How can community operations improve community activity?

If you are engaged in community operation , you must have had the experience of the community frequently becoming unpopular and then "dying" soon after. Faced with this phenomenon, the author proposed the idea of ​​community topics and effectively improved community activity.

There are more and more communities on the market, but their activity levels are getting lower and lower!

Many people go through great pains and spend a lot of time and effort to attract a large number of fans, but end up being dead silent the next day. There are three reasons for this.

Reasons for community silence

1. The model is old-fashioned

Many communities are just copying others, with basically the same model and no new ways of playing. Once users become familiar with the routine and it no longer feels new, they will basically choose to leave the community.

2. Lack of value

People are profit-seeking. No one will participate in things that have no value or benefit, let alone participate for a long time.

3. No sense of topic

Some communities may be valuable and have rich content, but they may not be topical enough to attract users' attention and interest. Users will also choose to leave or remain silent.

Some books published in the past have mentioned the definition of community: a community is an online communication organization initiated based on certain interests, relationships, or events.
This definition is relatively comprehensive and covers almost all types of communities on the market.

However, we have discovered in our long-term community operations that topics are the core that truly attracts users to join the group and keeps them active. Interest, relationship, and event communities are just the three organizational forms that are most likely to allow users to generate topics and communicate.

Even if your community model is old-fashioned and the process is nothing new, as long as you grasp the key factor of "community topics", stably output and create topics of interest to users in the community, and let users communicate and interact, then your community will continue to attract users and maintain the community's activity and high monetization rate for a long time.

So how do we plan and create good community topics?

Creating social media topics

The first step is to optimize the community classification dimension

When many communities are first established, they may not have a unified goal or a selection of like-minded users, resulting in community users being basically not on the same channel. This makes it difficult to formulate and launch community topics. Even if it is forced out, it is difficult to arouse heated discussion.

The more common community classification dimensions on the market that are conducive to the launch of topics include: classification by interest, classification by relationship, classification by event, classification by region, etc. Some companies or organizations can divide them according to their own business logic.

For example, the Community Business School will be classified according to courses, including: money-making courses in circle of friends, traffic generation courses, user activation courses, marketing conversion courses, etc. Early childhood education can also be divided according to the age groups of children.

Step 2: Improve your topic mining skills

Usually, topics are not created out of thin air; they must be discovered and excavated. So how do we find more topics that users are willing to interact and communicate about?

You can check out current hot topics from relevant websites and channels.

It includes Weibo hot search list, new list popular content, portal popular content, Toutiao hot word analysis, Baidu Index, Baidu Hot List, WeChat Index, Douyin hot topics and other channels, combined with the social service itself to determine some topics.

Step 3: Evaluate the quality of topic delivery

You need to evaluate which topics are worth putting into the community and which topics users are willing to discuss and communicate about.

Below, I have counted some topics of all community interactions in the past two years, and found that there are 7 types of topics with the highest interactivity and discussion level, which are worth putting into the community, for your reference.

1. Hot Event Topics

Hot events have natural topic attributes. I found that the most interactive things in the community in the past were current hot events.

For example, during the Spring Festival in 2018, the hot topic of “What is Peppa Pig” triggered widespread discussion online. So we immediately launched the topic in the social network: "What New Year's gift will you prepare for your parents?" Triggering screen-sweeping discussions and interactions

Similarly, taking advantage of the hot topic of "Feng Shaofeng and Zhao Liying's marriage" in 2018, we immediately launched the question "Who is your idol? Do you have a partner?", which also aroused enthusiastic participation from group members.

2. Social and livelihood issues

In addition to hot events, group members are also very interested in social reputation topics that concern the public, because they are closely related to their own lives and are things happening around them.

For example, merchants on major food delivery platforms will give away some drinks in order to attract users. Some people think that drinking cheap free drinks is bad for the body, while others think it is good enough to give them to you and they are picky. So, we launched the topic in the community: "Would you drink the free drinks when taking out?"

Similarly, the price issue of standing and seated train tickets has always been a social topic, and some people think that standing tickets should be half price. So we also launched a related topic "Do you agree with half-price train tickets without seats?"

3. Gossip and secret topics

You have to know that human nature is to gossip. Some revealing or gossip-like topics can easily arouse the curiosity of group members and inspire them to participate in discussions and interactions.

For example, we once posted an article in the community titled "10 Secrets to Community Traffic Generation That You Don't Know", and the article ended up being the most read article of the month. It’s not that the quality of the article is so good, but the title aroused the curiosity of group members.

4. Topics from industry giants

Regarding topics about large companies, group members will participate to some extent and are willing to express a few of their own opinions. Especially when it comes to Douyin, Toutiao, Alipay, Starbucks, etc.

For example, the topic discussions we organized, such as "Would you rather use Alipay or WeChat Pay?" and "Which one do you prefer, Luckin Coffee or Starbucks?", all achieved good communication and discussion results.

5. Topics that resonate with people’s feelings

Occasionally playing the emotional card in the community, expressing feelings, triggering resonance among group members, can also form a good topic. On the one hand, community members join the group to seek material resources, and on the other hand, to find an outlet for their emotions.

For example, the sale of Renren, a website that accompanied countless people during their youth, moved many people. So we raised the topic in the group, "Renren has become a memory, share your past with Renren", and many group members said "full of memories" and shared their own experiences with Renren.

6. Topics about growth experience

Share some of the community’s growth experiences with group members, so that they have a sense of participation and belonging. They will also think of their own work and life experiences, which will also cause a resonance.

For example, on the first anniversary of our community, we posted topics in the group: "When did you join this community?" and "What pitfalls did you encounter when running the community?"

7. The community comes with its own topics

Each community has its own members and themes. Often, some deeds of its members or community activities will become topics that trigger discussion.

For example, one of the leaders of our Wanqun Alliance published a book about copywriting, so we also organized a related activity: "Members of the group can experience this book for free with only 10 yuan postage."

This activity triggered several days of discussion within the group. Some people are grateful for the community benefits, some are impressed by their own writing skills, and so on.

The above are some of the types of topics that are more likely to arouse discussion and activity, including hot events, social livelihood, gossip, industry giants, emotional resonance, growth experience, and community-generated topics. Create some topics reasonably and grasp this key factor of the community, and it will be difficult for your community to be inactive.

Finally, there are three points we would like to remind everyone about community topic planning.

Notes on creating topics

First, the topic is related

The content of community topics should be relevant to the community theme as much as possible. If you always post irrelevant topics, it will be difficult to continue to arouse discussion among group members. This will not only be detrimental to the development of the community, but will also turn the community into a worthless "dead group."

Second, control the rhythm

It is a good thing to post topics to make the community active, but it is not necessarily a good thing to be active day and night. Excessive discussions, speeches and too many invalid messages will bring some unnecessary disturbances to users.

Therefore, you can post at most one topic a day. If the atmosphere in the group is good today or people are still discussing previous topics, there is no need to post new topics.

Third, lower the threshold

The purpose of the topic is to guide more users to participate and discuss, not to confuse users, but to show how professional the community is. Therefore, the content of the topic must be something that everyone can answer and say a few words about, and the difficulty and threshold should be lowered as much as possible.

Author: Xiao Ge

Source: Xiao Ge (xueshequn08)