4 "user retention" methods used by Facebook!

When talking about user growth, we often talk about "fission", but " user retention " is also a very important part. Taking Facebook as an example, the author of this article analyzes the four key points of "user retention" for everyone's reference and learning.

When it comes to user growth, I think a word comes to most people’s minds: "fission".

In this era where traffic is very expensive, growth has become the biggest challenge for all Internet companies, otherwise the word "fission" would not be so popular this time.

Most bosses’ understanding of fission is still at the stage of “bringing in 100,000 fans at low cost”, but we are not here to complain about the bosses today, so let’s get back to the topic.

1. Focus on retention before growth

Growth cannot be limited to attracting new customers. Attracting new customers is only one part of growth.

Just like the water in a pool, water keeps coming in and going out at the same time.

If the "water flowing out" is greater than the "water coming in", then the water in the pool will run dry sooner or later.

Now most companies’ new users come from “advertising”. If your average customer acquisition cost is 50 yuan.

Then the new user must complete more than three orders with you for you to break even. If the user leaves without placing an order, the 50 yuan advertising fee will be wasted.

As shown in the figure above, this is the relationship between user retention time and profit. Only when the user retention time is longer will consumption continue to be generated, and we can continue to make profits.

Therefore, if we want to expand the profits of our products, the best way is to extend the user lifetime value and improve user retention.

Therefore, compared to attracting new customers, it is more important to retain customers first. Only when retention is done well can the company's growth be meaningful. Stable retention means that the company's products are recognized by users and the market.

2. How to find behaviors that affect user retention?

I believe everyone has seen many retention cases, and has also heard of the concept of "magic number", such as the example of "adding 7 friends on Facebook within a week", which has basically become a standard case in the growth circle.

Have you ever thought about this when you saw this case?

1. Why add friends?
2. Why within a week?
3. Why 7 friends?

In fact, the essence of user retention is that users feel the value of the product. Only when users have a reason to stay will they stay.

So let’s go back to the example of Facebook. Since it is a social platform, how can you socialize without friends?

Without the act of adding friends, users would certainly not be able to feel the value of Facebook.

Why was it added within 10 days? You can take a look at the retention curve below.

The trend chart above has two very obvious intervals. I divide the two intervals in the chart into: selection period and stable period .

You can find that the curve is in a stable stage after the selection period, so Facebook has the logic within 10 days.

After 10 days, their product enters a stable period, but after the stable period, it also means that most of the users have been lost.

Therefore, within the 10-day selection period, users must feel the value of the product, that is, they must complete the action of "adding friends" within 10 days to stop the loss.

Why is 7 the magic number?

This is where I will focus next.

When we are working on user retention, we should focus on what those who stay do, rather than on those who leave.

There are many factors that influence user churn, but there is only one reason for user retention: they feel the value of the product .

Facebook discovered that the users who stayed had one thing in common: they all added more than 7 friends:

• When a user adds less than 7 friends, the fluctuation of churn is very large;
• When it reaches 7, the loss is very stable;
• When the number exceeds 7, the loss trend is not much different from when the number is 7.

Therefore, 7 is a watershed.

Therefore, how to retain users can be summarized in four sentences:

1. Find the selection period that suits you based on your product retention trend chart

There is no need to explain this further. Just look at the retention curve of your own product and see how many days it stabilizes. Then, before this deadline, you need to make users feel the value of your product.

2. Determine the core operating behavior of the product based on the product business model

For example: WeChat is a social product, and its core behaviors include adding friends, chatting, and posting to Moments; Zhihu is a knowledge community, and its core behaviors include browsing, following, liking, and posting.

3. Analyze the behavior of retained users and extract the magic number of the core behavior of such users

For example, Facebook is to add 7 friends, Twitter is to follow 30 people, NetEase Cloud Music is to collect 10 songs, etc.

4. Propose hypotheses, verify hypotheses, analyze results, and optimize products

Based on the user's node, actions, and level, we propose multiple retention hypotheses, then begin to verify the proposed hypotheses, analyze the results, and finally optimize the product.

3. How to improve user retention

Finding the behaviors that influence user retention is half the battle.

But we all know that users will definitely not follow the path we plan for them, and they will not do what we want them to do.

So what do we do?

Let’s take a look at what other Internet companies are doing!

Take Weibo as an example:

Weibo is the domestic version of Twitter, and I think everyone should have no objection to this. Since Twitter requires following 30 people, the same goes for Weibo. If you don’t follow them, where will the content come from?

Let’s take a look at how Weibo does it, as shown below:

When a new user registers on Weibo, Weibo will guide the user to follow bloggers of content that interests them.

Bloggers will provide some interesting and useful content every day to help Weibo retain new users, but what if users click [Skip] and don’t follow them?

Weibo also has a killer trick: the user growth system .

Weibo arranges all the key behaviors that affect user retention into daily tasks. By creating a task system, it uses points/money to drive users to complete the actions that the product wants them to complete.

Imagine, when users complete all the tasks in the picture above, can they feel the value of Weibo as a product?

Therefore, once you find the key factors that affect user retention, if you can create a new user growth system suitable for your own products, you can achieve twice the result with half the effort.

Currently, the new employee growth system has also been adopted by most domestic Internet products. I will give examples one by one soon. I believe that if you pay attention in your life, you will definitely notice it!

Related reading:

1. User operation: new funnel model for conversion analysis!

2. User operation: How to use B-side operation thinking to increase user growth?

3. Product operation: How to use data analysis to drive product user growth?

4. APP user growth: One model solves 90% of growth problems!

5.How to increase users? Take Pinduoduo and Xiaohongshu as examples

6. Triggering user growth: Is user operation just about attracting new users?

7. User operation: What else can you do to attract new users without fission users?

8. User operation: how can financial products awaken dormant users?

9. User operation: How to make use of private domain traffic?

Author: Zhong Yewei

Source: Operation Gongju Xiaoleilei (ID: gongjulei)