Build a user operation system in 5 steps!

User operation is an invisible skill that many new media people must master. Why? Because community operation is a comprehensive position. If you don’t understand user operations, you won’t be able to do community operations well.

What is user operation? The popular answers on Zhihu all include these parts: increasing revenue, reducing costs, promoting activity and transferring payments. But for me, who was still a newbie at the time, this gave me a difficult feeling.

By operating one community after another, covering more than 200 students, from being a novice to becoming an experienced person, I understand what user operations are all about.

The core of user operation is to be user-centric and formulate operating mechanisms through user demand surveys to achieve the goals of introducing new users, retaining old users, and keeping users active.

User operation is actually integrated into community operation, so I will explain the five steps of user operation from the process of community operation:

1. planning
2. recruit
3. manage
4. active
5. recall

1. Planning

Planning is the basis for doing anything. Whether it is a weekly study plan, reading plan or activity planning, you need to plan in advance. The user operation plan includes:

1. Clarify your purpose
2. Design Process
3. Writing copy

Clarify your purpose

Clarifying your purpose will help you aim in the right direction. Generally speaking, companies conduct user operations with the goal of maximizing user value by improving activity, retention rate or payment indicators through various operational means.

Design Process

What steps are needed to achieve your goal? The so-called process is a natural step-by-step process. The user operation process includes:

1. User survey: Because user operations are derived only when there are users and user behaviors, the first step in the design process is to understand the user portrait, conduct user surveys, and then design a questionnaire based on the questions and send it to target users. What you need to know:

• What do your users look like?
• What do your users do every day?

2. Break down the task: After the user survey is completed, you can break down the task. The tasks can be broken down using the WBS method :

• Work – a task that produces tangible results.
• Breakdown - A hierarchical structure of gradual subdivision and classification, breaking down large work tasks into specific tasks, and then breaking down each task into N activities.
• Structure - No matter how many tasks you break down a task into, those tasks are well-structured and interconnected.

For example, when I designed the "Hotspot Analysis Training Week" community, in order to enable students to produce an opinion essay outline without any basic knowledge, I broke down the tasks into the following five items:

1. Learn how to discover the latest hot spots and analyze the reasons behind their popularity
2. Think about the logic behind the hot topics and form your own opinions
3. Analyze the title, beginning, structure and angle of hot articles
4. Learn the writing structure of a discussion paper
5. Conduct peer review of classmates’ writing outlines and complete the final summary

Writing copy

User operation is actually integrated into community operation. Therefore, copywriting is also divided into the following three types:

1. Recruitment copy: Recruitment copy must be attractive, concise and clear.
2. Group entry copy: In order to reintroduce the community, publish group rules and activate the community, you need to write a group announcement.
3. Daily copy: According to the process, different types of communities require writing different types of daily copy.

II. Recruitment

Once the planning is complete, you need to recruit users and build a community. There are many recruitment channels, you can:

• New media platforms: Zhihu, Weibo, Jianshu, etc. are all places where you can publish recruitment copy.
• Existing communities: If your company needs to run a new community, an existing company community is a good choice.
• WeChat Moments: If you want to create a community yourself, spreading it through Moments is the most direct option.
• One-to-one private messaging: Use your existing social account to send one-to-one private messages to your friends, and interested friends will naturally join your community.

For example, the "Hotspot Analysis Training Week" was recruited through the academic notification group of Bandie Private School.

3. Management

After attracting new users, you need to establish a strict management system to manage users. In addition to basic group rules, you also need to monitor community data. Based on these data, you need to issue timely warnings or clean up users, such as whether they are active, whether they contribute to the community, and whether they engage in advertising activities.

Then, there are two ways to manage users:

• Self-management: that is, managing the entire community as the operations officer.
• Assist in management: Select several active and high-quality users to help you manage. On the one hand, doing so can reduce one's own workload, and on the other hand, it can enhance the sense of belonging of these users to the community. But be careful to control the number of assisting users and consider their assistance time. For example, during the hot spot analysis training week, a mentor was selected to help with operations.

4. Active

After building a community, how can we activate users? How to retain users? This often determines the fate of a community. you can:

1. Activate users: Encourage users to speak for the first time

When users enter an unfamiliar social environment for the first time, they will definitely feel a little restrained. As an operations officer, you need to encourage users to speak up, activate users, and let users get to know each other. This is the first step to breaking the ice.

When I operate a community, in order to activate the students, I will introduce myself first and then let the students introduce themselves.

2. Retain users: Let users participate in community activities every day

If you want to retain users and keep them participating in community discussions every day, you need to:

1) Deliver valuable content

When users join a community, what they hope to get is valuable content rather than blunt sales pitches. Therefore, only by tapping into the value of the community and investing in it on a regular basis can we retain users for a long time.

You need to summarize valuable information. Let users participate, encourage them to put forward opinions during the community operation process, organize them into documents, and then the operators will optimize them.

For example, when I was running the “Hotspot Analysis Training Week”, I asked students to organize the content they absorbed every day into posts. Therefore, after the training camp, each student can review the knowledge on the corresponding post.

2) Set up daily tasks

If users simply enjoy the useful information provided by operators, over time, they will easily become alienated and gradually marginalized. Therefore, in order to make users feel more “present” every day, you need to arrange daily tasks for users, just like the check-in app.

For example, in the "Hotspot Analysis Training Week", there will be [Pre-study Tasks] and [Post Reply] tasks every day.

5. Recall

Recalling users actually means improving retention and conversion rates. After a round of community operation, the user's life cycle has ended. To recall the user, you can:

1. Pull users back to historical message groups: In order to improve retention rate, you need to invest in content that is more valuable to users based on the type of community and product.

• If your product is group buying or e-commerce, you need to have discount activities;
• If your product is SNS, you need to make good use of the hot spots that users are interested in;
• If your product is information, you need to provide a good product experience, and it must be accurate and timely.

2. Users return to community operations as teaching assistants: In this case, not all users can be recalled. We need to stratify users so that we can decide which users are qualified. Different operations officers have different stratification methods, which can be divided into:

• Regular users : users who regularly participate in discussions and are neither overly active nor silent.
• KOL users : also known as core users, users who perform well during the operation and have the potential to be recalled.

For example, during the first "Hotspot Analysis Training Week", all users only participated in the discussion as ordinary users; during the second round of community operation, you will upgrade some high-quality ordinary users to KOL users and let them become mentors of the "Hotspot Analysis Training Week".

When we have deepened user operations to a certain extent and the user base is relatively large, in order to cultivate user loyalty, no matter what type of community you are, you can introduce a points system - users earn platform points through specific behaviors and realize the value of points through point redemption.

There are two keys to establishing a points system:

1. Points are consumable: You have to tell users that points can be consumable when they reach a certain amount, which means they can be redeemed. This way users will have the motivation to continue accumulating points.
2. Points are valuable: You need to set point levels so that users know clearly what they can redeem for what points, and these things must be able to meet user needs and be useful to users.

For example, taking education as an example, students can earn points by signing in daily, completing courses on time and with quality, and sharing knowledge. When they accumulate enough points, they can redeem them for course coupons.

Most of what the article says is applicable to user operations in community operations. There is another way, which is community operation. The community belongs to the forum system and focuses more on communication, content and topics. Here I would like to talk about three things to note about community operations:

1. Creation and initialization: Initially you need to create a theme that resonates with you. A community must exist based on a specific theme, and the communication and interaction between members will often revolve around this theme.
2. Decentralization: If the survival and development of the community depends on only a few people. Once these people leave, the community will likely be destroyed. Therefore, the community needs to decentralize and turn a highly centralized network into a decentralized network. Then you need to help community members build diverse relationships through guidance.
3. Self-growth of the community: When a community has the ability to grow on its own, many things and topics will arise naturally. At this stage, you need to set rules for the community so that it can develop healthily. In addition, it is necessary to extend the topic to attract potential users.

From planning to recall, these five steps build user operations. User operation is more like teaching you how to deal with different people. Even if you are a novice in new media, you will never go wrong if you follow the procedures step by step.

Author: Banpie Private School

Source: Banpie Private School