Community operation: How to build a high-quality and active community?

Communities have become a standard feature of Internet business, which is due to their high reach and high conversion. However, one thing that frustrates colleagues in operations is that community operations go from being active in the early stages to being quiet in the late stages very quickly, which makes it difficult to attract new users in the early stages and operations are very hard, but the final conversion effect is not satisfactory.

What are the characteristics of long-term active and high-quality communities? Let’s talk about what key points we need to pay attention to in each aspect of operation.

Be loyal to the goal and consider the overall situation

Community operation is also applicable to the AARRR model. It is inevitable to go through the stages of user acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and communication. However, if you want to build a healthy community and make the operation go smoothly until the revenue target is achieved, then:

First, it is necessary to clarify the operation goals, unify the operation goals and user needs, and be loyal to the goals from beginning to end, and specify reasonable phased goals and plans for each link;

Second, we take all aspects into consideration at any stage of operation, so that the community can be updated smoothly and healthily, constantly inject fresh blood, and continuously generate conversion and dissemination.

1. Set and execute reasonable operational goals

The ultimate goal of operation is conversion. As shown in the AARRR model, the operation of each link will lay the foundation for the subsequent links. If you want to achieve good results in this model and ultimately reach the revenue target, then the new user acquisition, activation, and retention links need to be based on the revenue target. We need to acquire, activate, and retain potential target users. The loss of non-target or potential users is not worth regretting, and may even be beneficial.

Therefore, goal setting is very important. This goal needs to be based on the revenue target to formulate reasonable community operation goals, and be specifically divided into goals for each link. This goal is not just about how many new users are attracted in a week, but how many potential target users are attracted in a week. It is not just about how many users are active, but how much high-quality content is generated. Only in this way can the community enter a virtuous circle and achieve the ultimate revenue target.

2. Consider the whole process at every stage

The various stages of the AARRR model in community operations do not operate in isolation: attracting new users is to prepare for active conversion and dissemination, and active conversion and dissemination help to continue attracting new users and expanding. As long as the first batch of users enter the community, we must begin to stimulate activity and promote conversion. Even if the community has reached a million levels, we still need to continue to attract new users in the early stages of operation.

Therefore, we must comprehensively consider the operational plan based on the operational objectives at each stage.

In the initial stage, it is necessary to consider whether the users brought in can achieve the conversion goals. If from the very beginning, you are in a hurry to achieve quick results and use inappropriate methods to operate non-target users in order to have good data to report to your boss, problems may arise in the operations of subsequent links, or you may be unable to reverse the direction in the mid-term and cause operational failure, or in order to maintain existing users, the operation direction may deviate further and further from the target, and completely declare operation failure at the revenue stage.

After accumulating a certain number of users, the main focus should be on retention, activation and conversion, but don’t forget to incorporate fission and new user acquisition into the activities. The opportunities for attracting new users at this stage are very good. A high-quality user must be surrounded by a group of high-quality users, and the fission effect is very good. Promoting dissemination should not be treated as an independent operation link, but should be interspersed in all operation links.

New customers: cautious yet bold

It cannot be said that the life cycle of a community is determined from the stage of attracting new members, but at least the impact of attracting new members on the life cycle of the community is no less than the promotion and retention of members in the later stage.

1. Be cautious when attracting new customers

First of all, we need to consider carefully when setting up community topics and potential target users.

In many cases, it's not just a rough theme, but a relatively precise theme.

But I am not advocating that the theme of the community should be set too narrowly. Instead, I advocate carefully exploring the potential commonalities and needs of potential targets, deducing the process of motivating users, and then determining the theme.

For example: If the operating goal of a community is to sell comics and drawing materials, the community theme can be set to 2D enthusiasts, because there should be many people who fall in love with the 2D world and thus fall in love with painting. I even once targeted the Japanese community at anime and game enthusiasts, because a survey showed that 80% of Japanese learners fell in love with Japanese through anime and games.

Secondly, new customer acquisition activities should start from operational goals and try to avoid possible deviations from potential target users.

For example, a certain operator launched online education content for the first time, with the goal of users ordering courses. In order to let users understand the new business of online education and to quickly gather users, the operator used its own resources and held many activities such as forwarding courses to get traffic, and winning JD cards with a roulette wheel; ordering and getting phone bills, taking advantage of users' price sensitivity, and quickly accumulating a certain scale of users.

But in the end, it was discovered that it was just a false prosperity. These users rarely left valuable content, nor did they participate in course-related activities, and the conversion rate was negligible. Users who subscribed for the purpose of phone bills quickly canceled their subscriptions after receiving the bills. The most discussed issues among users in the group were data traffic and phone bills. The community quickly got out of control. If there was no data traffic in a certain month, users criticized the community. Eventually, the community became an advertising group and the community operation was declared a failure.

These two points are applicable to communities with vertical audiences, such as: exams, certain interests, certain professions, or groups related to food, daily necessities, and other aspects of public life. They are the only two ways to effectively eliminate meaningless freeloaders.

2. Be bold in attracting new customers

Being bold in attracting new customers means being innovative in methods and channels, and making good use of a combination of methods.

Generally speaking, when users enter a community, most of their requests are for social interaction, content, consultation, etc. Based on this, it can be concluded that the most effective way to attract new users is content dissemination and user forwarding.

It is necessary to attract new members at any stage of community operation, but the methods of attracting new members can be different at each stage. During the cold start phase, you can ask friends and colleagues to forward it, forward it in your own circle of friends, and place the event or group QR code on various relevant channels you can find.

In the later stage, as the number of group members increases and the content of the group becomes richer, we carefully plan strong communication activities to carry out social fission, create KOLs within the group, give KOLs a sense of participation and power, and enable old members to bring in new members. This is a very important form of attracting new members and can promote the community into a virtuous circle. Because every high-quality user must have a group of high-quality users around him, how to cultivate and maintain KOLs will be discussed in detail later.

On this basis, many new games, activities and other forms of attracting new customers can be evolved, which I will not go into detail in this article.

Activity and retention: value, warmth, trust, principles

When a user enters a community and remains active in it for a long time, it must be because the community is valuable to him and meets his needs. This demand must be consistent with the operational goals, otherwise it will affect the health of the community and even cause the loss of potential target users, and the community operation will be declared a failure.

For example: in a group whose goal is to gather music lovers, some users come to obtain the latest music information, and some users come just to post advertisements. Then the users who come to obtain the latest music information are our target potential users. The needs of this part of users are consistent with the community operation goals, while the opposite is true for users who post advertisements.

So, what we need to do is to provide part-time content, services and activities, maintain relationships with the former, let the former stay in the group and continue to be active, while excluding the latter so as not to affect the former's experience. Therefore, the key points of operations in the active and retention stages are to be valuable, warm and principled.

1. The content is valuable

Valuable content is the basis for user retention, active conversion and dissemination. Content is the skin and operation is the hair. If the skin is gone, where will the hair be attached?

The value of content mainly refers to satisfying users' material and spiritual needs, such as: being able to obtain the content they want, being able to socialize, being able to gain a sense of accomplishment, etc.

Specifically, it means providing valuable content, services and activities based on the needs and perspectives of users, stimulating user activity, cultivating user habits, and achieving more goals, such as: users leaving valuable content, understanding users' deep needs, educating users indirectly, cultivating payment habits, cultivating KOLs to naturally drive activity or form word-of-mouth communication, etc.

Generally speaking, the richer the content of a community is, the better it is, the more attractive it is to group members, and the activity of group members will also be greatly improved.

We should note that a community is not a neighborhood. It may not be possible to always publish too much information. It is recommended to use the shortest text and only say a small point each time. Eventually, similar content should be organized into text in the WeChat public account, published as pictures and texts, and pushed to the community for users to collect.

Community content settings of a baking community:

2. Warm operation and trust from users

The purpose of warm operation is to gain dependence and trust, and lay the foundation for the natural spread and conversion of users. As the first and most loyal KOL of the community, the temperature of the operator determines the temperature of the community.

"Heartfelt" is a necessary quality for a warm-hearted operator. Being warm does not just mean that the group owner has a friendly tone, but that it allows users to have more good experiences based on themselves. For example: make users feel a sense of belonging, have the desire to communicate and show themselves, feel that they are valued, and their personalized needs can be responded to and met in a timely manner, making users feel superior, etc.

So, in what ways can operators make operations warm?

First of all, you can give yourself a personalized and warm group nickname.

I have seen that the names of many operators in the group are XX Assistant or XX Jun. Although such names are recognizable, they look cold, like Siri robots, and cannot arouse users' desire to communicate.

So how do you come up with a warm group nickname?

There are two standards for a warm group nickname:

The first is to be liked by people. The so-called being liked by people does not mean that the operators themselves like the characters, but that the characters should be chosen based on the characteristics of the group members. For example, in an elderly group, naming a character like Xiong Da or Xiong Er may not be accepted.

Secondly, it is recognizable, so that group members can know at a glance that they are the group administrators, and can find them immediately if there are any problems. For example: I once operated a group whose members were mostly 2D girls, so I thought I should give myself a cute name that also has a certain degree of authority and recognition, such as: XXX President, XX is used to sound cute, and President is used to sound authoritative and recognizable.

Second, shape your own image .

For example: President XX mentioned above, his users are 2D girls, aged about 18-30 years old, and the content discussed in the group is mostly 2D hand-painted. Then the image of the president of Miaomiaodong is defined as male, around 25 years old, of medium build, slightly plump, with a high level of hand-drawing skills, obsessed with drawing materials and digital tablets, a warm man, humorous, occasionally a little tempered, sometimes complaining about the company's too high requirements for product quality and the resulting heavy workload. He is almost the image of an ideal male best friend.

This image does not need to be specifically introduced, but can be slowly revealed in group conversations and 1-2 Moments posted every day, simulating a natural process of making friends and getting to know each other, constantly arousing users' curiosity about the people behind the scenes, making the process more mysterious and interesting, and intentionally or unintentionally building word-of-mouth for the target product.

The most important thing is to treat users as friends and family, communicate with them sincerely and provide them with suggestions. I have seen that in some communities, XX assistants only publish some fixed-pattern content at regular times and locations, such as: industry morning reports, new event notifications, etc. Although the tone is kind and cute, it is not sincere, and users can feel it. Over time, users will become indifferent.

It is very important to publish industry morning reports and organize activities regularly, but how to publish them also affects the user participation.

From this, we can infer that if we collect user needs in a timely manner, when many members raise similar questions and confusions, the operators may as well randomly organize a discussion, share their own relevant experiences and lessons, discuss with members, and make targeted suggestions to users' questions. This is very helpful in improving user experience, establishing the image of operators, and gaining user trust.

Going a step further, if there is a user who has achievements and expertise in a certain area, we might as well invite him to share with other members, and then give the user some honorary small gifts. This is very helpful for stimulating the user's sense of accomplishment and honor, and then stimulating user activity.

In addition to discussing content that is strongly related to the community theme, you can also occasionally have some pioneering discussions focusing on the common characteristics of group members. For example: In the above-mentioned cloud computing community, users may have some common issues such as career development, which can also become occasional topics of discussion in the community, making the relationship between members closer.

In the process of operation, stratifying users and discovering and maintaining KOLs are the magic weapon to maintain the autonomous and healthy operation of the community. KOLs are the soul of the community.

In the early stages, you can create topics, discover potential KOLs, invite KOLs to participate in community operations, become a group manager, work hard to develop personal relationships with KOLs, ask KOLs to make timely and private suggestions, help KOLs establish a good image in the community, and give KOLs appropriate special rewards.

On the one hand, it encourages KOLs to be more enthusiastic and actively participate in the community, playing a positive role in the community;

On the other hand, it also sets an example for other members, motivating them to be more active and making the community more popular.

3. Behave with principles

Meeting user needs and giving users a good experience does not mean meeting all of their needs. As mentioned earlier, we need to unify user needs and operational goals, because the needs that meet the operational goals are the common needs of all users, and are the only reason why we gather users from all over the world to this community. If the individual needs of individual users are met without principles, it will harm the experience of other users and make users suspicious of the community.

Generally speaking, maintaining the purity of a community is achieved by formulating complete group rules and strictly enforcing them.

The formulation of group rules generally adheres to three principles: rejecting advertisements, rejecting illegal information or discussions, and rejecting irrelevant information or discussions, and clearly announcing corresponding reminders and punishment measures . The general practice of various communities in dealing with irrelevant information is to issue a warning once and then remove it twice. There are also very strict paid groups that do not set up a warning link after the announcement and directly remove it. This needs to be handled flexibly according to your own situation.

After the group rules are formulated, it is more important to remind members to abide by the group rules and strictly enforce them during the entire operation process.

First of all, operators themselves need to strictly enforce the rules.

It is understandable that some operators may be responsible for operating more than one community. Many times, we encounter bottlenecks in cold-starting other projects or activities, and we very much hope to divert traffic to other activities from mature communities. But at this time, you must be cautious and ask yourself whether the members of this community really need this activity.

If there is a connection, you can recommend group members to participate; if the relevance is very small, please do not divert traffic at will, otherwise the operators will break the rules themselves.

Secondly, the rules should be enforced equally for everyone.

Whether it is the difficult period of attracting new users and retaining users in the early stage, or the additional requests made by high-quality KOLs in the later stage, they must be firmly rejected. Of course, in the process of implementation, we must also pay attention to the methods. After issuing a warning in the group, we can educate and persuade them privately, or provide new channels and suggestions to help users with other needs find new outlets. If users have any other confusions unrelated to the community topic, they can chat privately with the operation staff.

Transformation: Education and stimulation

If you do the above points well, as long as the product quality is not too bad, conversion will actually be a very natural thing. However, if you want to further increase conversions, you still need to educate users and stimulate marketing activities.

There are three most effective ways of education: the first is verbal and subtle dissemination, the second is the role of role models, and the third is product trials.

First, we must always keep this goal in mind during daily operations and flexibly express the advantages of paid products when communicating with users;

The second is to invite excellent paying users to cooperate, organize activities together, and talk about their experience and results;

The third one can be combined with the second one to organize trial activities, invite trial members to provide experience reports, give appropriate prizes, and encourage trial members to spread the word among their friends.

Marketing activities are the final step to promote conversions.

Price discounts, hunger marketing, and group purchase invitations are all relatively common marketing activities, which capture the common needs of users who are sensitive to prices and thirst for scarce resources. However, we should also carefully explore the unique needs of our community users, innovate more activity models, or package activities that were originally just simple price discount hunger marketing.

Spread: Give users a fulcrum

Good products and activities are the cornerstone of dissemination, but the amount of natural dissemination may not satisfy us. In this case, we must give users a fulcrum and a reason to stimulate user dissemination.

The reasons given to users are usually discounts and honors. The former will appear before and after an event or purchase, and the latter is usually standard after an event or purchase. Communication is not just about the first time, but also about constantly creating opportunities for secondary communication.

Invitations to get free things, invitations to receive discounts, invitations to receive prizes, and Pinduoduo’s bargaining are all forms of promotional communications, and are already very mature. The key point is to package an interesting theme to reduce users’ psychological barriers to forwarding.

After users pay, you can also spread the word about discounts. For example, some restaurants ask users to take photos and post them on WeChat Moments before giving them discounts.

In terms of honor, there are more points to play. For example: education can organize graduation ceremonies, gaming and technology can organize competitions, and award certificates and prizes to outstanding performers. Even without guidance, users will forward the posts to their friends, and paying users can be randomly selected to receive interesting and scarce prizes. For community KOLs, or users who have been active for a period of time and provide high-quality content and suggestions, some scarce prizes can be given.

When I was doing activities in the past, the most popular items were the company’s dolls, small peripherals, and employee notebooks. Their value was not high, but they were not available anywhere else. They could make users feel superior, further strengthening the emotional connection with users and increasing user stickiness.

Community operation is a very hard job that requires full commitment, and it is also a job worthy of in-depth study. Care + skills are the indispensable magic weapons for community operation.

Related reading:

1. Demonized growth, fission and community!

2. Event operation: practical analysis of knowledge payment "training camp + community" model!

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?

Author: Jianshu

Source: Jianshu