How should community operations be done to make them valuable?

How to operate a community? How can we ensure that a community does not decline after it is established? What kind of value can your community provide to its members? Before answering these questions, you can read this article first.

The difficulty for chain brands to build communities is that they cannot have unified management and each store operates independently. I once learned that a certain brand had hundreds of stores. In order to maintain customers, a community was established. The method of establishing the group was that the headquarters asked the store managers to create their own groups, and the stores were responsible for the operation and maintenance themselves.

In the end, the brand headquarters has not yet established an effective management system, let alone how many communities it has built? How many fans do you have? How active is the community? Is there a good handover of the community after the store manager leaves? Is the community developing as expected? The operations staff at the headquarters knew nothing about it, and ultimately the community operations failed.

The platform I work for is a nationally renowned baking company with more than 400 chain stores. When I took over the user operation project, the first thing I did was to build a community operation system for the company.

Compared with the membership system, the community system is simpler. It does not require a complicated CRM management system, and does not require online and offline connections. What we do is to establish communities for stores and further retain customers through the communities. So here comes the question:

1. How can we build a community among 400 stores and how can we manage it?
2. How to produce daily operational content and how to spread it to numerous communities?
3. Who will respond to fans’ daily interactions and who will respond to fans’ ordering requests?
4. How to manage community order? What should I do if I am trapped in an advertising group?
5. How to measure the effectiveness of community operations?

Based on the above issues, first of all, communities cannot be built by relying on stores. A store usually has 2-3 people at the front desk, who simply do not have the energy to maintain a community. So who will do it?

The answer is the operations staff at the headquarters. I guess there is a question: there are at least five or six hundred groups in four hundred stores. How many community operations staff does the headquarters need to recruit? My answer is that a full-time community operations staff is enough.

This is inseparable from the community system we are talking about. The following are the five major systems in the operation strategy:

System 1: Community new member acquisition system

Before recruiting fans, you must first clarify what the community can bring to the fans? This is how to clearly define the community.

Most of the communities we have seen are for the purpose of communication and promotion. After joining the group, the content you see is mostly event promotion information, which causes a certain degree of disturbance. The life cycle of fans is generally short, and the community becomes stagnant or suffers serious loss after operating for a period of time.

We have clearly positioned our community as creating a convenient purchasing experience.

This positioning determines that the operation direction of the community is mainly based on fan experience. In actual operations, we will respond to all requests of fans. For example, if fans want to order a cake, they only need to say they want to order a cake in the group, and the robot will respond to the fan as soon as possible to reduce the bad experience caused by fans feeling that no one is paying attention to them.

The community manager will then follow up on the fans' specific needs, and turn the fans' needs into work orders and send them to the store. The store will receive the order and deliver the goods to the door. We require that the fans' needs must be met within 5 minutes of the entire purchasing process, which is far better than the experience of customers placing an order after consulting customer service online or going to the store to place an order on the spot.

Based on our operational positioning of creating a convenient purchasing experience, our community is still maintaining strong vitality after more than a year of operation. The reason is that we have created a better experience.

In terms of specific new customer acquisition strategies, we will target new customers based on the demographics of the store’s location, as follows:

From the strategy map, we can see that it is impossible to achieve a one-size-fits-all approach when attracting new customers. The user characteristics of different business districts and communities are completely different, so there must be differences in the language used to convey to customers when attracting new customers.

For example, in community stores, customers are mainly community residents, and older people are the main consumers. This group of people cares about whether they can get benefits by joining the group. When attracting new customers, the store should focus on explaining in one sentence what benefits the customers will get when they pay and leave.

In business district stores, the main customers are white-collar workers. This group of people are not very sensitive to discounts, but are more concerned about the experience they get after joining the group. The stores will focus on introducing social activities such as baking classes, tasting and evaluation.

System 2: Fan Activity System

The most taboo thing in community activities is to deviate from the essential needs of fans. Generally, when fans join a group, we can think from the perspective of a customer: what is the purpose of fans joining this group?

Someone said, I let fans come in to get discounts, so I send group buying, flash sales and discount activities to the group every day, but after a long time, I found that all the fans have left.

Some people say that when fans come in, I let them know what activities the store is holding or send coupons to customers first, but over time, the community becomes less attractive to fans, and fans quit the group because they can't stand the disturbance.

Before we organize an event, we need to answer a question from our fans: What does this group do?

First of all, we named the group directly as xx store welfare group, which hits the heart. Welfare is the most direct reflection of fans’ needs, and you can get benefits by joining the group.

Secondly, after the fan joins the group, the robot will initiate a welcome for the new member. At this time, the robot’s welcome message will tell the fan what benefits they can get by joining the group, and give the fan a new member gift certificate, which the fan can redeem for a product in the store.

Again, we will hold fixed welfare activities for fans every week, and inform fans which welfare activities can be participated in every day in the form of a fan welfare calendar.

• Group member price benefits: Group member price is a fan-exclusive benefit. Only fans in the group can enjoy a price that is more attractive than the member price. This is equivalent to giving fans a very large discount to meet fans' demand for discounts.
• Exclusive activities: Regularly recruit fans in the group for store tasting and new product evaluation. When selecting fans, we prefer those who frequently participate in group interactions and are extremely passionate about the brand, so as to meet fans' needs for social interaction.
• Talent campaign: We hope that fans can contribute more high-quality content, build a fan community, and form a good complement with the social network.

Fans who frequently promote products will be given priority to enter our expert database and given certain growth incentives. Fans selected as experts will enjoy the brand's supreme treatment. We will even invite expert fans to participate in the company's annual meeting, and the chairman will personally present honorary certificates on the stage to meet fans' needs for identity recognition.

System 3: Fan Content System

Content is the most valuable aspect of fan operations. With good content, products can be deeply rooted in people's hearts. If general content is produced solely by the official, it is undoubtedly self-talk, because no matter how good a copywriter is, it cannot compare to a senior fan's understanding of the product and grasp of the feeling. The content written will be flashy and empty.

How to produce content? The details are as follows:

There are three major sources of content output, namely fan UGC, PGC and official output. In the process of specific fan content operations, fans need to be managed in a layered manner.

First, we need to divide the content into those that are often produced and those that are not, manage the tags of the fans, and gradually guide the productive ones to the expert level; in this way, ordinary fans contribute UGC content, which will form a reputation for the product, while expert fans contribute PGC content;

The official usually provides guidance and promotion, telling fans what direction to write in and what content other ordinary fans most want to see.

When a high-quality post is published, it is a loss if no one reads it, so the official must spread it in the existing community, and let other ordinary fans participate in the interaction by burying red envelopes in the reply posts. The experts will actively reply and gradually form a trusting relationship with the fans.

System 4: Community Tool System

It is very important for the community to have a powerful tool system. First of all, there must be a robot. In order to avoid suspicion of advertising, we will not talk about what specific robot to use, but the robot can help you do many things.

• Help you break the 100-person limit of WeChat group QR code and freely pull 500 people;
• Welcome fans to the group and tell them what the fan community is about;
• When fans have needs, we will respond to you as soon as possible;
• Fans who post advertisements can warn or kick people out on behalf of the group owner;
• Block malicious people from entering the group to promote the content, so that the community always has a green communication environment;
• Protect your group name from being maliciously modified forever;
• …

Secondly, you have a tool to count fans, otherwise do you have to rely on manual counting of more than 600 communities? Obviously unrealistic.

Data analysis tools can help you clearly know how many fans each store has, how active it is, the quitting rate, how many people actively invited how many people, etc. Data operation is the key.

Finally, you have fan service tools. Of course, it would be better to develop some small programs by yourself, so that fans can pre-order bread, breakfast, collect opinions, hold small festival activities, etc., to create a warm pre-sales and after-sales experience community.

System 5: Community Management System

The operation and management of the store is very simple. In addition to attracting new customers, the most important thing is for the store to provide a good fan service experience.

The essence of fan operation lies in providing a service. When the community was being built, my colleagues were worried that the community would become a customer complaint group. Some people also explicitly opposed it, saying that they were worried that a small problem would be over-magnified by one customer, causing a chain reaction.

My view is that I am not afraid of fans’ complaints, but I am afraid of fans avoiding the problems. Therefore, during the operation of the community, we strongly encourage fans to vent their dissatisfaction in the group.

In response to fans’ complaints, stores must first correct their attitude and actively respond to all fans as soon as possible with a positive attitude towards the problem; secondly, understand the reasons for fans’ dissatisfaction and comfort them; and finally, be brave enough to take responsibility.

For example, some fans’ drinks spilled and their bags were damaged because the store staff did not pack them properly. The store will reply directly in the group and the fans can come back to get a free product. Another time, a fan took a photo of a fly landing on a product shelf in the store. The store immediately apologized and scrapped all the freshly baked bread and threw it into the trash bag.

Under the supervision of fans, the store did not suffer uncontrollable losses due to a small problem. On the contrary, the attitude of courage to take responsibility won the approval of most fans, allowing fans to buy and eat with confidence.

As for the operation of community stewards, community stewards are the best helpers to assist the headquarters in managing the community operations of all stores, and are also the cornerstone for ensuring the effectiveness of the entire community operations. The previous article "Community Operation Practice: How to Build and Operate 600 Communities" explains the steward's recruitment system, steward's task system, steward's incentive system, steward's exit mechanism, etc.

The qualifications of the housekeeper are generally selected from among the fan influencers, which is the most important point. Our selection of housekeepers is even more stringent than recruiting an operator. First of all, they must be loyal fans of the brand and their understanding of the products must even exceed that of store employees. Therefore, we select fans who frequently visit the store.

Secondly, you need to have good writing or photography skills. We will ask the housekeepers to promote their favorite products in the form of tasks and recommend them in the community. This will drive ordinary fans to understand the products and thus play a role in promoting and educating the products.

Regarding the daily order management of fans, we set two lines: what can be tolerated and what cannot be tolerated. The tolerance range is that fans can forward third-party mini-programs and content into the group. At this time, the robot will remind them once. If they do not listen to the reminders for multiple times, the community manager or store manager will manually remove them from the group.

The intolerable scope is forwarding unhealthy content, forwarding micro-business content, privately adding group friends, and directly pulling people from the group into other groups. Such fans are usually directly added to the blacklist by robots. Once on the blacklist, fans can no longer join any group.

Having a good community communication environment can maximize the fan experience and avoid fan loss. This also ensures that our community has not entered a death cycle after operating for a year. The average community activity remains at around 40%, and the average monthly repurchase rate of fans is as high as around 45%.

After the above five systems are built and combined with social media data for in-depth operations, we believe that the community will be able to bring good fan stickiness to major chain brands. Once you have a base of loyal fans, you can then carry out other operational activities with full participation guarantee, and if you do fan fission at the right time, the fission will spread rapidly. In a nutshell: whoever wins the fans wins the world.

Related reading:

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Author: Zhao Wenbiao

Source: User Operation Observation (ID: yunyingguancha)