Everyone is talking about communities, how do we build them? How to operate a community? How to monetize the community?

Products must be innovative, solve problems and reach the extreme. First of all, your community concept must be innovative, able to help some people solve their problems and needs and reach the extreme, then your community is a valuable and good product.

How to build a community?

The word "community" became popular in 2015. First, let us give a simple definition of community. A community is simply a group, but a community needs to have some forms of expression of its own. For example, we can see that a community must have a social relationship chain. It is not just about creating a group but about bringing people together based on a point, need and hobby. We believe that such a group is a community.

So how do you start building a community? Brother Basang summarizes the four key points of building a community for us as follows:

1. There must be a clear purpose for creating a group. You should know what you want the group to do and what content it wants to express, and then launch a call to establish a community. As long as you grasp one important point, you can start implementing it.
2. The core values ​​must be clearly reflected, so that it will be easier to build a community, such as a love of cycling and traveling.
3. In order for your ideas to be recognized by the public, first of all, the community you have established must have its own values. At the same time, it must have its own ideas and attitudes, and share them with everyone. Only when they are recognized by the majority of people can you attract the public to your community.
4. Products must be innovative, solve problems and reach the extreme. First of all, your community concept must be innovative, able to help some people solve their problems and needs and reach the extreme, then your community is a valuable and good product.

The one-to-one travel social platform created by Brother Basang is an example of an innovative concept. In the early stage of establishing the platform, he was also exploring core seed users on major forums and Weibo. This was a relatively difficult process. Later, he discovered that he could do it through his own "a group" platform. A group is first added to some groups, and then recommended out, such as some fan groups that love traveling. He would help everyone promote it first, and when the number of fans in the community reaches a certain number, he would call on these fans to join his own group. Brother Basang said that joining a "group" was an accidental opportunity, but it was of great help to him. He got to know many friends from various industries, and when he wanted to do a certain project, he could easily find specific people, and his target was very precise.

How to effectively maintain and operate a community?

First of all, you must pass the "group rules". When you establish a community, you must have a clear set of group rules and constantly improve them. No matter how many groups there are, they will all be exhausted one day. "A group" not only promotes high-quality groups, but also these good group rules. When the fan base reaches a certain amount, a group is convened according to the group rules, and the group rules are continuously clarified and improved during the operation process. At this time, the group rules can reversely establish a high-quality group in the account. A good group rule can efficiently and quickly establish a high-quality group, and secondly, it can better maintain and develop the group in the long term.

So what is a good boutique group? There are four criteria:

1. The group rules are clear. A good boutique group must have clear group rules and guidelines at the beginning of its establishment;
2. Distinct themes, such as new media , basketball, entrepreneurship , parenting , and other theme groups;
3. The crowd is accurate and the community theme is clear, so the crowd positioning must be accurate, and it is best if they are familiar with each other;
4. Regularly organize online and offline activities, especially offline activities. The best way to maintain and develop a group is interaction. Offline interactive activities can better promote the development of group relationships.

Take the circle of girlfriends as an example. They have more than 200,000 fans, which is a large number. There are seven or eight people maintaining it. To maintain such a large fan community, they rely on offline activities. They initially held large-scale activities, and then gradually dispersed to small-scale in-depth gatherings and salons offline. The emphasis here is on depth. The offline community activities you organize do not have to be large-scale, and the key is not the number of participants, but whether your offline activities are deep enough. A thematic offline activity can actually help them solve problems or achieve the purpose and significance of your event and have a profound impact. This is a successful offline activity.

To operate a community efficiently, we need to enhance interactivity, plan high-quality activities, and build a management team with a unified structure and perfect framework to stimulate participation, formulate a long-term and effective community development plan and perfect group rules, maintain an open and altruistic attitude, build a platform to integrate resource advantages for promotion, make good use of the fan economy, learn to decentralize and build community leaders, and always keep conveying the core values ​​of the community.

How to realize community fan economy?

There are two monetization models for WeChat communities: direct monetization and indirect monetization.

• Direct monetization models include paid WeChat groups , where online lectures are held and charged, or other paid activities are organized, such as auctions, selling books and courses, making products, etc. For example, there is a friend in our group who set up a group and charged 10 yuan per person. He then invited ten friends who were good at WeChat operations to share lectures in the group. This is a profit model that directly monetizes.
• The indirect monetization model is to use your community as a media platform to maintain fan relationships rather than to generate direct profits. For example, you set up a WeChat group, through which you get to know many people in the same industry and expand your network of contacts. This does not generate direct income, but is mainly indirect monetization. Many companies also set up their own WeChat groups and fan groups to carry out maintenance, which are all ways to achieve indirect monetization in the long-term operation process.

If you are a businessman and you have your own products, which may be maternal and child products, or parent-child products, you can create a community that brings together mothers, infants, and parents. First, you rely on your own values ​​to attract a group of people and reach a consensus on the concept. Finally, you sell the products and return to the transaction to realize commercial monetization. This may be the most direct community business model, and many people may dislike it, but if they are businessmen, their ultimate goal is to sell products.

What is the role of the community?

• Create a certain sense of attraction and reduce the user's credit cost to you;
• It may change people’s consumption concept - turning pre-consumption into post-consumption

For example, in the past, people bought houses as pre-consumption and bought cars as post-consumption, because cars are consumable goods and require money to maintain, and the cost may eventually exceed the cost of buying the car, which is a post-consumption model. The influence of the community may turn pre-consumption into post-consumption. For example, real estate developers used to require payment before selling a house, but in the future, you may be able to live in a house for free. However, you must consume at the supporting facilities suppliers that the developer cooperates with, such as supermarkets, home decoration, properties, schools, etc. You must consume at their designated places for a certain number of years, such as shopping in supermarkets and sending your children to school. This is equivalent to a set of consumption binding. Developers use free services to attract consumers in the early stage, and use a long time to recover funds and realize monetization in the later stage.

For example, in the traditional online lecture model, people pay to attend the lectures, and there are people who record the lectures on site, write them down and submit them to major media platforms. If we use the community model now, then you are my student, and we use the crowdfunding model to take classes. In that case, you need to find people around you to pay for you to attend the lectures, and then give back to those who crowdfund for you. You can create a group to share this course, share your course notes and insights, and others will be equivalent to listening to that lecture course. In the past, lectures had to be promoted by oneself, but now, through the community model, every student can help you promote the content, the influence continues to expand, and the sense of participation of community fans is realized, reflecting one's own value.

For example, if you operate a recruitment community and join the community, the HR in the group can recommend you to major companies, but you must demonstrate your industry-related execution or planning capabilities. The community can plan an offline event and call on group members to help the HR group plan offline activities. First of all, you can demonstrate your planning and execution capabilities in front of many HRs in the group. They will help you to recommend you and let the HRs of companies related to the event see your capabilities. This is a win-win activity. The community has achieved the best event promotion effect, and you can also get offers from it. The group owner relies on his own resources to drive group members to help with publicity and marketing for the community, while also receiving feedback from group members.

The “Four Senses” of a Community

• Mysterious, a small community that started from scratch, with core values, not easily recruiting people, only selecting the best, and accurately targeting group members
• Sense of ritual: entering a community requires a ritual, spiritual or real, which is a manifestation of spiritual values.
• Collective sense of honor, the community actively launches online activities to encourage group members to participate in activities and exchanges, and enhance the promotion effect
• To create a sense of participation, we continuously hold offline activities to allow everyone to have in-depth exchanges with questions and goals. We don’t have to care about the number of people, but the depth.

Summarize

1. Clear spiritual values ​​and core goals determine whether your community can be established quickly
2. The group rules should be clear and the group members should be accurate
3. Regular activities over a long period of time are the decisive factor in determining whether your community can survive for a long time.
4. Consumers are more inclined to pay for spirit rather than function, so the spiritual value should be highlighted.
5. The community may turn pre-consumption into post-consumption, and turn the previous high price into installment consumption.
6. Community crowdfunding model, many crowdfunding is completed through the community

The online lecture model of the community should not be "I listened, I watched, and I left", but "I listened, I spread, and gained a sense of participation and honor in the circle of friends". The community amplifies people's image in the online world.

Conclusion

In the future, communities will continue to grow, with one group generating another. Each group will synchronize information, interact, promote each other, connect resources, and complement each other, thus breaking down information silos.

Three key points about operating a community:

First, create content with attitude to attract popularity and resonance;

Second, creating a circle of interactions and allowing the community to interact on a large scale can help peer practitioners or entrepreneurs gain positive feedback on their value;

Third, mutual benefit comes from sharing. Everyone in the community is a beneficiary and a contributor at the same time. Through sharing and mutual benefit, this community will become stronger and longer-lasting.

Social needs to build a community

Whether it is the early stages of product or WeChat public account or community construction, a needs analysis theory is needed based on the five-level human needs theory proposed by American behavioral psychologist Maslow: physiological needs, safety needs, belonging, respect, and self-actualization.

The strongest needs are human beings' primitive instinctive desires, which religions call the seven deadly sins: sexual desire, laziness, arrogance, jealousy, anger, greed, and appetite.

Inspired by the needs hierarchy in the above examples, human needs are extracted and rearranged, and matched with scenarios to realize a community with core values ​​and clear purposes. Each product, the realization of a certain function or the deep spiritual pursuit is based on the above people's instinctive desires, and through continuous exploration, practice and summary, a real product, function and community are derived.

When you build or operate a community, you can refer to the above method to list and arrange your community needs and positioning. Analyze and extend the above human needs, reorganize and arrange them, and extract keywords to get the following:

• Health, food, clothing, housing, transportation, and fun
• Boredom, pleasure, participation, hobbies, curiosity, gossip, fun, prank
• Talk, complain, express oneself, feel a sense of existence, feel superior, honor, attention, praise, show off, show off
• Socializing, loneliness, sharing, sense of belonging, sense of security, group identity, etc.

WeChat communities have three major pain points and solutions

First, because of the closed nature of WeChat groups, they cannot be searched like QQ groups. In many cases, people in the group cannot add more accurate fans, and people outside the group cannot find a good WeChat group to join;

Second, many group owners are unable to effectively maintain a community due to time or ability constraints, which causes the WeChat group to become a spam group, a zombie group, or an advertising group.

The last pain point is that many group owners rely solely on interest to maintain the group and cannot do so for long.

Three solutions to pain points

First, in response to the closed nature of WeChat groups, a platform with media resources is provided to publish community information;

Second, establish a cooperative alliance of group owners, exchange and complement resources, and strengthen information exchange WeChat group management experience;

Third, establish a community with core values, effectively maintain and operate it through the team over the long term, regularly hold online and offline interactive activities, and finally realize the WeChat group monetization model.

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