The core model and skills of community operation!

This year, the term " community operation " has become popular again in the operation field and has reached a new height. I have updated some methods of community operation before, so today I will share with you my new thoughts in a relatively complete manner.

Compared with other friends, I may not have the experience of suddenly growing a community with hundreds of thousands of users, but in terms of survival, I have operated a community that has survived for more than 5 years. I believe I can still be a little proud of this.

So I won’t go into details about how important community is today. I believe other operators have also shared a lot. So, let me share with you some key points of thinking on how to build a high-quality group. Before we begin, let’s rethink “operation” itself.

Rethinking “Operation”

What is Operations: Operations are all the means used to achieve business goals

Operational goals: Operations should be business-centric and the goal is to maximize business value

Classification of operations: platform-based (business goal-oriented), function-based (KPI-oriented)

The premise of good operation: unify business objectives and user objectives

What are the criteria for fulfilling the two prerequisites?

1. Deep user insights

2. Deep business understanding

Why?

1. If you don’t understand the user, everything will be subjective.

2. Operations without understanding business objectives will inevitably be biased

I have been in many groups and have seen the following:

We set up benefits, sent out red envelopes, and users stopped talking after receiving them

The community operators tried their best to create a group, but there was no movement in the group.

Community operators send out morning reports every day, and the community becomes a morning report group

Community operators are active in the group every day, but no one responds

Community operators distribute benefits every day, but users don’t claim them in the end

What went wrong?

Since it was mentioned above that the prerequisite for good operations is to achieve the unity of business objectives and user objectives , why do most people not think about it and just start building communities without any hesitation?

Here we explain the two premises mentioned above:

User Purpose & Business Purpose

What is user purpose?

Users join a community because they have certain needs and expect to have them solved here.

As operators, we are also the target users of knowledge payment and learning training, so we often see similar fission posters:

Reflecting user identity: Operation crowd

Title: Teach you how to build a user community of XX million in 14 days

Outline: Specific Benefits

Endorsement: Recommended by XXX experts

Urgent: limited time, limited quantity

Gifts: XX famous community operation SOP, XXX information

At this time, what is aroused is the user's desire to learn. What are the characteristics of this demand?

Meet high frequency:

The rise of various new platforms, new rules, and new ways of playing on the market are constantly iterating and updating, which also forces us operators to continue learning.

Meet the basic needs:

If operators fail to master operational knowledge and methods, they will easily suffer devaluation or even elimination under fierce competition.

Meet the long cycle:

Learning is a problem that is difficult to quantify and solve in the short term. It is an ongoing process. It is impossible to solve all problems by only learning one thing.

Therefore, if you want users to remain active in the group, you must first see whether their needs meet these three points. Even if it is changed to a beauty or moms community, it can still be established.

Almost all people who clamor to do community operations, at least the majority of them, believe that as long as they create a group, subsequent conversion and monetization will not be a big problem. Attracting new customers has become almost everyone’s top priority. Here I am not saying that attracting new customers is not important. The step of attracting new customers is to obtain traffic, but it is just the beginning, not all. In fact, we can also see many companies that are born in attracting new customers but die in retaining existing customers.

What is the reason that attracting new customers has become the focus of everyone’s attention? I think there are 2 aspects:

On the one hand, as operators, we urgently need to complete KPIs, and the number of new customers is the most intuitive reflection of the operation results.

On the one hand, as a boss, they simply believe that traffic can bring in revenue and ignore the subsequent operational services.

Is this actually the case?

When we, as users, enter a community. We may have questions like:

1. How to get the information

2. What is the value of the community?

3. What are the follow-up arrangements for the community?

4. Who in the community will share?

5. What kind of behavior is allowed and what is prohibited?

…

I have organized the entire user's thinking path and combined it with the group entry process. The content is as follows:

From the above picture we can see that when user needs are aroused, they hope to enter the community to get them solved.

As the group joining process progresses, various new demands and questions will arise. Once these are not met and resolved, the expectations you have previously established in the minds of users will be destroyed, and it will be difficult to have subsequent interactions, let alone conversions and monetization.

Therefore, I believe that the key to building a good community lies in managing user expectations.

So what is business purpose?

The business purpose is essentially to find operational opportunities during the operation process, intervene in users, and guide users to experience the core value of the product, thereby achieving business goals such as conversion and monetization.

If we don’t consider these things, the problems mentioned above will arise when we build a community.

So how to avoid it? And how to run a good community, next I will share some tips.

Get off to a good start - avoid service interruptions

Today's users' attention is becoming increasingly fragmented, and the time they can devote to it is becoming less and less. In this era where everyone wants to build a community, if you don’t seize 15 minutes, your users will be snatched away by others. When users have new options, they will undoubtedly abandon you without mercy. So what should we pay attention to when building a community? I also mentioned in my previous article - service interruption

From the above picture, we can see that if there is a service interruption and the user's needs cannot be met immediately, then the trust in the services provided in the community will also decline . No matter how good you praise your products and services, it will be difficult to convert and monetize them.

One goal and three operational measures to prevent service interruptions

Within the golden 15 minutes after the group is created, let users complete their first impression of the group . It can be roughly divided into three steps:

1. Break the Ice

Usually I don’t create a group right away. Instead, I set clear expectations for users before creating the group, provide them with a self-introduction template, and let them prepare in advance.

Operational Purpose:

The reason for doing this is to lower the threshold for interaction after joining the group. When I remind everyone to interact in the group, users can do it at will. Generally speaking, it is encouraged that everyone give random red envelopes when introducing themselves.

This gives users who join the group something to do, and the lively atmosphere created by the red envelopes will give users a good initial atmosphere for the group and make them willing to continue interacting. At this time, you can also take the time to continue to invite people to join the group, so that service interruptions are less likely to occur.

2. Build expectations

After breaking the ice, publish the group's theme, content schedule, group rules, etc. to let users know when to come in and listen. Usually you will see many groups doing this, such as sharing XXX topic at 8pm and ensuring you reply 1 to attend on time.

Operational purpose: quickly establish user expectations and guide users to make proactive commitments. When a person makes an active commitment, he tends to care more about these things. Compared to a situation without any guidance or feedback, knowing the approximate number of people can help you estimate the basic effect of the event.

3. Complete the first experience

Do a small experience as soon as possible. It doesn’t have to be a very time-consuming sharing. It can also be topic interaction, lucky draw, etc. But it must be related to the group topic, otherwise there will be cognitive deviation.

Operational purpose: from previous interaction, to cognition, to experience. At this point, users have a more complete expectation of the group's topic. Only by following up with subsequent arrangements will users realize the value of the group and be willing to stay in the group to interact.

The secret of continuous operation - content operation

After the first impression, users have formed clearer expectations, so content operations should be given more attention in the future. It also operates a learning community for people. The focus here is on the fluidity of content

We will see that many communities eventually become places for forwarding articles from public accounts, or become morning newspaper groups. Regarding the Morning Post issue, I once initiated a survey in my circle of friends to guide everyone's views on this matter.    

Based on everyone’s feedback, I came to the conclusion that most people will watch but will not interact. If there is no interaction in the group, users will be unwilling to speak. The result is obvious. A group where no one speaks will inevitably become a dead group. Therefore, we need to do content planning and find a topic library.

Having only a topic library does not mean that you can do a good job in content operation. The topic library is just a direction. Specific topics need to be selected based on the proportion of members in the community and hot spots. The most important thing about community content operation is content liquidity, so when we operate community content, we should pay attention to the following matters:

1. Confirm that the topic you send can cover more group members

2. Is this a problem that group members have encountered recently?

3. If someone participates in the discussion, can you @ him to ask questions?

4. The way you ask questions needs to be specific to the scenario, rather than vague, otherwise it will be out of focus and impossible to answer.

User operations within the community - Five community little suns

The so-called five little suns do not necessarily mean five people. In fact, to put it bluntly, it means finding active elements to drive the activity of the group.

There is a particularly interesting phenomenon in one of the groups I am in. Two people in the group quarrel every day over the group morning newspaper, and this has become an ongoing joke. Therefore, almost as soon as the morning paper is released, there will be a few people coming out to complain and chat.

It’s not that this is enough to make the group active, but it is a point worth thinking about. If, under the premise of the above preparations, more active members discuss in the group, can it boost the activity of the group? These people usually have the following traits:

1. Talkative attribute

2. Love to ask questions

3. Love to share

4. Love to eat and play

5. There are some problems

Therefore, we don’t necessarily have to think of user operations as something that complicated. Instead, we should find the core active members and give them multi-angle topics to stimulate discussions, which may help to increase the activity of the group.

About conversion and monetization - from focusing on results to focusing on process

Focus on results: The entire process serves the results, and not much attention is paid to user experience.

So far, we have seen that the common practice is that after users enter the community through the lead-in courses or lead-in benefits, they have a simple experience, and then they use limited-time discounts to guide you to place an order.

Doing this will indeed be effective, but if the lead-generating product does not provide a good experience, it will be difficult for users to place an order. This is why some users complain that the experience is designed specifically to cheat users.

Focus on the process: Results are only incidental, user experience comes first.

What this means is that by providing good products and services in the early stages, interacting with users in the process, collecting feedback, and providing good service to users from their perspective, we can get users to place orders through care + word of mouth + user recognition + discounts. This is the way to place orders in the future.

This may sound a bit vague, so let me explain it this way. In the past, we collected feedback from users after the service was completed. In the future, we will optimize our products and services based on users' real-time feedback, allowing users to grow together with our products and services. This brings trust. Users have a high level of trust in you, and the difficulty of closing a deal will be greatly reduced no matter what product you sell.

Summarize:

Based on the premise of achieving the unity of business goals and user goals, we have sorted out the core model of community operation. This model is not a methodological model, but the most essential model of community operation.

Author: Zhizhong

Source: Shixian Operation (yyshixian)