Community operation: How to build a high-value community from 0-1?

First, let me explain a concept. What is a growth community?

I believe everyone has seen posters like the one below. This type of poster was very popular last year. It has a very high traffic-generating efficiency and can establish hundreds of WeChat groups with hundreds of people overnight.

We call the community built in this way an explosive community . This type of community will generate hundreds of WeChat groups through early fission and drainage activities, and these WeChat groups often complete their historical mission after the course is completed and gradually become dead groups and advertising groups .

What distinguishes a hit-type community is a growth-type community . Compared with a hit-type community, a growth-type community has a longer-term vision and tests the operational skills of the community owner more. Correspondingly, the community owner will gain a higher sense of accomplishment from the operation.

Growing communities mainly enhance the core value of the community through thoughtful community services and content output, combining community information, community services, content output and product marketing, and ultimately building a complete three-dimensional ecological operation system.

After introducing what a growth community is, let’s move on to the topic of the speech: How to build a valuable growth community?

▲Funnel model of growing communities

Step 1: Who are my seed users?

Operators who have done various operations-related work such as community operation or product operation know the importance of seed users. Seed users can set the tone for the community’s group commonality from the very beginning. The stronger the group commonality among community users, the more consistent the community’s content and value output will be, and the corresponding product sales conversion rate will be higher.

How to find the "group commonalities" of the user group as accurately as possible and conduct user portrait analysis is a task that must be done in the early stages of community operation.

If you want to find seed users, you first need to analyze the following 6 questions:

1. What is the community positioning?

What is the positioning of your community and what value can you provide to community members?

2. What are the specific characteristics of the target population?

What are the specific characteristics of this group of people in terms of gender composition, age distribution, geographical distribution, and occupational distribution? What are consumption capacity and consumption propensity?

3. What are the active times and places of the target population?

Where on the Internet does this group of people like to be active (Tieba, Zhihu, Douban or other public accounts)? What time period is more active?

4. What kinds of things are they interested in?

What values ​​do they have? What kind of content can attract them?

5. What methods can be used to attract them?

How to summarize things that are suitable for them based on their interests, such as courses, physical products, etc.

6. How to filter out non-precise users?

For example, by setting a certain charging threshold, or building a community through an invitation system or task system, you can effectively screen out non-precise users.

▲User portrait analysis chart

After analyzing these 6 questions, you will have a clear idea on how to select seed users.

Step 2: What can I offer?

Now comes the second step: What can I offer?

At the sharing session, Teacher Gu Yin asked the audience a question: " As a community, what value can you provide? "

Before answering this question, we first need to know: What kind of value do most users want to obtain when they join a community?

From a rational perspective, they join communities in order to achieve personal growth and accumulate resources, including but not limited to money, experience, knowledge, connections, etc.

On an emotional level, they join communities to increase their social currency, have more social capital, and be able to better present themselves in front of their friends.

From a humanistic perspective, they join communities to find more people with similar interests and values, and work together to achieve a long-term goal that they identify with.

After understanding the value they need to obtain, the corresponding community owners will know what kind of value they can provide, and create their own community around this point to continuously output valuable content.

Teacher Gu gave two examples:

① For many years, Mr. Gu has insisted on modifying the resumes of working professionals so that they can find suitable jobs in the workplace as soon as possible and meet their needs for personal growth. This seemingly small move has helped many people a lot and fulfilled many people's job-hunting dreams. This is the value that a community owner can provide personally.

② A certain entrepreneurial community has been connecting with a large number of entrepreneurs for a long time, linking isolated islands together and establishing a harmonious relationship of mutual trust and mutual help. In addition to enabling entrepreneurs to grow, this community also allows them to find a large number of people with common values ​​in the community and grow with them. This is the value that the community as a whole can provide.

Step 3: Planning the community growth path

Teacher Qiu Ye once summarized the five elements of a community in his "Community Marketing Practical Manual", namely: like-minded people, structure, output, operation, and replication. These five elements correspond to the three development stages of the community. It is most appropriate to plan the community route based on these five elements.

Community 1.0: Like-minded people + structure

This stage is the community’s traffic generation stage, and it is also the stage for community information dissemination and advertising display. During this stage, community owners need to accurately position themselves, set group rules and entry thresholds, find their own seed user groups, and form an initial community.

In addition to finding the seed user group, the community at this stage must also conduct a preliminary design of the community structure, define each role in the community, and prepare for subsequent development.

Community 2.0 stage: output + operation

This stage is the service stage of the community and also the stage for carrying out refined operations. The core of community operation at this stage is to build community atmosphere and pay attention to user emotions. Community owners need to understand the needs of group members in a timely manner and provide feedback, and use a variety of operational methods to enhance user trust.

At the same time, this stage is also the stage of steady output of community value. Community owners need to find a way to stably output content (such as UGC combined with PGC) to ensure the frequency of content output and increase the value of the community step by step.

Community 3.0: Replication

After the initial construction in stage 1.0 and the refined operation in stage 2.0, the community in stage 3.0 already has a relatively complete ecological system. Community owners need to improve this system and replicate and promote it to form a community matrix with large groups as the main body and small groups as the auxiliary.

This stage is also the monetization stage of the community, and the value generated by the early long-term operations will burst out in this stage.

Step 4: Find seed users

After talking about the conceptual things, let’s talk about some practical things: How to find seed users?

First of all, before taking this step, we have already drawn a portrait of the community users and have a certain understanding of the dynamic direction of this group. There are many corresponding methods to find seed users on this basis. The three methods introduced by Teacher Gu Yin are very representative.

Method 1: Send a group message to friends to invite them to join

You don’t need too many seed users, so if you already have a certain number of friends, you can start by exploring them from your own friend chain, edit a sincere message, and then send it to a group of people to see how many of your friends are willing to develop the community with you. These members are not only the core users of the early group, but will also become valuable resources for the community in the future.

Method 2: Discuss with the group owner and exchange resources

If the potential user profile of your community has a high degree of overlap with the member profile of an existing mature community, you can find such a community to exchange resources in order to acquire your seed users. For example, calligraphy communities and traditional Chinese medicine communities both have a majority of their audiences consisting of middle-aged people, and there is no competition between the communities. This is an excellent channel for acquiring community members.

Method 3: Drain traffic through online activities

The fission and traffic-generating tactics commonly used by popular communities are also applicable to growing communities.

But unlike the former, the traffic to growth communities often sets certain thresholds first. For example, the course price is set between 19 and 49 yuan. The price of courses is not high, but it can effectively screen out low-quality users and prepare for subsequent refined operations.

Method 4 (Editor’s supplement): Find a group and join it through Douban, WeChat, Tieba, etc.

Communities such as Douban, WeChat, and Tieba all have search functions. With the help of precise keywords, you can find the corresponding WeChat group. After joining the group, you can add friends to form your own seed user pool. Although this method is clumsy, it is a good solution for community owners who lack connections in the early stages.

In addition to online methods, actively participating in offline activities related to the target user group and mixing with them is also a way to acquire seed users.

Step 5: Community Service

Community service is an important means to enhance the value of the community. It can help community owners create the overall atmosphere of the community and enhance the stickiness of community members. It is also an important part of the community 2.0 refined operation stage.

Different types of communities provide different community services. Take the communities that Xingxiu cooperates with as an example. The singles dating community "Singles Star Chief" aims to organize rich and interesting activities for single young people, so that they can find their ideal partner through long-term interaction; the calligraphy learning community "Keyi Study Room" will use WeChat group live broadcasts and other methods to conduct lectures and answer questions, so that group members' questions can be answered as soon as possible.

Although the services provided by different communities vary, the basic principles are the same: to provide high-quality community services that suit the characteristics of corresponding user groups.

▲A "30-day learning plan for product novices"

The following are several ways to improve community services introduced by Teacher Gu Yin for your reference:

The simplest violence: red envelope activities

Red envelope activities are the simplest and most violent way, but there is also a requirement for red envelope activities: do not simply distribute red envelopes. Red envelopes are a powerful tool for attracting attention, but if this attention cannot be used to gain exposure, its value will be greatly reduced.

In this sharing session, Teacher Gu Yin introduced several interesting red envelope gameplay cases, such as:

① The offline barbecue restaurant community holds red envelope activities on a regular basis every day, and the person who grabs the highest red envelope will be eligible to drink free beer.

② Online activity communities send out red envelopes when the activity is about to begin to attract everyone’s attention and let everyone know that the activity is about to begin.

③ Product marketing communities offer certain benefits and let group members send out red envelopes to create an atmosphere. For example, if two VIP memberships for the entire network's film and television programs are given out, the seventh group member who sends out a red envelope can get it. In this way, a large number of group members can be mobilized to send red envelopes.

▲The community service case presented by Teacher Gu Yin at the sharing session

Get active regularly: Regular activities

The biggest feature of regular activities is that they can be regularly planned and used as part of community culture construction, contributing to the overall atmosphere of the community and the sense of belonging of its members.

For example, in children-related communities, most of the group members are parents. How can we use regular activities to adjust the atmosphere when there are no classes on weekdays? It's very simple. You can motivate middle-aged people by means of some interesting activities that they generally like.

The regular activities of knowledge payment are undoubtedly homework and check-ins. The 21-day check-in activity initiated by Youshu last year was imitated by countless knowledge payment communities. In addition to mobilizing the atmosphere of the community, this method can also provide the community with a large amount of UGC resources, and therefore it is loved by the majority of community owners.

Product marketing communities will also initiate promotional activities such as group buying and bargaining among friends. On the one hand, this is to promote the products, and on the other hand, it is also to hype up the community and create momentum for subsequent community marketing.

Periodic activities: regular live broadcasts

In addition to organizing activities, regular live lectures are also a common way of community service. Many community owners related to knowledge payment and e-commerce marketing will teach through community live broadcasts. In addition to delivering community value, live teaching can also bring community owners and group members closer together and enhance their sense of trust.

Teacher Gu Yin introduced the case of a lawyer community. This lawyer community has a fixed one-hour free Q&A time every week. The community owner uses this one hour to answer questions from community members for free. If you want to find a lawyer for legal advice during other time periods, you have to add WeChat for a paid consultation.

The significance of free consultation lectures is, firstly, that they can actually answer some of the questions of community members and enhance their stickiness; secondly, they can fully demonstrate the professionalism of lawyers. When subsequent community members have some urgent legal issues that need consultation, they will immediately think of this community as having a very good lawyer to consult, thus completing the transformation of the community.

At the sharing session, a friend raised this question: Activities can indeed bring community activity, but after the activities the community will return to silence, what should we do?

The solution provided by Mr. Gu Yin is: ① Prepare an "ammunition depot" and store some interesting short videos and short stories, and release them when needed to activate the community. ② Cultivate a few core users and let them emerge and activate the community at the right time.

▲The community service case presented by Teacher Gu at the sharing session

Step 6: User Growth/Advancement

At different stages of community development, the emphasis of setting user screening mechanisms varies, but no matter at which stage, it is very important to provide different services based on user growth/advancement.

1. Develop a multi-tiered reward mechanism during the event to screen KOLs

Set up gradient rewards in the event, for example, give different rewards for inviting 5, 20, or 100 people. The principle behind this is a bit similar to a high school math test. When an exam paper does not have a set of tiered difficulty levels, most people will get similar scores, so the teacher will not be able to determine who are the top students and who are the average students (the poor students will basically remain poor students).

Similarly, setting up gradient rewards in community activities can mobilize KOLs from different levels to use their own resources to expand. While fully meeting user needs, it can also help community owners screen out high-quality KOLs and provide strong support for subsequent community development.

2. Set up multi-level course options to give users more room for improvement

As the community continues to develop, the number of community users is also growing. If the initial model is continued, the higher-value members in the community will encounter bottlenecks in their subsequent growth. When the community cannot provide them with corresponding advanced value, their stickiness to the community will weaken, and they may even leave the community.

Therefore, when setting up community courses, community owners also need to set up certain advancement mechanisms to meet the needs of high-value members.

This is best reflected in the Keyi Calligraphy Community, which cooperates with Xingxiu. As a gathering place for calligraphy enthusiasts, they have launched a variety of advanced courses for various types of calligraphy. At the same time, they have also launched corresponding calligraphy tool packages specifically for these calligraphy learners, and even carried out group operations to allow people with different needs to enjoy different services.

Step 7: Social Media

What are the ways to spread the community? The most common one is event communication.

Whether it is the course learning activities commonly used by knowledge payment communities, the group buying activities commonly used by marketing communities, or the offline activities often organized by activity communities, they can all bring good communication effects to the community.

In addition to regular activities, social media brands or products can also be widely disseminated through marketing tools such as sharing and unlocking, collecting likes, and distribution promotion. However, before using these marketing tools, remember: a good blacksmith must first sharpen his own tools.

What channels can be used for communication communities? The two most common ones are:

1. WeChat group promotion

Since group resources can be used to find seed users, these community resources can naturally be used when promoting the community. Of course, please discuss with the group owner before promoting. After all, you are in someone else's place, so basic etiquette is still required.

2. KOL’s friend relationship chain

The reason why we emphasized the selection of KOLs is that KOLs have a broad network of friends. By leveraging their network of friends to conduct social communication, we can effectively expand the community.

Summarize

The core of community operation is to connect a group of people together and work together towards a common goal.

A high-value growing community can not only build a mature community operation system itself, but also bring together a large number of people with similar values ​​and help them realize their respective values. This is also the core goal and concept of the growing community.

Related reading:

1. Demonized growth, fission and community!

2. Community operation: How to create a good community atmosphere?

3. Community operation: 6 thoughts on community operation!

4. Community operation: How to use the community to achieve a daily turnover of one million?

5. Community operation: Why are more and more communities dying?

6. Community operation: How to increase the conversion rate of fission communities by 10 times?

7. Community Operation丨The essence and gameplay of "private domain traffic" in 2019!

8. Community operation: replicable community marketing case!

9. Community operation: 9 minefields of community marketing!

10. Community operation: teach you how to easily build a high-conversion rate community!

11. Community operation: operation skills of community content!

12. Community operation and promotion: How to build a successful community?

Author: Xingxiu

Source: Xingxiu (ID: HelloXingXio)