Community operation: Which is more important, growth or operation mechanism?

A few days ago, I was chatting with a friend about WeChat traffic generation and we discussed the issues of attracting new members to the community and subsequent conversions. He said that their company has now set up many WeChat groups, but many of them are dead, with almost no one talking. They are usually empty, and only when there is an event will a link be sent into them. After listening to him, I thought about it for a long time; is building a community just about continuously bringing in traffic?

As far as I can remember, the word "community" appeared in the Internet industry in 2015. Since 2018, the word "community" has become more and more popular, and major companies have begun to develop communities. There are also many tools on the market for WeChat community fission. Such as Bao Juice, Jian Qun Bao, Octopus, Wei Xiaobao and so on. Perhaps it is the rise of the community that has made these companies that develop technology-driven tools successful.

Since 2018, friends who are engaged in Internet operations should have witnessed many successful cases of community fission. Such as NetEase Xijing, New World Marketing, Future Education Course Unlocking and so on. But careful friends should find it easy to discover that the methods used in these cases are roughly the same.

I probably have hundreds of WeChat groups on WeChat. Usually, when I see community fission activities in my circle of friends, I will scan the QR code to join the group and see how they play. In the meantime, I found that most companies’ community fission activities were one-off. In other words, most companies engage in community fission just for the purpose of that event. Once the event is over, the group will be basically left there and basically no one will care about it. Usually, the morning report will be sent out, and when there is a new event, a link to the event will be thrown in.

I think this kind of group is a "flash group". If you create a group just for an event, I would suggest that you disband the group immediately after the event.

From the user's perspective, if your group has no one to manage and operate after the activity ends, and there is no established set of community rules. Once time is too long, people will slowly start to advertise in the group, and the group will have no value to the users. In the users' minds, the group will become a garbage group , which will make users lose confidence in your products, which will be counterproductive!

I was once in charge of a project where the company had more than twenty targeted WeChat communities about pets. I remember that before I took over, this project had more than 5,000 precise users at its peak. Then due to the development of the company's business, the project was suspended for a period of time. During the suspension period, nearly 2,000 people left the group because there was no one to manage it, and the activity of each group continued to decline. Some of the more active users before also began to stop showing up. When this happens, it actually means that the group is on the verge of death.

After I took over, I also thought about doing another activity to continue to attract new users and boost the atmosphere of old users in the group by introducing new users. But then I didn't do it. Perhaps doing so will indeed increase the activity of the group, but it may also directly accelerate the demise of the group. Moreover, the cost of carrying out a corresponding new customer acquisition campaign is relatively high.

Why do I say that re-doing an activity may accelerate the death of the group ? (This is a personal opinion)

Because your group was originally established through activities, old users in the group may already be familiar with your activity routines because they have experienced it once. If you do the same activity twice in the same group, old users will become numb. And generally speaking, when you do an activity to attract new users, many repetitive messages may appear in the group every day during the activity. For old users, it will make them feel that there are too many messages, and some of them may even make them quit the group directly if they disturb them.

And why do I say that the cost is relatively high?

Because you are doing a new user acquisition activity, you must offer a certain amount of discounts to attract new users to join the group and participate in your activities. For the e-commerce industry, many people rely on giving away gifts or coupons as bait. However, traffic in the market is becoming more and more expensive, and users have long been numb to some very common routines. If your discount is not significant or there is nothing new about it, why should users join the group?

After I took over, I operated it for about 2 months. I made a comprehensive analysis of the current situation and started from the following aspects:

Because there are too many groups, it is best to have tools to support you when sending group messages to avoid missing any groups!

During this period, I shuttled between different groups and dealt with users every day. This is because users in the pet industry actually have their own topic attributes, as they all have the need to communicate and like to post cute photos of their pets in the group.

When chatting with users every day, users generally explain the current situation of their pets, such as what brand of food they use, what toys they like to play with, etc. At this time, you can make a rough needs analysis based on the feedback from some users in the group, which will make it easier to quickly find the most matching products when conducting activities in the group later.

As everyone who keeps pets knows, pets often suffer from some diseases, especially in spring. For example, severe hair loss, vomiting, poor gastrointestinal function and other problems. At this time, we specially found a veterinarian online to join the community. Provide group users with specific answers to questions about daily care and solutions to some medical conditions.

This step actually has another purpose. We invite pet doctors to join the community in order to cultivate the image of a kol and make users trust the doctor's words. In this way, we can also work with the doctor to organize activities in the group later to serve as a layer of endorsement.

Because there are dozens of groups in the entire project, it is sometimes impossible to keep track of the message replies and active topics in each group. So during this period, I filtered out some of the more active users in the past based on the previous chat records of each group and had individual private chats with them. Give them some extra product discounts and do key maintenance , then maintain a good relationship with them, let them continue to be active in the group, and sometimes they will even take the initiative to liven up the atmosphere in the group.

There are some other small methods, but I won’t elaborate on them here because they are not the focus of this article. After one to two months of such maintenance, the group activity increased by approximately 50% compared to before. And more and more old users began to actively invite their friends who have pets to join the group. This also indirectly achieves the effect of attracting new customers.

Regarding order conversion, the reason why we need to build a community is simply to circle users and put them in a pool so that they can continue to repurchase. As long as your community is valuable, can help users solve problems, and have good relationships with them. Most users are willing to take the initiative to send out their needs. For example, the pet users I just mentioned, after the operation started, almost every user, when their pets have needs, they will generally take the initiative to ask in the group and then go to the store to place an order themselves.

In fact, these two steps are very important for both attracting new customers and converting them.

If you only attract new customers but don’t have a conversion mechanism, the traffic you have worked so hard to attract will slowly dissipate and eventually become a garbage group. In other words, your conversion mechanism has been established, but if there is not enough new traffic, the final effect will not be very good, because the so- called quantitative change leads to qualitative change, which is actually the reason. The total quantity is limited, and no matter how well the operation is done, the order volume is limited.

So I am not saying which of the two steps, attracting new customers or converting them, is more important. Both are important, but when you start to build a community, you should first think of a complete operational mechanism from attracting new members to the community to final conversion. This will make your results twice as effective.

Whether it is an e-commerce enterprise or an educational enterprise. Everyone’s goal in building a community should be the same, which is to bring sales to the company. However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain traffic in the current market, and the cost of converting a new user is far greater than the cost of converting an old user. Therefore, if you currently have a certain amount of traffic or social resources, don’t give up if you can try to reactivate them.

Author: Liu Zhixing

Source: LZX's study notes