WeChat group traffic diversion and operation methods!

Nowadays, many people believe that WeChat groups are dead. After all, the cost of attracting traffic to WeChat groups is getting higher and higher, and the active time is getting shorter and shorter. In this case, how to revitalize a WeChat group?

1. Difficulties in WeChat Groups

This year, many people in the WeChat ecosystem feel powerless. The cost of attracting traffic to WeChat groups is getting higher and higher, and the time it takes for users added to WeChat groups to go from being lively to being quiet is getting shorter and shorter.

WeChat groups have a life cycle. Judging from the WeChat data circulating, the life cycle of WeChat groups in 2019 was generally only 3 days.

This means that the users we worked so hard to attract died in the WeChat group within a few days.

2. The glory of WeChat groups in those days

In addition to the increasingly shorter life cycle of WeChat group activity, the development of WeChat groups in the WeChat ecosystem has also experienced its own life cycle.

The peak of WeChat groups should be in 2017. In this year, many excellent products mainly based on the WeChat group model appeared in the WeChat ecosystem, such as Mint Reading (checking in for reading in WeChat groups) and Baby Plays English (moms teaching their babies to learn English and checking in in WeChat groups).

The popularity of WeChat groups gave rise to some new ways of playing:

1. WeChat groups for sales

In terms of sales conversion, for example, English Fluency’s low-priced paid WeChat groups convert into high-priced paid courses.

When we recruit community operations staff in Shanghai, we see a lot of resumes from people who use Fluent English. Why?

Because the community model of English Fluency is to recruit a lot of community operators and use low-priced courses to attract traffic (such as short-term courses below 99 yuan/month). After purchasing the low-priced courses, users enter the WeChat group. The community operator acts as the class teacher in the WeChat group to maintain the community, and users take classes in the group. After the class, the class teacher needs to convert the users in this group to ones with a higher average order value (such as a half-year course at 1,999 yuan).

Given this model, the community operation of English Fluency is not a basic operation to maintain user relationships but an operation with a sales nature. This type of operation has KPI requirements, high sales pressure, and relatively high staff turnover.

At that time, we would give priority to looking at resumes with a background in English Fluency. Operations based on sales KPIs were more in line with our business needs at the time than operations of a service nature.

2. WeChat groups for traffic generation

In terms of traffic generation, when WeChat groups were popular, many fission methods were spawned, such as poster fission.

Through a mobile phone poster with a QR code, scan the QR code to join the WeChat group and complete the fission task in the WeChat group. For example, you must forward the poster to your circle of friends before you can get the right to attend the class for free.

Through this method, it is easy to quickly create dozens or hundreds of groups of 100 people and generate tens of thousands of users.

The most classic one is the poster of New World that went viral at the beginning of 2018. However, starting from the second half of 2018, after WeChat imposed various restrictions on advertising guidance, the effect of this type of fission has been greatly reduced.

3. WeChat groups for service purposes

The most typical example is the emergence of many online fat loss camps in 2017. I know a mother who successfully lost 30 kilograms through her own perseverance after giving birth. She became a KOL in WeChat Moments and took the opportunity to open her own online fat-loss camp, teaching a group of mothers in the WeChat group how to lose weight after childbirth.

In addition to this niche fat-loss camp based on a certain KOL, many institutionalized and large-scale fat-loss camps have emerged this year, such as GetFit and Fit time. The main service model is to add users of the same period to a WeChat group to supervise and encourage each other, and check in in the group every day, post photos of food, and exercise.

This type of fat-loss camp has won the favor of many people born in the 1990s and 1995s and mothers, and can maintain profitability every month.

3. WeChat groups are not dead, they just moved to another battlefield

Although it is 2021 now, it is no longer possible to achieve the same level of WeChat group activity and rapid accumulation of users as in 2017.

The popularity of Mint Reading has long passed, and the screen-sweeping incident of New World has never happened again. It can even be said that operating WeChat groups has become an increasingly costly undertaking. However, in the second half of 2018, we saw the rise of community group purchasing.

WeChat groups are no longer a purely online business model, but have become a connection point from offline to online.

Before the first half of 2018, most of the examples I cited were purely online services. It was not until community group buying was discovered by investors that a crazy investment and financing journey began in 2018, with 2 billion US dollars entering this battlefield. The entire market paid attention to another value of WeChat groups.

In addition to being used to attract traffic and provide services like in 2017, WeChat groups have a better use: selling goods!

Although WeChat businesses have always been ahead of us, selling goods is what they have left over. However, the value of WeChat groups that was valued by mainstream businesses started with selling goods.

Community group buying is based on the group leader collecting group buying orders and using cash to purchase from the supply chain with higher bargaining power. People in the WeChat group can buy their favorite products at a lower price.

As the core node of the community, the group leader is the transit station for online orders and offline goods distribution, solving the last-mile problem that O2O has been unable to solve at high costs for so many years.

Community group buying is popular.

Soon after, more and more traditional e-commerce companies also saw the value of WeChat groups.

This year a new way of playing has emerged, called community group buying , and it has become very popular. Community group buying has broken through the geographical limitations of community group buying and returned to pure online group buying. The advancedness of community group buying lies in the fact that it draws on the successful experience of Pinduoduo and uses the group buying method; it also absorbs the core role of the leader of the community group buying, that is, the owner of the selling group, and can bargain with the supply chain in reverse.

As long as the owner of a sales group can find a way to obtain traffic and add users who are interested in certain products to a WeChat group, he can generate sales and profits in this WeChat group.

In addition to selling goods, WeChat groups also have another value, which is to store your potential users!

For example, the insurance category, which I have mentioned many times in my speeches. Snail Insurance Hospital and Xiaobang Planning, which are currently doing very well, are frantically launching WeChat public accounts to attract traffic, using free group classes to attract people who are interested in insurance, and adding them to the WeChat group to give them free classes.

After finishing the class in this WeChat group, the group will not be disbanded. Because insurance is a high-gross-margin and high-unit-price category, just because users don’t need it today doesn’t mean they won’t need it tomorrow. When he needs you, he will think of you and come to you on his own initiative.

Just like this, I feel that these insurance brokerage platforms should have accumulated a lot of free group courses.

Although these users do not buy insurance today, with the development of Internet insurance and the increasing awareness of people buying insurance online, one day they will take the initiative to click on the insurance advertisements in this group and spend dozens of dollars to consult this platform, becoming high-priced users who can be converted in the future.

It’s worth keeping such high LTV users in the group!

4. What is a “good” WeChat group?

Through the gameplay of some WeChat groups mentioned above, there are two types of WeChat group operations that are done well:

Category 1: User-controlled WeChat groups

The most typical example is Baby Playing English. There are clear roles and division of labor in the WeChat group of Baby Playing English, and the people who perform the roles are selected from the users. For example, in a WeChat group for learning English, the head teacher is a mother who is a loyal user of Baowan. The head teachers lead their own classes and create an atmosphere of competition and mutual encouragement. There is no need for the official to operate a large number of WeChat groups itself, which creates a good user atmosphere and saves a lot of operating costs.

The second category: groups with core roles, such as community group buying groups

Since the end of 2018, the most popular group buying group has been the community group buying group. We have conducted field research and lurked in some community group buying groups, and we found that they can really remain active. Because community group buying is based on the community and is centered around the group leader. Whether a community group buying group is active is closely related to the group leader. Some group leaders can maintain good relations with their neighbors. In the group, they are not only a seller, but also a close neighbor. In addition to shopping, people in the WeChat group also chat about family matters.

5. WeChat groups are not equal to social networks

I have talked about the changes in WeChat groups that I have seen in the WeChat ecosystem in recent years. I would like to share a few points:

1. Your group is not active, which does not mean that other groups are not active.

Although many people have heard of "private domain traffic" now, they want to add users to WeChat and want to create groups. However, in the process of creating a group, there are always many problems. For example, when adding traffic to the WeChat group, the WeChat group becomes as silent as death.

Then I will ask, can WeChat groups still be used? Are WeChat groups dead?

In fact, WeChat groups have always been alive, but they are being used well by different people to take advantage of different scenarios.

Just because your group doesn’t talk doesn’t mean other groups aren’t active. The community group buying groups and community group buying groups mentioned above are still very active.

2. WeChat groups are really just a tool for commercial purposes

There are so many examples listed above, all of which are about how different categories and different people in the business world use WeChat groups to attract traffic, split, sell, convert, and provide services.

When this WeChat group completes these missions, it can be declared dead, and there is no need for us to linger on it. Instead, we should find ways to continue to increase revenue and reduce expenditure.

Such WeChat groups are just a way to gather users together, not the community itself.

3. Communities are more likely to have souls

If we define a community as a group of people who come together based on something in common, such as a common background, identity, or interests. Moreover, this community has interaction and information flow, that is, people in the community contribute their views and serve as channels for each other's information output and input. Such a community is flexible and a living community.

If there are one or more core nodes in this community who can have a certain influence on the community, then such a community will survive longer.

Many people create WeChat groups without thinking clearly when creating them. They just invite people for the sake of inviting them or create groups for the sake of creating groups. Finally, a group of people were pulled into a group. This group of people has no core node and no soul, so such a group often has a shorter survival time.

VI. Conclusion

There is still a chance in WeChat groups now.

• Before creating a WeChat group, you can think about:
• What do I expect from this group?
• How many days can you predict this group can survive?
• What goal do I want to achieve with this group while I am still alive?
• If people in this group stop talking, how should I deal with it?
• How to reuse this group in the future?

Think about these things clearly, and maybe after the groups you created stop talking, you will also feel that the groups you created are worth creating!

(The above time points are based on my experience in the industry. If there are any inaccuracies, please feel free to correct me.)

Author: Lv Xuemei

Source: Exponential Growth Lab