Zhihu moving towards mediaization in a larger direction. For a long time, the mediaization of social networks has become a hot topic. This topic has come from both home and abroad. Mediaization of social networks The mediaization of social networks is a universal problem. Social networks are a great work on the Internet, which release users' group psychology, make it easier to find friends and groups, and give users a sense of belonging. However, traditional communities seem to have their limitations after a certain period of time. The first choice to break through is to mediaize community development. In addition, the mediaization of social networks seems to be an inevitable result of the development of social networks to a certain stage. Although social networks at a certain stage only focused on social functions to allow users to make friends more conveniently, the entry of certain social celebrities or individuals with better abilities slowly gathered a large number of followers in social networks. It seems inevitable that media attributes are getting stronger and stronger. In social media, users can easily interact with celebrities and idols who they can usually only look up to, or personally participate in the dissemination and discussion of certain major events. This sense of participation can bring moral advantages, pleasure and satisfaction to users, which is different from the previous Reading traditional media information can only be passively accepted. In this regard, Sina Weibo cannot even be considered a model. Sina Weibo was born in the hands of Sina, a media company. From the beginning, it was operated as a media product, and today it has become a huge media product that consumes public sentiment. The more typical one is Facebook. Facebook has undoubtedly been a pure social product since its birth. But now that celebrities and corporate accounts have entered the market, some people say that Facebook’s social attributes account for 80% and media attributes account for 20%. At a time when the number of Facebook users is gradually reaching its peak and slowly declining, media-oriented development seems to be the only option, whether it is the self-growth of the community or the company's operating ideas. In addition, abroad, Twitter itself is a more media-oriented product, and it is still aggressively following the path of media, adding picture services, releasing rich media elements such as Twitter Card, cooperating with NBC for Olympic coverage, and cooperating with TV company Via Viacom and NBC discuss video content cooperation. Now the social recruitment website ?0?2LinkedIn?0?2 has acquired the news reading application?0?2Pulse and is also taking a media-oriented path. The mediaization of Zhihu Zhihu is not a simple social network, but it undoubtedly has social attributes. As a question and answer community, it has accumulated a large amount of high-quality content after a long period of invitation-only registration mechanism. When it comes to about two years after Zhihu was born, the pressure on Zhihu’s user volume and how to add value to its content have become issues that must be considered. After all, Zhihu is a start-up company rather than a public welfare project, and it cannot remain unknown to others. Zhihu opened registration last year, and the number of users grew rapidly after opening registration. Although the quality of the entire community has declined to a certain extent, many people lamented that bad coins drive out good coins, but the situation may not be so serious. Many users understand the rules. Will correct his or her behavior in the community. After Zhihu has accumulated a large amount of high-quality content and has a certain number of users, business expansion has become inevitable. Based on the continued production of high-quality content, mediaization is a natural idea. In the view of the Zhihu team, this is the process of expanding the audience of content. Regarding what Zhihu wants to do, in fact, Zhihu founder Zhou Yuan has said that Zhihu is not limited to the Q&A community: But what I want to say is that Q&A may not be all of Zhihu. An excellent company does not think around a positioning, but constantly thinks around a user scenario. Back to that ubiquitous need - knowledge, experience, insight and judgment that has never been shared in one person's brain is always something that another group of people desperately wants to know.

Zhihu’s mission is to bring the knowledge, experience, and insights in people’s brains to the Internet so that they can better connect with each other. Therefore, next we must not only provide tools, but also build a community. We are doing Q&A, search, reading, and more. The connection has just begun. Zhihu first focuses on building a high-quality community and accumulating content through questions and answers. When content needs to be promoted and distributed, a mediaization process will be formed. Zhihu previously launched the Zhihu Daily APP, an application that organizes high-quality Q&A content based on current hot topics, which is what Zhou Yuan calls "reading." This application has indeed spread Zhihu's high-quality content. Not only does the application itself have a relatively high number of users, but it has also brought about a short-term surge in the number of Zhihu's own users. The Zhihu column launched this time is actually equivalent to a blog platform. If Zhihu Daily uses current affairs hot spots as clues to organize content, Zhihu column returns to the knowledge itself, focusing on the individual user and based on the personal knowledge system, motivating Users produce more organized and in-depth content, which is distributed through Zhihu’s own channels. Zhihu is a self-marketing platform. Which users are Zhihu columns beneficial to? What kind of users will use Zhihu columns? In fact, there are many users in Zhihu whose behavior is consistent with the nature of the column. As a Q&A community, Zhihu has quite a few rules and restrictions on questions in order to maintain the high quality of Q&A. However, many users have several types of Q&A behaviors that are not “conventional”. For example, self-question and self-answer type, ask yourself questions and answer them yourself. This may be because you have studied a certain issue or a certain field in depth. You have knowledge in this area that you want to share or promote yourself, but you haven’t found a suitable question in the community, so you ask and answer it yourself. In fact, this is a relatively effective way of personal promotion. In addition, there is another common question in Zhihu: "Who is X?" When a person gains a certain reputation in Zhihu, other people will be interested in him, so he will use the method of mobilizing the masses to ask this kind of question, and many familiar people will come here to answer the question. This kind of problem often causes other users to complain that this is clique behavior and the question is meaningless. But this kind of question often makes the "X" in "Who is X?" better known to people in the community. Therefore, it is actually easy to understand that Zhihu itself is a self-media platform and a self-marketing platform. Users are active in Zhihu, demonstrate their depth of knowledge and professionalism on a certain category of topics, and let other people in the community know about them. This has promoted their personal brand. In the early days of Zhihu, it accumulated a large number of Internet industry practitioners, especially for Internet users. As long as you consciously use Zhihu as a self-marketing platform, you can easily improve your brand value. Therefore, the Zhihu column actually just standardizes this behavior and organizes these behaviors, which not only better reflects the user's personal brand, but also reduces the above types of Q&A in the community. Organization of Personal Knowledge System Zhihu is a Q&A community that uses social nature to encourage users to produce a lot of high-quality content in the form of Q&A, but this content is often scattered throughout the community. Zhihu's own Q&A content is organized by topics, tags, and user timelines, which is relatively fragmented. Whether you are looking for a quality answer to a question or looking for some answers from a person, it is difficult. In fact, these difficulties are difficult to solve using Zhihu search. In the user's personal page, the answers are organized in chronological order. When the user's answers reach hundreds or even thousands, even now many users have thousands of answers. Not all of these answers are of high quality. Go back one by one. Looking through it is almost impossible. Zhihu columns are essentially personal blogs in the community, and the genre of the blog will limit users to write more organized and in-depth on a certain topic, allowing users to better sort out and accumulate their personal knowledge system. Disadvantages of Zhihu Column Of course, just as every time Zhihu launches a new feature in the past, it is quite controversial, the launch of Zhihu Column this time has also caused many users to complain. In fact, Zhihu columns have certain disadvantages.

First of all, after a user publishes a Zhihu column article, it will directly enter the timeline of the users who follow this person. The author has also experienced that when suddenly seeing the column content in the timeline, it will feel like a fragment, which affects the continuity of the browsing experience. Zhihu has developed a small number of core users and star users early on. The questions these users care about or the answers they agree with will generally attract more people's attention. The Matthew Effect allows these users to receive more and more attention, creating a distance from ordinary users. In the past, there were often conflicts between celebrity users and ordinary users in the Zhihu community. Zhihu Column Zhihu is an activity to create celebrities, which makes many ordinary users feel resentful. Zhihu columns are similar to blogs, but blogs are already a declining genre in the current impetuous Internet atmosphere. Many people who insisted on writing blogs in the past have given up now. Firstly, there is less communication and less encouragement. Secondly, there is no source of profit and insufficient motivation. Whether Zhihu columns can allow people to continue to produce high-quality content is a question in itself. Of course, Zhihu inserts column content into the community in order to enhance exchanges and discussions and increase incentives for columnists. Zhihu columns need to continuously output good content, otherwise they will quickly become useless after three minutes of popularity. Although the quality of the Zhihu community was once seriously questioned after the number of open registered users increased significantly, there is no doubt that Zhihu is still the community with the highest quality content on the Chinese Internet. Creating new functions around these high-quality content is an inevitable choice for Zhihu to firstly encourage users to continue to produce and secondly to expand the audience of high-quality content. (Unless otherwise noted, all articles on Leifeng.com are original, please indicate the source when reprinting) Latest announcement Wang Ke, director of e-commerce at Bird: The Return of the King will focus on e-commerce and social marketing Cloud OS special conference: all friends will join Alibaba To build a complete ecosystem of Ali OS Alibaba CTO Wang Jian: The changes cloud computing has brought to China Camera360 Gu Rui: Entrepreneurs should focus on products to stay ahead and not be afraid of "imitation" Interpretation of the butterfly effect of the cloud Alibaba Cloud Developer Conference from "focus" to "Spreading" Lei Feng Network Mobile Internet Entrepreneurship and Innovation Lei Technology gathers global innovative technology products for the future The founders of the website, Lin Jun and Benli, are responsible for gossip and nonsensical things, and they will never act cute!